Historical Data on the Impact of 16th-Century Basque Whaling on Right and Bowhead Whales in the Western North Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Basques pioneered whaling in Newfoundland waters around 1530 and remained the only group to exploit western Atlantic whale populations until 1600, hunting from coastal stations in southern Labrador and eastern Québec. In light of recent research on archaeological whale remains from Red Bay in Labrador, this paper presents historical data relevant to the numbers of whales that were hunted by 16th-century Basques. These data led to an estimate of 13,000 whales killed, a count lower than those provided by other analyses. Whaling peaked in the 1570s, then declined sharply around 1579 to low levels for the remainder of the century. The Basques primarily targeted the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus). As whaling intensified in the 1560s, the Basques noticed a second bowhead migration in mid-November and extended their hunting season until freeze-up. During this time, the port of Red Bay increased in importance until about half of all Basque whaling ships were based there in the 1570s. Basque whalers preferred stations in the Strait of Belle Isle for economic and security reasons but also because of the late fall bowhead whale hunt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".