The History of whaling is very extensive, stretching back for millennia. This article discusses whaling prior to the "modern" era of whaling when conservation became an important international issue.
Pre-historic to medieval times
Humans have engaged in whaling since pre-historic times. The oldest known method of catching whales is to simply drive them ashore by placing a number of small boats between the whale and the open sea and attempting to frighten them with noise, activity, and perhaps small, non-lethal weapons such as arrows. Typically, this was used for small species, such as Pilot Whales, Belugas and Narwhals.
The next step was to employ a drogue: a floating object such as a wooden drum or an inflated sealskin which was tied to an arrow or a harpoon, in the hope that, after a time, the whale would tire enough to be approached and killed. Several cultures around the world practised whaling with drogues, including the Inuit, Native Americans, and the Basque people of the Bay of Biscay. Archaeological evidence from Ulsan in South Korea suggests that drogues, harpoons and lines were being used to kill large whales as early as 6000BC. Petroglyphs (rock carvings) unearthed by researchers at the Museum of Kyungpook National University show Sperm Whales, Humpback Whales and Northern Right Whales surrounded by boats. Similarly-aged cetacean bones were also found in the area, reflecting the importance of whales in the prehistoric diet of coastal people.
The Basque fishery
The first mention of Basque whaling was made in 1059, when it was said to have been practiced at the Pays Basque town of Bayonne. The fishery spread to the Spanish Basque region in 1150, when King Sancho the Wise of Navarre granted petitions for the warehousing of such commodities as whalebone (baleen). At first, they only hunted the whale they called sarda, or the North Atlantic right whale, using watchtowers (known as vigias) to took for their distinctive twin vapour spouts.
By 1197 they were exploiting the fishery out of Guernsey, and perhaps as early as the 14th century they may have been whaling off the shores of southern Ireland. The fishery spread to Terranova (Labrador and Newfoundland) in the second quarter of the 16th century, and to Iceland at least by the early 17th century. They established whaling stations at the former, and probably established some in the latter as well. In Terranova they hunted bowheads and right whales, while in Iceland they appear to have only hunted the latter.
The fishery in Terranova declined for a variety of reasons. Principal among them the conflicts between Spain and other European powers during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, attacks by hostile Inuit, declining whale populations, and perhaps the opening up of the Spitsbergen fishery in 1611. The first voyages to Spitsbergen by the English and Dutch relied on Basque specialists, with the Basque provinces sending out their own whaler in 1612. The following season San Sebastian and St. Jean de Luz sent out a combined eleven or twelve whalers to the Spitsbergen fishery, but most were driven off by the Dutch and English.
They continued whale fishing in Iceland and Spitsbergen at least into the 18th century, but Basque whaling in those regions appears to have ended with the commencement of the Seven Year's War (1756-63).
The Greenland & Spitsbergen fishery
In 1611, the English Muscovy Company's Jonas Poole, in the 60-ton Elizabeth, led the first whaler, the 160-ton Mary Margaret, under Thomas Edge, to Spitsbergen to exploit the whale stocks found there. One of the six Basque specialists they had recruited from the town of St. Jean de Luz caught the first whale there on the 12 June. Although they were able to capture thirteen whales, the voyage itself was a complete disaster, as both Poole and Edge lost their ships, the former capsizing and the latter being driven ashore by ice. Luckily, Thomas Marmaduke (who had been walrus hunting in Horn Sound, on the west coast of Spitsbergen), in the Hull ship Hopewell, agreed, after much proding, to take both of them back to England.
The next season the Company sent the ships Whale and Seahorse, while other nations had decided to join in on the trade as well. The Dutch sent a vessel under Willem van Muijden, the Spanish Basques sent one piloted by the former Muscovy Company employee Nicolas Woodcocke, while the Hopewell of Hull and another London interloper were also sent to prosecute the trade. In 1613, the Muscovy Company was granted a monopoly on the fishery at Spitsbergen. The three English men-of war sent to protect their whaling interests that season drove off any foreign vessels they came into contact with, that being some seven or eight Spanish Basque vessels, three or four from St. Jean de Luz, two to four Dutch vessels, and four or five French ones.
