The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-06-11

men resorted to Smeerenberg, and hot rolls, dear to their hearts, were served at breakfast daily. Yet for forty years past whaling has been abandoned in Holland.
 The Dutch first introduced whaling into the New World, having embarked in it in their early days in what is now York, and they hunted the rorquals off Long Island and the bowheads along Labrador. From them the Puritans took it up, and it in time became a. mainstay of New England. Prior to the War of Independence the Yankee whalemen flshed without hindrance off Newfoundland, and among the prizes brought into St. Johns by British fri gates during that struggle, and again in 1872. were many American whale ships. When the treaty of 1918 restored them their fishery status they resumed the pursuit and continued it until recent years.
 Labrador was also frequented by them, and in 1874 bowhead was killed by a New Bedford vessel off Bonne Esperance, Belle Isle Strait, from whose mouth was taken whalebone twenty lone and quarter feet long. This was 1 a monster, for the "bone" rarely ex- ceeds sixteen feet and is usually short CT. It is the extreme length of this bone" which makes it so valuable; that from the rorquals is only from two to four feet leng, and fetches only 30 cents a pound, as against $7 pound for the other. The bowheads carry Q princes ransom in their jaws. for full grown specimen yields about 1,500 to D. LOCO pounds, worth S1400O a ton. About sixteen years ago one was killed in Hudson Bay which yielded S,3oO pounds of whalebone, being fitted with dou- ble fringe of it, like man with double teeth.
 l About seventy years ago the New ! England whalemen began frequenting Hudson Bay. As the mighty but tim orous bowheads, so-called from the massive arched dome which causes 1 their bone" to be so long, found them selves deeimated by the hunters in the Greenland waters, they withdrew to the comparative security of this inland sea, where they enjoyed a respite from utter exterrnination fer few decades longer, as, in order to hunt them, each ship had to lose a season in entering the bay. Hudson Strait is blocked with ice till after midsummer, and ships have only time to get in and secure 1 winter quarters, not fishing until the next spring, as it is at that period the cetaceans are taken most readily. A K ship then, reaches the bay one season, winters there fishes for two springs and returns home the third autumn, being usually about twenty-seven months on cruise. Experience has taught the whalemen the best harbors and fishing grounds, and when the waters are free from ice they begin their work.
 Whalebone is not bone at all, but a flexible fringe on the creatures jaws, 1 in lieu of teeth, to enable the whale to separate from tEe sea. water in which it floats the marine animalculae on which lit subsists. It allows the water to enter its cavernous mouth, then closes it's jaws, expels the brine though this fringe and swallows the minute food which satisfies it's mighty bulk Each whale has about four hundred plates of this bone" in it's jaws, the teeth being embryonic only, and this is the substance that tempts men into the perils of an Arctic voyage. The huge carcass yields much oil, it is true, but the oil alone would not make the ven- 1 ture pay, and the practice has been, after flensing, or stripping off the outer coat of fat, or blubber, to let the re- mainder go, and the skeleton, with the l covering of flesh which enshrouds it, and weighing from forty to fifty tons usually becomes the prey of sharks. The decline in whale fishing is best shown by the fact that in 1853, the rec- ord year for bone in the United States | industry, the yield was 5,652,000 pounds, whereas last year it was only 121000 pounds. Hence the price advanced from 80 cents a pound in 1860 to $1.10 in l 1870, $2.05 in 1880, $4.25 in 1890, $5.52 in 1900 and S7 in 1903. Experts think, too, that it must still advance, for the bow l heads can only be got now by penetrat- ling the circumpolar fastnesseS, where they take refuge from the hunters, whose kill has declined to such an ex- tent in the last ten years that, where in 1893 the American whaling fleet in Hud- son Bay and northwest waters secured 394 of these mighty creatures altogeth- CT, their combined catch was only 161 last year.
 | The cost in human life which this in- dustry has involved is beyond compu- tation. In the earlier, days, when hy- giene on shipboard was unknown, and the crews were inactive thoughout the whole winter in their dark, foul and iunventilated forecastles and cabins, living on salt food drinking strong 1 liquors, taking no exercise and defying all sanitary rules, it would be strange indeed if the mortality had not been excessive, and the many grave mounds 1 in the different wintering harbors prove alike the extent to which the fishery was prosecuted and the heavy toll of lives demanded by Nature for non-ob- ,servance of her laws. Nowadays, though, the whalemen winter with the natives, have them hunt musk OK and bears, and, by active work, defy scurvy, the pest of the faraway mariner.
 Other perils of the north, too, were l fully felt in the whaling industry. The