Imagine sitting on the cliffs of Dover contemplating the sea on a crisp spring day. Today your eye would be drawn by the crawling shapes of cargo vessels, ferries and fishing boats. Wind back the clock to the seventh century, however, and the scene would be very different. Instead of shipping, you would watch the passage of great whales on their northward migration from African wintering grounds to Arctic feeding areas. At the season’s peak, over a thousand whales might pass in a day. Today few whales are sighted in the English Channel, because we have decimated their numbers by hunting. The slaughter began in the Bay of Biscay and English Channel around the ninth century and, by the early Middle Ages these abundant animals sustained a vigorous whale fishery that was conducted from coastal bays and inlets along their migration routes. Records suggest that numbers were declining as long ago as the 12th and 14th centuries. The depletion of those stocks offers a good explanation for why Basques whalers were so quick to exploit newly-discovered Arctic and Canadian whale populations in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Over the following centuries – in […]