Follow the Whale

From time immemorial man has pursued the whale. Follow the Whale, which was first published in 1956, tells the story of the people who have engaged in that pursuit—its historical, cultural and economic consequences.

In narrative never less thrilling for sticking close to the known facts, biologist Ivan Sanderson has recreated the whole fabulous saga of whaling through the ages—not only from the beginning of recorded history but long before.

“The story that follows is an attempt to display this fascinating facet of human endeavor in some semblance of its entirety and in proper perspective by a process of corralling the forgotten and more neglected aspects of whaling history and the new discoveries about the whales themselves, and weaving them into a continuous web of narrative. It is primarily natural history, in both senses of that term. It is the history of man’s conquest of the sea, a saga with a theme so inexorable that it can only be described as natural, and it is a natural history of a group of animals than which there are none more mysterious or romantic in the world. To follow the whale is to follow the whole course of one of the most important and significant aspects of our own history. It is virtually the story of the conquest of our planet.”