In 1614, the Northern Company of Holland, was granted a monopoly on the trade. They sent fourteen ships supported by four Dutch men-of-war to the fishery that season, forcing the outnumbered English to agree to fish at Spitsbergen to the exclusion of third parties. In the 1617 season William Heley, an English whaler, seized the catches of one of the Dutch whalers. This angered the Dutch, who came the next season with twenty-three ships to Spitsbergen, driving away the English vessels without their catches. Following this fiasco, the English and the Dutch agreed to separate, with the Dutch getting the Island of Amsterdam and a bay formed between the island and the mainland and the English receiving Bell Sound, Preservation or Safe Harbour in Ice Sound, and Horizon Bay on the south of Foreland, along with English Harbour and Magdalena Bay to the north near Amsterdam Island.
The trade for the English and Dutch followed very different paths following this division of the whaling areas, as the Dutch would dominate the trade, and that of the English would struggle to even exist. In 1619, the Dutch established a semi-permanent settlement at Amsterdam Island, Smeerenburg, or "Blubbertown." At its height (1633-35), it consisted of warehouses, cooperages, quarters for the crews, a fortress, and a church. It was visited by nearly 1,000 (or as few as 200, according to one author) whalers during the season, who worked in shifts throughout the short summer season to ensure that the tryworks were always boiling blubber. By 1639 Smeerenburg was said to be in a state of decay, but it was still used a rendezvous by whalers well into the late 17th century.
With the decline of the west cost Spitsbergen bay fishery in the mid-17th century, Dutch whalers began to sail north and east in search of new whaling grounds, finding the "West Ice" to the north and west of Spitsbergen and "Waigat" to the northeast of the island.
In 1719, the Dutch began exploiting the Davis Strait whale fishery, dominating this area until the 1780s, when British whalers took over the trade. The British would continue to send out whalers to the Arctic fishery into the 20th century, sending her last on the eve of the First World War.
The Japanese fishery
The oldest written mention of whaling in Japanese records is from Kojiki, the oldest Japanese historical book written in the seventh century. In this book whale meat was eat by Emperor Jimmu. In Man'yōshū, the oldest anthology of poems in the eighth century, the word "Whaling" (いさなとり) was frequently used in depicting the ocean or beaches.
Japanese traditional whaling technique was dramatically developed in Taiji, Wakayama in the 17th century. Chubei Wada organized the group hunting system and introduced new handheld harpoons in 1606. Kakuemon Wada, later known as Kakuemon Taiji, invented the whaling net technique called Amitori methods and increase the safety and efficiency of whaling.
Whaling has been frequently mentioned in Japanese historical texts.[1]
- Whaling history (鯨史稿), Seijun Ohtsuki, 1808.[2]
- Whaling Picture Scroll (鯨絵巻), Jinemon Ikushima, 1665. [3]
- Whale Hunt Picture Scroll (捕鯨絵巻), Eikin Hangaya, 1666. [4]
- Ogawajima Whaling Wars (小川島鯨鯢合戦), Unknown, 1667.[5]
In 1853, a US naval officer Matthew Perry forced open Japan's doors to the world. One of the purposes was to obtain a base for whaling in the north-west Pacific Ocean. The traditional whaling technique was rapidly replaced by the American or Norwegian whaling, which used Bomb Lance Guns.
The Yankee Whale fishery
It is believed that the towns of Long Island were the first to establish a whale fishery along the shores of New England sometime around 1650. Nantucket joined in on the trade in 1690 when they sent for one Ichabod Padduck to instruct them in the methods of whaling. The south side of the island was divided into three and a half mile sections, each one with a mast erected to look for the spouts of right whales. Each section had a temporary hut for the five men assigned to that area, with a sixth men standing watch at the mast. Once a whale was sighted, rowing boats were sent from the shore, and if the whale was successfully harpooned and lanced to death, it was towed ashore, flensed (that is, its blubber was cut off), and the blubber boiled in cauldrons known as "trypots." Even when Nantucket sent out vessels to fish for whales offshore, they would still come to the shore to boil the blubber, doing this well into the 18th century.
In 1715 Nantucket had six sloops engaged in the whale fishery, and by 1730 it had twenty-five vessels of 38 to 50 tons employed in the trade. Each vessel employed twelve to thirteen men, half of them being Native Americans. At times the whole crew, with the exception of the captain, could be natives. They had two whaleboats, one held in reserve should the other be damaged by an angry whale.
By 1732 the first Yankee whalers had reached the Davis Strait fishery. The fishery slowly began to expand, with whalers visiting the west coast of Africa in 1763, the Azores in 1765, and the coast of Brazil in 1774.
