William Scoresby Jr.

William Scoresby Jr. emerges as both a working whaler and a scientific observer: the sea financed his investigations, while his voyages supplied evidence that reached far beyond the immediate business of catching whales. His career joined the practical inheritance of his father, William Scoresby Sr., to a distinctive effort to describe the Arctic in detail. In the book’s account, that combination gives his observations a long afterlife: a tool recovered from a whale helps illuminate both a possible passage between oceans and the animal’s capacity to outlive generations of hunters.

Family Inheritance and Scientific Formation

William Scoresby Jr. went to sea as a boy, following a formidable example. In 1803, William Scoresby Sr. took command of the Resolution, a new double-hulled vessel whose metal-plated bow was designed to push through Arctic ice. His fourteen-year-old son sailed with him, at the beginning of a life that would make him a whaler, explorer and inventor. His father had already pursued the North-West Passage and devised an enclosed crow’s nest, fitted with protective covering and space for a telescope and firearm, as well as flags and a speaking trumpet for communication. The son inherited not simply a place aboard ship but a world in which observation, navigation and the pursuit of whales were tightly interwoven.

William Scoresby Jr. later added formal scientific study to that seafaring experience. After going to sea as a boy, he studied science in Edinburgh and joined the navy. Following his discharge, he travelled to London to meet Joseph Banks, the naturalist who had sailed with James Cook. Banks received him at his home in Soho Square. By then, William Scoresby Jr. could speak from experience about Arctic regions explored on his father’s whaling voyages; the meeting brought that firsthand knowledge into contact with established natural history.

Command, Instruments, and Arctic Research

A year after meeting Banks, William Scoresby Jr. took command of his first whaling ship, the Resolution, and later commanded the Esk. Whaling remained the practical means by which he pursued research. He set out to investigate whether seawater was warmer below the surface, and he and Banks developed an instrument to measure the ocean’s residual heat more accurately. Called the Marine Diver, the brass device could be lowered 7,000 feet into the water. It converted a question about the unseen sea into a measurable inquiry, even as the voyages themselves remained exposed to the risks of Arctic navigation.

On a perilous journey aboard the Esk, pack ice nearly cost him his ship. His curiosity may not have been welcomed by all the men whose safety depended on his decisions, but he continued to fill books and papers with calculations, sketches, suppositions and descriptions. The narrative presents this record as a new documentation of seas that had previously remained unrecorded in such detail. His ship was therefore at once a whaling vessel and a platform for inquiry: the same voyage that pursued animals also produced observations about water, ice and the Arctic environment.

That work took published form in 1820, when An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery appeared in two illustrated volumes in Edinburgh. The book gathered knowledge of Arctic nature, whale biology and whaling methods, and became a standard against which later works were measured. Its illustrations included ninety-six snow crystals, arranged in repeated patterns that made the small structures of ice a subject for close study. Its scientific ambition coexisted with a religious interpretation of nature. William Scoresby Jr. understood the animals and phenomena he catalogued as evidence of Creation, and his investigations did not, in the account given here, conflict with that faith. Like his father, he also sought, by God’s grace, to find the North-West Passage.

The Whale in the Record

William Scoresby Jr.’s descriptions make the whale at once an object of scientific attention and an animal encountered through the material demands of the fishery. Drawing on his own experience, he recorded that of 322 whales whose capture he had personally witnessed, he believed none exceeded sixty feet. He described a whale’s open mouth as a chamber large enough to contain a merchants’ jolly-boat full of men, offering dimensions to make its scale intelligible. Yet his account also registers the limits of what could be known: the whale’s small eyes, the difficulty of identifying an opening for sound before the skin was removed, and the gap between what was visible at the surface and what remained hidden in the body.

The account of a stone lance found inside a whale became the most consequential of these observations. Near Spitsbergen on July 19, 1813, the master of the Volunteer, a Whitby whaler, showed William Scoresby Jr. part of a lance recovered from the blubber of a whale killed by his crew weeks earlier. The weapon was embedded in the flesh, the wound had healed, and only a small white scar marked where it had entered. The account identified such weapons with Indigenous hunters on the far northern coast of the American continent. If a whale encountered in the Atlantic carried a tool associated with people living on the Pacific side, the evidence suggested a connection between the two oceans—and gave renewed force to the search for the North-West Passage.

The discovery also pointed toward a different mystery. The stone lance had entered the whale long before the animal was killed, raising the possibility that whales lived much longer than conventional estimates allowed. William Scoresby Jr.’s report did not settle the animal’s age, but its implications travelled into Herman Melville’s reading. In 1850, Melville borrowed the two volumes from the New York Society Library and drew on the stone-lance account in Moby-Dick. The question of who had thrown the weapon, and when, became a way for the novel to imagine a whale whose life extended across human history.

Later evidence strengthened the challenge to shorter estimates of bowhead life. Iñupiat hunters in the Bering Sea had reported recognizing individual whales across successive generations, and stone or ivory harpoon points were found in the blubber of whales. Research by Jeffrey L. Bada, using changes in aspartic acid levels in the eyes, dated one examined bowhead at ninety years, four at between 135 and 180 years, and another at 211 years. These were presented as minimum ages, not final limits. William Scoresby Jr.’s account of the 1813 lance thus became part of a chain of evidence through which an old whaling observation acquired new significance: the embedded object preserved a trace of an earlier encounter and made the whale’s hidden lifespan newly thinkable.

Leaving the Sea and the Work’s Afterlife

After publishing his book, William Scoresby Jr. returned to sea aboard the Baffin and charted the east coast of Greenland. He left his wife and family in Liverpool before the voyage and returned in September 1822 to learn that his wife had died. The loss ended his active whaling career: he made only one more trip before leaving the sea for religious work. In this turn, the maritime record gives way to a different vocation, though the scientific and religious commitments evident in his Arctic book remain joined in the narrative of his life.

William Scoresby Jr. became vicar of Bradford, where his parishioners included the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his young daughters. His attention also turned to the mysterious forces of mesmerism. Meanwhile, the whaling world he had documented was contracting. After the loss of all hands on the Lively in an Arctic storm in 1825, he preached at St Mary’s Church in Whitby; the former Esk had also sunk, just thirty miles from the town. Sixty men died in these losses. The narrative links the dwindling fleet not only to disaster at sea but also to the depletion of whale grounds and the slaughter of thousands of animals.

The contrast between William Scoresby Jr.’s scientific descriptions and the conditions of whaling remains essential to his significance. His observations arose from a fishery that treated whales as a source of oil and other products, yet they also preserved facts that exceeded that economic purpose: measurements, anatomical details and evidence of an animal’s possible longevity. His book’s religious reading of the Arctic, its careful natural history and its connection to the search for a passage all belong to the same account. The stone lance especially bridges those strands. It was first a tool recovered from a dead whale, then a clue to human movement across the Arctic, and finally a material sign that the whale might have lived through a span of time that its pursuers had scarcely imagined.