The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns,
ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the
choicest furs this continent produces.
The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this
international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British
Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver
Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur
bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would
think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of
Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta
claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs,
feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60 deg. and the uttermost edge of
things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be
hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the
rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by
interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of
these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
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