In 1768, the fishery began a huge expansion that was to culminate just prior to the Revolution. Between 1771 and 1775 the Massachusetts ports alone employed an average of 183 vessels in the northern fishery, and 121 in the southern. The Revolutionary War brought a complete standstill to the trade. In the three decades (1785-1815) following the Revolution and ending with the War of 1812, the trade never reached its former importance, perhaps never even exceeding 200 vessels.
In 1791 the first Yankee whalers rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean to hunt the cachalot, or sperm whale. At first they only fished off the coast of Chile, but by 1800 the sperm whalers had reached the coast of Peru, and George W. Gardner extended the fishery even further in 1818 when he discovered the "Offshore grounds," or the seas between 105 and 125 degrees west and five to ten degrees south. In 1820 the first Yankee whaleship, the Maro, Cap. Joseph Allen, fished off of the coast of Japan. The previous year the first Yankee whalers visited the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, and subsequently these island's ports began to be used as places to obtained fresh fruits, vegetables, more men, and to repair any damages sustained to the ship.
In 1829 the Yankee fleet numbered 203 sail, in five years time it more than doubled to 421 vessels, and by 1840 it stood at 552 ships, barks, brigs, and schooners. The peak was reached in 1846, when 736 vessels were registered under the American flag. From 1846 to 1851, the trade averaged some 638 vessels, with the majority coming from such ports as New Bedford, Nantucket, New London, and Sag Harbour.
Thomas Welcome Roys, in the Sag Harbour bark Superier, sailed through the Bering Strait on 23 July 1848 and discovered an abundance of "new fangled monsters," or later to be known as bowheads. The following season fifty whalers (forty-six Yankee, two German, and two French vessels) sailed to the Bering Strait region on the word of this single ship. In terms of number of vessels and whales killed, the peak was reached in 1852, when 220 ships killed 2,682 bowheads. Catches declined, and the fleet shifted to the Sea of Okhotsk for the 1855-57 seasons, and once that area began to decline, they returned to the Bering Strait region.
During the winter, some of these same vessels would make their way to the lagoons of Baja California. The peak began in 1855, commencing the period of lagoon whaling known as the "bonanza period," when whaleboats were crisscrossing through the lagoons, being pulled by engaged whales, passing by calves that had lost their mothers and other ship's crews hunting whales. Less than twenty years later, in 1874, the lagoon fishery was abandoned entirely, due to several years of poor catches.
Several Yankee ships were lost during the 1860s and 1870s. During the Civil War (1861-1865) Confederate raiders such as the Shenandoah, Alabama, and Florida captured or burned forty-six ships, while the United States purchased forty of the fleet's oldest hulls to sink in Charleston and Savannah harbours in a failed attempt to blockade those ports. In 1871, thirty-two of the forty whalers comprising the Arctic fleet were lost near Point Belcher and Wainwright Inlet, while another twelve ships were lost in 1876.
The use of steam, the high prices for whalebone, and the proximity of the whaling grounds brought the rise of San Francisco as a dominant whaling port in the 1880s. By 1893 it had thirty-three whaleships, of which twenty-two were steamers.
At first, the steamers only cruised during the summer months, but with the discovery of bowheads near the Mackenzie River Delta in 1888-89 by Joe Tuckfield, ships begin to overwinter at Herschel Island. The first to do so was in 1890-91, and by 1894-95 there were fifteen such ships over wintering in the snug little harbour of Pauline Cove. During the peak of the settlement (1894-96) about 1,000 persons went to the island, comprising a polyglot community of Nunatarmiuts (Inuit caribou hunters, originating from the Brooks Range), Kogmullicks (Inuit who inhabited the coastal regions of the Mackenzie River delta), Itkillicks (Rat Indians, from the forested regions 200 miles south), Alaska and Siberian ship's natives, whaling crews and their families, and beachcombers (the few whalemen who's tour of duty had ended, but chose to stay at the island). Ships continued to over winter at Herschel into the 20th century, but by that time they focused more on trading with the natives than on whaling. By 1909 there were only three whaleships left in the Arctic fleet, with the last bowhead being killed commercially in 1921.
