boiling their oil; which cookeries they left standing from year to year, and only brought home the purified oil and the whalebone. The English, having been first in that fishery, kept possession of the best bays. The Hollanders, coming late, were obliged to find bays farther north: yet the Danes, who came later into this trade than the Dutch, got in between the English and Dutch. The Hamburghers came after the Danes; and after them came the French, and also the Biscayners, who, though they were older whale-fishers than any in Europe, except the Norwegians, had not, however, practised this method but by the example of the English and the rest, and who were forced to set up their cookeries still farther off. But, since those times, the whales are less frequent in the bays, and are most commonly among the openings of the ice at a greater distance from land, which obliges the ships to follow them thither. So that the blubber is now cut from the whales, which are taken in small pieces at the ships' sides, and then casks filled therewith, and thus brought home to be boiled and purified, and the whale-fins also to be cleaned. This latter method, however, of fishing being often found dangerous and hazardous to shipping, it discouraged our English adventurers, who then traded in a company, so that they soon after relinquished that fishery; and so it remained till the reign of King Charles II."[1]
We have a proof, notwithstanding the complaints of the decay of the national trade and industry, which, as we have seen, were not wanting now any more than in every other period of our history, that the country still continued, on the whole, to advance in wealth and prosperity, though at a slacker pace than for some time before, in the fact that both the mercantile and the royal navies were considerably increased in the course of the present reign. It has been asserted, as we have seen, that in the fleet fitted out in 1588 against the Spanish Armada Elizabeth had forty ships of her own; but, according to other accounts, what properly formed the
- ↑ Histor. and Chron. Deduct. of Orig. of Com. ii. 272.
