Abstract
The diary offers a detailed account of his voyage to Vladivostok via the Suez Canal accompanied by two whale-catchers, Nikolai and Georgy. Subsequently, he constructed a whaling station in Gaydamak, near Vladivostok, which is now part of Nakhodka City. The whaling station, which employs personnel from Japan, China, Korea, and several other countries, constitutes the focal point for whaling operations spanning the Russian Far East and the Korean Peninsula. The diary records the number and species of whales captured by the company. From the description of the diary, Walby was employed by a Japanese whaling company to supervise the construction of a whale-catcher in Osaka and to participate in whaling operations as a gunner in the Sea of Japan, from the Tsushima Strait to the Korean Peninsula, and off Kagoshima Prefecture in southern Kyushu. The diary indicates that he visited a hot spring in Unzen and the ancient capital Nara from Osaka, during the period of unemployment, prior to his contract with a Japanese whaling company. A review of the diary entries and articles in fishing journals of the same period revealed that Walby started working as a gunner in 1899 for a Japanese whaling company, a year later than the descriptions of Akashi (1910) and Tønnessen (1967). Nevertheless, Walby was the first gunner of a modern Japanese whaling company to be recorded and the first to hunt a whale with a whaling cannon. The value of Walby’s diary lies in its detailed internal record of whaling companies, which makes it an invaluable source of information on the earliest days of modern whaling, from the Russian Far East to the Korean coast, and to Japan at the end of the 19th century.
https://ror.org/05crbcr45 
