| Summary: | With the run-down of both Northern and Southern fisheries, the second half of the nineteenth century experienced the same sort of marking-time as had occurred in the late seventeenth century. As a consequence the period is relatively unimportant compared with the great exertions before 1840 and the vast expansion after 1900, and it is only necessary here to outline the main lines of development. None of them led on to the modern industry, and important though British whaling may have been to individual persons and places, it had already departed from the mainstream of whaling and was sailing up a backwater as dangerous and ruinous as any in Baffin Bay. No amount of incentive, capital investment, technical advance or human bravery could save the Arctic trade, but it fought its painful death-struggle for three-quarters of a century, periodically encouraged by remissions that eased the pressure and sometimes brought a measure of prosperity....
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