By 1895 the Yankee whaling fleet had dwindled to fifty-one vessesl, with only four ports regularly sending out ships. They were New Bedford, Provincetown, San Francisco, and Boston. Boston left the trade in 1903, with Provincetown and San Francisco leaving in 1921. Only New Bedford continued on into the trade, sending out its last whaler, the John R. Mantra, in 1927.
The Rorqual Fishery
It wasn't until the 1850s that Euro-American whalemen made a serious attempt at catching such rorquals as the blue and fin whale. This era was inaugurated by one Thomas Welcome Roys. Roys, while cruising south of Iceland in the 441-ton Hannibal, was able to kill a sulfurbottom (blue whale) with a Brown’s bomb gun in 1855. He realized that if he had a better way to dispatch such large rorquals as the sulfurbottom that he could easily fill his ship’s hold with whale oil. Due to his ship having taken a beating in a heavy gale in these waters, he was forced to put into Lorient, France. While there, he ordered for "two rifles in pairs for killing [rorqual] whales," staying long enough in France to see them nearly completed, then leaving for home in a steamer, and, when finished, having the guns sent by way of England to the US.
The following spring, he went out in the 175-ton brig William F. Safford to test his experimental whaling guns. The guns Roys had ordered from France were lost on the voyage out, so he had to persuade C. C. Brand of Norwich, Conn., to let him use his bomb lance, but to increase his bomb missiles to three pounds in order to ensure greater success. Roys sailed to Bjornøya, where he encountered vast numbers of blue, fin, and humpbacks. He fired at around sixty, with only a single blue whale being saved. He then sailed to Novaya Zemlya, capturing two humpbacks there. After cruising off Russia and Norway, he came to anchor at Queenstown, Ireland, and thence went to England to reconstruct his lost French-made guns. He had Sir Joseph Whitworth manufacture him some rifled whaling guns and shells. Roys returned to his ship, sailing from Queenstown on 26 November for the Bay of Biscay. Here, when testing one of the guns, he blew off his left hand, having to amputate it "as well as we could with razors." They sailed to Oporto, Portugal, where Roys’s lower arm had to be amputated.
Having failed in securing whales on another cruise in 1857, Roys redesigned his gun. This time, the rocket-powered harpoons proved too weak to penetrate the whales correctly. Undaunted, he made another cruise, this time to South Georgia, but he wasn’t able to take any whales. He cruised north to put into Lisbon, sailed to Africa, then west to the West Indies in early 1859, where he was able to capture several humpbacks.
In 1861 Roys joined forces with the wealthy New York pyrotechnic manufacturer Gustavus Adolphus Lilliendahl in order to perfect his "whaling rocket." In mid-May 1862 Lilliendahl purchased the 158-ton bark Reindeer, appointing Roys as her master. Unfortunately, she was seized on suspicion of being a slaver, and when everything was finally cleared up, she sailed to Iceland, but arrived too late for the summer whaling season, and had to return home and wait until next year.
In 1863 Roys refitted the Reindeer and once again sailed to Iceland, but he damaged his rudder while off the coast of the island, and was only able to save one of the many whales he shot that season. Roys was much more successful the following season of 1864, saving eleven of the twenty whales that were shot, in part because he was using stronger harpoons and better lines. In November 1864 Roys obtained the rights to establish a shore station on the coast of Iceland from the Danish government. He acquired the twelve-ton, sixty-two-foot iron steamer Visionary in Scotland, and returned to Iceland in the spring of 1865. He arrived at Seydisfjordur on 14 May, finding his bark Reindeer had already arrived there in April, loaded with whaling equipment, boilers, steam engines, timber, bricks, and everything necessary for the construction of his shore station. Lilliendahl supplied them with defective rockets, and before the station was built, they were forced to tow the dead whales to the Reindeer, where they were flensed and processed the old fashioned way.
After his rockets were rebuilt, Roys and his crew set out in the Visionary, with whaleboats in tow astern, to search for rorquals. Once a whale was sighted, the crews went to their respective boats, and if a whale was successfully captured, they’d heave the carcass to the surface with a steam winch, fasten it to the side of the ship, and tow it back to Seydisfjordur. For the 1865 season they took twenty or more whales, but also lost another twenty. The next season, 1866, he used the Sileno and the iron steamers Staperaider and Vigilant- identical ship, bark-rigged, 116-feet long, each carrying two whaleboats and equipped with steam tryworks and powerful winches to bring aboard large strips of blubber when flensing whales. They killed ninety whales this season, with forty-three or forty-four being saved to produce 3,000 barrels of oil. Roys and Lilliendahl parted company at the end of the season, with Lilliendahl continuing on in Iceland for another year. Using the Vigilant and Staperaider, he only caught thirty-six whales. After this season, he departed as well.
