Immense sums were annually paid to foreigners for whalebone at this period. It was not, it appears, until the whale-fishery was on the decline at Spitzbergen, that the Davis’s Strait fishery was resorted to. The Dutch sent their first ships in the year 1719. The shipping employed in the Greenland and Davis’s Strait whale-fisheries, in 1721, by foreign nations, amounted to three hundred and fifty-five sail. When, by the lapse of some years, the unfavourable impression produced on the minds of speculative persons by the immense losses suffered by English adventurers in the whale-fishery had partly worn off, the propriety of attempting this trade was suggested by Henry Elking, and was proposed to the directors of the well-known South Sea Company. The British legislature, by exempting the produce of the Greenland Seas from existing duties on the condition of its being imported in British ships, held out encouragements to the company similar to those offered to former adventurers. The South Sea Company caused a fleet of twelve new ships, about 306 tons’ burden each, to be built in the river Thames, equipped each vessel with the necessary supplies of cordage, casks, and fishing instruments, and engaged for their use the duke of Bedford’s wet-dock at Deptford, where boiling-houses and other conveniences were constructed. In the spring of 1725, the fleet being all in readiness, put to sea, and returned safe with twenty-five and a half whales. The proceeds of this voyage, though scarcely sufficient to pay the expenses incurred by the fitments and the hire of foreign harpooners, were yet superior to those of any succeeding year during the period in which the company pursued the trade. For eight successive years the company persevered in the whale-fishery, with indifferent or bad success, and after the season of 1732 were compelled to abandon it. In 1736, a London ship, which visited the whale-fishery, procured a cargo of seven fish—a degree of success which was fortunately different from that of most of the antecedent English whalers. The English government offered a bounty of twenty shillings per ton on the burden or tonnage of all British whale-fishing ships of 200 tons or upwards; and this, in 1749, was increased to forty shillings per ton.