The Arctic Whaling Journals of William Scoresby the Younger / Volume I / The Voyages of 1811, 1812 and 1813

The Arctic Whaling Journals of William Scoresby the Younger is the first of three projected volumes of the unpublished journals kept by William Scoresby (1789-1857) of his voyages to the Arctic. Scoresby made his first voyage in the whaler Resolution from Whitby to the Greenland Sea, west of Spitsbergen, in 1800 and in 1810, on his twenty-first birthday, ¿the earliest at which, by reason of age, I could legally hold a command¿, his father relinquished the Resolution to him. A brief spell at Edinburgh University, and the encouragement of John Playfair, Robert Jameson and Sir Joseph Banks, stimulated his scientific observations, and in 1820 he published what has been called ¿the foundation stone of Arctic science¿. The lengthy journals of his annual voyages are remarkable accounts in their own right, containing scientific records and social and religious comment as well as detailed descriptions of navigation and whaling.