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Purchas (1625)Purchas, Samuel (1577-1626). Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes [...]. London: Henry Fetherstone, 1625.
In 1625, when Purchas published a new collection of accounts of travels, the English had barely begun hunting whales. However, the Basques had already been doing it for close to a century along the coasts of North America. In fact, at an unknown date, but going back to the first half of the sixteenth century, the Basques discovered the presence of whales in the Newfoundland and Labrador waters. Moreover, in a manuscript written around 1550, André Thévet had mentioned that once a year the Basques sailed up the Saint Lawrence River to Tadoussac, Quebec to hunt whales. Until the turn of the seventeenth century, when a large stock of whales was discovered in Spitsbergen (north-east of Greenland), Basque whalers frequented the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the North American coast with great regularity and in large numbers. The discovery of Spitsbergen marked the real beginning of the English whaling industry, with the first whaling expedition undertaken in 1611. But from 1625 on, the English were no longer able to compete effectively against the Dutch, their main rivals in Spitsbergen. A century later, following the discovery of a new large reserve of whales in the Davis Strait waters, the whaling industry took off again in England. In 1816 it was given a fresh impetus by the discovery of a large quantity of whales along the west coast of Baffin Island. However, a few decades later this activity went into a decline, and in the second half of the nineteenth century it was finally abandoned, among other reasons because of new sources of oil supplies. In fact, during close to four centuries, the whales that frequented the North American waters - the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Labrador, Newfoundland, Davis Strait and Baffin Island - were harvested mainly for their oil which served among other things for lighting streets as well as houses, workshops, factories and stores. Used also as a lubricant, whale oil entered into the manufacture of a host of products, such as hand soap, varnish, paint and rope, as well as into the preparation of leather and wool.
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