Abstract
IN the January-February number of the Scottish Naturalist, No. 199, 1933, Dr. Robert W. Gray continues his very interesting account of “Peterhead Sealers and Whalers: A Contribution to the History of the Whaling Industry”, begun in 1932 (September-October). Peterhead first sent a whaling vessel to the Greenland Sea (the “Greenland” of the old sealers and whalers, the Spitsbergen Sea, the ocean between Greenland and Spitsbergen) in 1788, and a Greenland whaling ship sailed out of Peterhead for the last time in 1893. Dr. Gray, whose grandfather and father both commanded whaling ships, possesses original log-books containing a large amount of reliable information as to the whaling in the latter portion of this period and has gathered together data from many sources relating to the earlier years, beginning with the tiny Robert, the pioneer vessel. Up to the year 1814 the fishery had been pursued generally in the more northerly regions, but after this the boats began to explore southwards. From 1825 the Peterhead ships went mostly to the Davis Straits and the whales of the Greenland sea were left alone for a time. In 1837 the whalers returned to the north and both northern and southern fishing was continued, the northern fishery in some years proving very successful. A great deal is to be learned by reading this article, the present portion going up to the year 1874. In that year, according to the logbook of the Eclipse it was an open season, northerly winds prevailed in April, May and June, there was a strong south-westerly drift and the edge of the ice lay far west. The ice was drifting south at the rate of twenty to thirty miles a day, and at the end of the voyage it was estimated that more than 300,000 square miles of ice drifted south out of the Arctic Ocean in three months.
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Peterhead Sealers and Whalers. Nature 131, 904 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131904a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131904a0