| Summary: | For most people in the eighteenth century, and for most British people to this day, the whaling trade was synonymous with the Arctic voyages about which almost all the British whaling histories have been written. It is, however, important to remember that, despite its dramatic potential and home-spun quality, the Northern trade was no more than a subsidiary source of whale oil in the eighteenth century. Before 1770 it was rare for more than a tenth of peace-time imports to come from Greenland, and until the American Revolution the bulk of supplies came from the New England colonies. Imports from there averaged 3696 tuns in the years 1764-1775 compared with only 1168 tuns from Greenland....
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