DIM YESTERDAY

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1565, 8 October 1912, Page 6

DIM YESTERDAY

A. TALE OF THE MARINES, ' (By Quiz.) If reiterated assertion is correct there will beat into Port Nicholson 0110 of these breezy days 11 picturesque reminder of our earliest past. Port Nicholson, by tho way, is Wellington' Harbour—according to the map. Tho reminder will come in tho form of several whaling vessels, and it will awaken the memory of a distant yesterday, because even before tho advent of the settlers who got hero first—more reverently culled "the pioneers"—the whalers knew and hunted in these parts. .lust when this fishing craze led them this fur from homo may, and may not, bo discoverable inside some grim)', yellowleuved schedule of events-(alias envly history); but their memory should live less because of the circumstance that they arrived early than becnuso of their veneration of all tho members of the great family of Truth. There wero among theso old whale-perse-cutors men compared with whom George Washington and Izank Walton were unsophisticated amateurs. These hunters whose day now, lags far in the wake of Time knew not. only where to hunt and how to capture, but how to report the Facts. They wcro experts in fish stories, nnd fish stories, as everyone knows, arc a species of Truth—one of tho Family. The whaling industry, it is worth remarking, is a business, the methods of which havo hot changed at all violently in the last tan centuries. For instance, no 0110 has invented a machine for catching whales in ten seconds, and .there is no American system of utilising all but the spout. No Yankee machine is advertised with the words: "You simply put the whale in one end, give the handle three turns, and, if it is a sperm whale,, a pound of sperm candles falls- out the other.end! The whole operation can be done in less than four seconds, and the process is cheat), clean, and effective!". A thousand years ago whaling was carried on in rather much the same style as it is carried on to-day. Not that' wo have very reliable accounts of whaling in that lope dead past, but we' know from King Alfred's story of Ohthere's- AV.hite Sea excursion that there were expert whalers among the Norwegians in those days. From the tenth to the sixteenth century mariners of France and mariners of Spain carried on lucrative whale-fish-ing enterprises. Britons entered the race later. It is said that the. largest .cargo ever secured by a Scotch'whaler was that of tho "Revolution," of Peterhead, in 1811. It took forty-four whales to provide the cargo. There was .100 tons of oil, which .realised ,£9500. The money bbtaiucd for the whale-bone nnd a State bounty brought the total up to £11,000. Two kinds of whales used to be treated with more respect than the others—the finwhales and the hump-backs.'V, Generally, these gentlemen were left to enjoy their peace' undisturbed by business intrusions. The severest famine in whale-oil--would not induce the average' hunter .'to thrust a harpoon in' the top story of a fin or a hump-back. These quarry were fiercer and of grcnter vitality, than other whales, and tho velocity' of their onslaught was appalling. Attacking one of these with tho old hand-harpoon was as productive of immediate result ns pricking lather with a pin, and about as disastrous. But, in about ISGG, Syend Foyn, a Norwegian, invented the explosive harpoon, sinco when the fin and the hump-back are as liable to get converted into, oil and whalebone as any other cetacean is. , • . But—hack to whaling as it concerns us. Student's of Maori tradition say that the first Maori' War arose' out of a. dispute as to the possession'of a sperm; whale. It seems more than- likely that; before 'the old whalers discovered the fact;-whales were as thick on the New Zealand coast as they would now be welcome. Before tho dawn of the nineteenth century, whales used to frequent Sydney Harbour. One chased a boat there one day in 1790 and upset it, and the result was tho drowning of the three occupants. However, while -whales wero plentiful, good whale stories ■ wore. ,at,. ,a premium until the arrival, of, tho Britannia ui the year 1701. The men of tins vessel saw whales by the myriad .just.as other men see creditors in their dreams. The captain of. this ship used to see whales all over the horizon. He got off doing a special trip to Norfolk Island with convicts in order to go whale-hunting. And on one occasion he reported-that he had seen in a-ten days' hunt no less than— I think ho mennt "no more than"—ls,ooo whales. Nevertheless, it does seem that whales were nearly as plentiful as herring in these' waters. in those old days, and in 1802 special raids were made on New Zealand! The ships which were sent along to hunt off our coast met with a great measure of success. One compiler of historical matter writes: "The whale fisheries becamo of great importance, and exercised considerable inlluence upon the settlement of New Zealand." ■ It is over a hundred years since tho early whale-hunters were here. About 73 years back accounts for the first of "the pioneers." '