"By this date, Peterhead owners were seriously losing heart in the Greenland fishery. What few whales were seen had become so wild that it was almost impossible to approach them, and it was contended that the noise of the screw could be heard by whales for a tremendous distance and gave ample warning" (p. 423).
One could surmise that several hundred years of hunting a large cetacean had thinned the numbers of the breeding population that were less likely to startle awake and flee while being hunted. Likewise, those that were relatively calm in demeanor among a population that had no real predator at adult size other than the newly arrived whalers were the first among this population to perish as were those whales that chose to bask in the open, away from floes. Contrast that to the one instance of the 'unsuspicious fish' that circled a whaling vessel a few times and even nudged it along as if it were a fellow whale before being harpooned point-blank. The rare few in a Greenland whale population that could be perceived as its ambassadors among humans, those that felt no fear or animosity toward them, were the first to perish as they were the easiest to harpoon, flench, boil down, and sell to markets in Europe and the Americas in the form of oil and baleen products.
Quote above from The Arctic Whalers by Basil Lubbock
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