Roys and Lilliendahl found imitators in Iceland, in the form of the Danish naval officer Cap. Otto C. Hammer and the Dutchman Cap. C. J Bottemanne. The former formed the Danish Fishing Company in 1865, and wound up operations in 1871; while the latter formed the Netherlands Whaling Company in 1869, closing down operations a year after Hammer.
In 1866 James Dawson, a Victorian emigrant from Clackmannanshire, Scotland, and a man named Warren tried catching whales in Saanich Inlet, British Columbia, but lost all three whales they struck to bad weather. In 1868 Dawson joined in a partnership with a 27 year old from San Francisco, Abel Douglass, along with two other Californians, Bruce and Woodward. They were joined by Roys, who chartered the eighty-three-foot, twenty-five-ton steamer Emma. His first cruise was a disaster, while the second cruise from early September to October he allegedly struck four whales, killing three, but lost all three in dense fogs. Dawson began whaling on 26 August with the forty-seven-ton Kate, cruising in Saanich Inlet, where they managed to catch eight whales using bomb lances, despite thick fog.
Persistent as ever, Roys formed the Victoria Whaling Adventurers Company on 22 October, and in January 1869 he sent the Emma to erect a shore station in Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island. Again, Roys was met with by failure, having made fast to only one whale. The harpoon broke free, and the whale escaped. He was defeated once more by the Dawson and Douglass Whaling Company, who took fourteen whales by mid-September 1869 to produce 20,000 gallons of oil.
Dawson and Douglass then joined forces with a man named Lipsett, forming the Union Whaling Company. They only took four whales during two cruises in the winter of 1869-70, forcing the company to suspend operations as of 3 February 1870. Lipsett reorganized and formed the Howe Sound Company, while Dawson found new partners had formed the new Dawson & Douglass Whaling Company on 27 June 1870. Another unidentified group of whalemen using "the Roys Rocket" arrived in June, charting the schooner Surprise and hunting whales in Barkley Sound. Only one of the companies used a vessel equipped with a whaleboat, while the others apparently sent rowing boats out from their shore camps. The three firms only took thirty-two whales, for a yield of 75,800 gallons of oil.
The next season, seemingly undeterred, Roys returned to British Columbia in the 179-ton brig Byzantium on 10 May 1871. He constructed a station at Cumshewa Inlet in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and fitted out the Byzantium with proper onboard tryworks. Douglass split from Dawson and paired with the Victorian vintner and publican James Strachan, while Dawson rejoined Lipsett and formed the British Columbia Whaling Company. Dawson and Lipsett's company produced 20,000 gallons of oil in 1871, with Douglass and Strachan producing about 15,000. Both companies lost money on their ventures, with the former soon being liquidated. The Kate and other possessions of the company went on the auction block in March 1872. The schooner and equipment went to former company partners Robert Wallace and James Hutcheson, who unsuccessfully attempted to continue whaling operations. We last hear of them in July 1873, when the Kate was said to have been cruising near Lasqueti Island, in the Strait of Georgia, with little success. By the end of the year the schooner had been sold.
As usual, Roys fared the worst. The Byzantium struck the rocks in Weynton Passage, Johnstone Strait, forcing the men to abandon her and row ashore, to spend a frigid night huddled on the beach. Roys never operated a whaling company again.
In 1877, John Nelson Fletcher, a pyrotechnist, and the former Confederate solider from North Carolina, Robert L. Suits, modified Roys’s rocket, marketing it as the California Whaling Rocket. They used the small five in a half ton steam launch Rocket of San Francisco in 1878, killing 35 humpback, fin, and blue whales with their rocket outside the harbour and north to Point Reyes.
In 1880, Thomas P. H. Whitelaw fitted out the forty-four-ton steamer Daisy Whitelaw of San Francisco. With the California Whaling Rocket she "very successfully" hunted fin whales though the Farallon Islands to Drake's Bay. That same year, some of the rockets were purchased by the Northwest Whaling Company, or Northwest Trading Company, of Killisnoo Island, on the west coast of Admiralty Island, Southeast Alaska. They hunted fins and humpbacks, firing rockets from the deck of the company's small steamer Favorite, as well as from whaleboats. They established a whaling and trading station on Killisnoo Island, giving a few jobs at the whale processing plant to both Killisnoo and Angoon residents. After a few years of whaling, the station was turned into a herring processing plant, going out of business in 1885.
