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WHEN William Scoresby sailed home to Whitby in the autumn of 1792, after some six months at sea, the blubber boilers on the quayside couldn’t believe their luck. They were waiting to turn his precious cargo into candles and lubricants, and found he had in his hold the remains of 18 bowhead whales. It was a record catch for the town and, in all probability, a record for any whaling ship anywhere in the world. It seemed like a bonanza for the port, which had taken up whaling 40 years before. Little did the townsfolk know, but this huge haul was the beginning of the end.

The Whitby whalers had muscled in on a Dutch business. Whalers from Rotterdam had been heading for Greenland to harvest the eastern Arctic bowheads since the 1660s. They left port in spring and reached the ice caps off Greenland as the pack ice began to break up. The whales there, which grew up to 20 metres long, were known as bowheads because their curved lower jaws looked like archers’ bows. There seemed to be a never-ending supply, even when the British showed up.

By the 1780s, hundreds of British and Dutch whalers were making the trip. Each boat typically took three or four “fish” in a season. But Scoresby changed that. He was a renowned navigator who had just been made a captain. In five years his ship the Henrietta brought back 80 whales and produced 729 tonnes of oil, as well as a mountain of whalebone destined for every imaginable use from corset stays to watch springs, fishing rods and umbrella ribs.

Scoresby was a star of the ice floes. Switching ships, he broke his own record, bringing back 94 whales in five years aboard the Dundee, including 36 in 1798 alone. And then he took 194 in eight years with the Resolution and 103 in four years in the John. His books show he cleared an annual profit on his investment of 25 per cent.

How did he do it? His biographer Clarence Preston attributed his success to “his superiority as a navigator in ice-encumbered seas”. The trick was to get in among the bowheads when the ice was melting early in the spring. Then, huge numbers were confined in small areas of open water, vulnerable to the whalers’ puny hand-held harpoons.

With only wooden vessels powered by wind and sail, navigation among the ice floes was a tricky business. Most whalers, fearful of the ice, carried little ballast and rode high in the water. If they hit ice it would be a glancing blow. But this left them more at the mercy of the winds and less able to manoeuvre around the ice.

Scoresby, on the other hand, filled his holds with ballast and sailed close to the wind, weaving in and out of the ice. His boats struck the ice harder than others, but in compensation he could avoid the floes better, sail faster—and had first pickings. Sailing north in 1806 with a flotilla of other whalers, he manoeuvred through the ice and onto the whaling grounds with such skill that by the time the rest of the vessels showed up, he already had 14 whales in his hold.

He innovated in other ways too. He invented the crow’s-nest to enable lookouts to spot whales in the worst Arctic weather. And when he did get stuck in the ice, he hit upon the idea of sending his crew running from one side of the ship to the other, rocking the vessel in time with the natural oscillation of the ship in order to free it.

But if such techniques preserved his boats and increased his haul, they also began to undermine his industry. As more British whaling captains copied Scoresby, the whale harvest multiplied, and stocks that had supplied the Dutch for 150 years couldn’t withstand the onslaught.

Some have guessed at this before. But Robert Allen of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has recently completed the first detailed study of what exactly caused the demise of the eastern Arctic bowhead. It shows unequivocally that the expansion of the British whaling industry at the end of the 18th century was what led to the collapse first of the rival Dutch industry, which withdrew around the turn of the century, and by the mid-1830s to the “virtual extinction” of the stocks. Before the whalers came, Allen estimates the eastern Arctic bowheads numbered some 900,000. When the British showed up the numbers were lower but probably stable. But just 40 years after Scoresby first donned a captain’s cap, they were all but gone.

Allen’s modelling study gives the lie to the orthodox view that pre-industrial technology on the high seas was incapable of causing stocks of marine animals to crash. And the collapse of the eastern Arctic bowhead has proved anything but temporary. Today, 200 years after Scoresby’s heyday, there are just 450 of these whales in the waters west of Greenland. To the east of Greenland, once the biggest whaling ground in the world, there are none at all.

Allen also shows that the seas were emptied by the forces of free market economics—although according to theory this shouldn’t happen. Orthodoxy holds that without massive subsidies it should become uneconomic to harvest a declining stock long before the crash comes. It is a view still being expressed today about major fish stocks. This was not what happened off Greenland. “The British continued to profitably hunt bowheads until they were on the very brink of extinction,” says Allen.

After 1780, primitive harpoons and astute navigational skills, as pioneered by Scoresby, enabled British whalers to almost double the number of whales a ship could take in a season to around six. This was peanuts compared with Scoresby’s tally. But he was the master of his art. In a career that took him to Greenland 30 times, he took 533 whales, or almost 18 whales a trip. No one else came near before or since. For by the time his last boat, the Fame, caught fire off the Orkneys in 1823 and brought about his retirement, the whales were becoming scarce.

An arch of bowhead jawbones overlooking the harbour at Whitby marks Scoresby’s amazing career as “the most successful and daring of all captains engaged in the whale fishery”. But although Scoresby’s innovations turned whaling into a gold mine for British whalers they also sealed the fate of the first great whale population ever hunted to extinction. In the process, Scoresby ended Whitby’s status as one of the great whaling ports of the world. The last whaling ship returned to port here from Greenland in 1833, just 80 years after the first.