The first notice in Hakluyt of any actual whale-fishing by the English occurs under the date of 1593, in which year it is stated that some English ships made a voyage to Cape Breton to fish for morse and whales; and before the close of the century we find the ships of the Russia Company engaged occasionally in fishing for whales in the seas in the neighbourhood of Spitzbergen. It appears that the oil was the only thing for which the whale was then valued—at least there is no mention at this early date of any trade in the fins or whalebone.
In 1577, according to Hakluyt, the ships engaged in the Newfoundland fishery were 150 from France, 100 from Spain, 50 from Portugal, and 15 from England; the Biscayans had also 20 or 30 ships engaged in the whale-fishery; but the English, he says, had the best ships, and therefore gave the law to the rest, and were their protectors in the bays from pirates and other intruders, for which it was then, and had been of old, a custom to make them a sort of acknowledgment by a boatload of salt or other present of that nature. The ships of the Spaniards were the next best to those of the English. Hakluyt accounts for the small number of the English ships that resorted to Newfoundland by the number employed in the Iceland fishery.
A new mercantile company was incorporated by Elizabeth in 1579, by the name of the Fellowship of Eastland Merchants, with the exclusive right of trading to Norway, Sweden, Poland, Prussia, and all the other countries along the coasts of the Baltic. "This," says Anderson, "was what is called in England a regulated company—that is, a company trading, not on a joint stock, but every one on his separate bottom, under certain regulations." The exclusive privileges of this association were extinguished at the Revolution by the act called the Declaration of Rights; but in Anderson's time the Eastland Merchants, and also the Merchants of the Staple, who were similarly circumstanced, continued to exist in name, and to elect their annual officers—their capital being reduced to a small stock in the public funds, the interest of which defrayed the expenses of their yearly meetings.
