Where have all the barque rigged sealers gone?

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy 1890, sealing from southern Norwegian ports had been in decline for some years. The owners of the fleet of strongly built barque rigged ice-sheeted sealers were facing a serious problem. This was simply that their ships did not make money. This paper describes the options that the owners had at a time when the fleets of the world were about to change from sail to steam. There were alternative possibilities for employment of such strongly built ice going wooden ships. These included involvement in Arctic transport, American whaling, and Newfoundland sealing, and on Arctic tourist and polar expeditions. The paper analyses these possibilities and compares the development of the Norwegian fleet with the situation in the Scottish sealing fleet that had faced the same problem some 30 years earlier.