Gradually the British whale-fishery began to assume a respectable and hopeful appearance. The combined fleets of England and Scotland, in the year 1752, amounted to forty sail; in 1753, to forty-nine; in 1754, to sixty-seven, in 1755, to eighty-two; and in the year following, to eighty-three sail—which was the greatest number of ships employed in the trade for the twenty years following; while the least number amounted to forty sail during the same period. On the establishment of the British whale-fishery, the legislature directed its attention to the means for securing the perpetuity of the trade, and the economical application of the bounty. These enactments were not carried in the House of Commons without considerable debate. In 1768, the king of Prussia, interesting himself in the Greenland fishery, caused some ships to be equipped from Emden; and in 1784, the king of France attempted the revival of the whale-fishery, by equipping, at his own expense, six ships in the port of Dunkirk. In 1785, the king of Denmark, in imitation of the English, granted a bounty of about thirty shillings sterling per ton, to all vessels in the Greenland and Iceland fisheries, on the condition of the ships being fitted out and their cargoes sold in a Danish port. The Act of the British Parliament of 1786, embodying several additional regulations on the subject of the whale-fishery, and rehearsing and revising former acts, has ever since been considered the fundamental act on the subject of the Greenland and Davis’s Strait whale-fishery. By accounts laid upon the table of the House of Commons during this session, it appeared that the bounties granted for the encouragement of the British whale-fisheries, carried on in the Greenland Sea and Davis’s Strait, from the year 1733, when bounties were first given, to the end of 1785, had amounted to £1,064,272. 18_s._ 2_d._ for England, and £202,158. 16_s._ 11_d._ for Scotland. By a subsequent act, the bounty was reduced to twenty-five shillings per ton, from the 25th of December, 1792, to the 25th of December, 1795; and from this period until the expiration of the act in 1798, to twenty shillings per ton, at which latter rate it has continued ever since. From a list, it appears, that in 1788, 255 British ships sailed for the whale-fishery, of which 129 were of a burden under 300 tons; 97 of 300 to 350 tons; 16 of 350 to 400 tons; 11 of 400 to 500 tons; 1 of 565 tons; and 1 of 987 tons. They were fitted out from the ports of London, Hull, Liverpool, Whitby, Newcastle, Yarmouth, Sunderland, Lynn, Leith, Ipswich, Dunbar, Aberdeen, Bo’ness, Glasgow, Montrose, Dundee, Exeter, Whitehaven, Stockton, Greenock, Scarborough, Grangemouth, and Queensferry. CHAPTER II. SITUATION OF THE EARLY WHALE-FISHERY—THE MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS CONDUCTED—AND THE ALTERATIONS WHICH HAVE TAKEN PLACE.