In the late 1870s schooners began hunting humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine. In 1880, with the decline of the menhaden fishery, steamers began to switch to hunting fin and humpback whales using bomb lances in what has been called a "shoot-and-salvage" fishery because of the high-rate of loss due to whales sinking, lines breaking, etc. The first was the steamer Mabel Bird, which towed whale carcasses to an oil processing plant at the head of Linekin Bay in Boothbay Harbor. Soon there were five such factories in Boothbay Harbour processing whales. At its height in 1885 four or five steamers were engaged in the Menhaden whale fishery, but it dwindled to one by the end of the decade. Fin whales accounted for about half the catch, with over 100 whales being killed in some years. The fishery ended in the late 1890s.
Before Svend Foyn launched the industry into the modern era, there were the Norwegians Jacob Nicolai Walsøe and Arent Christian Dahl. The former was probably the first person to suggest mounting a harpoon gun in the bows of a steamship, while the latter experimented with an explosive harpoon in Varanger Fjord (1857-1860). While they were the first in their class, it was Foyn who successfully adopted these ideas and put them into practice. In 1864, his methods, through trial and error, would lead to the development of the modern whaling trade.
During the 1930s, as German whaling in the Antarctic was coming about, the Nazis maintained that a gunsmith from Bremerhaven, H. G. Cordes, was responsible for Foyn's invention, and should thus receive credit for having brought whaling into the modern era. Foyn had indeed ordered material from Cordes, but he had found it unserviceable, and only experimented with his gun for a season. Cordes, working with John P. Rechten of Bremen, had developed an improved version of the Greener gun in 1856. They made a second version of this swivel gun with two barrels, side by side, with the left barrel shooting a harpoon and the right a bomb lance. Their invention was successfully experimented with in the North Sea in 1867. With this success, Rechten attempted to introduce this idea on the American market two years later, but it isn't known as to whether he succeeded or not.
References
- ^ http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/kujira/
- ^ http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/kujira/geisiko/6/geisiko6.html
- ^ http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/kujira/kujiraemaki2-1/kujiraemaki2-1.html
- ^ http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/kujira/hogeiemaki3/hogeiemaki3.html
- ^ http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/kujira/ogawajima/ogawajima.html
- General references
- Barkham, S. H. 1984. The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536-1632- A Summary. Arctic 37: 515-519.
- Bockstoce, J. R. 1986. Whales, Ice, & Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic. University of Washington Press.
- Conway, W. M. 1904. Early Dutch and English Voyages to Spitsbergen in the Seventeenth Century. London.
- De Roo, K. 2007. A History of the Whale Fishery [Online].
- Edvardsson, R., and M. Rafnsson. 2006. Basque Whaling Around Iceland: Archeological Investigation in Strakatangi, Steingrimsfjordur.
- Ellis, R. 1991. Men & Whales. Alfred A. Knopf.
- George, G. D. and R. G. Bosworth. 1988. Use of Fish and Wildlife by Residents of Angoon, Admiralty Island, Alaska. Division of Subsistence. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Juneau, Alaska.
- Jackson, G. 1978 The British Whaling Trade. Adam & Charles Black.
- Jenkins, J. T. 1921. A History of the Whale Fisheries. Reissued 1971, Kennikat Press.
- Purchas, S. 1625. Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and others. Volumes XIII and XIV (Reprint 1906, J. Maclehose and sons).
- Scammon, C. M. 1874. The Marine Mammals of the North-western Coast of North America: Together with an Account of the American Whale-fishery. Carmany and G. P. Putnam's.
- Schmitt, F. P., C. de Jong, and F. H. Winter. 1980. Thomas Welcome Roys: America's Pioneer of Modern Whaling. University Press of Virginia.
- Starbuck, A. 1878. The History of the American Whale Fishery. Castle.
- Tower, W. S. 1907. A History of the American Whale Fishery. University of Philadelphia.
- Webb, R. L. 1988. On the Northwest: Commercial Whaling in the Pacific Northwest 1790-1967. University of British Columbia Press.
- BBC News report on the engravings