and setting them adrift – in all stealing 600 casks of oil and 200,000 lbs of baleen. With fully laden ships they sailed back to France, selling their plunder at Rouen and elsewhere for a handsome profit. Unable to gain a foothold at Spitsbergen, the Basques ventured offshore. Even here they met with trouble. In July 1637, the Fleur, of Ciboure, under Dominique Daguerre, who had been whaling between 73° and 76° N, made the mistake of straying as far north as 78° N, where he encountered the Danish man-of-war De To Løver ("The Two Lions"), under Corfits Ulfeldt. Ulfeldt, who had been sent to Spitsbergen to protect Danish interests, led Daguerre to Kobbefjorden, where he seized 400 barrels of blubber and 100 quintals of baleen. Northern Norway In Finnmark (Northern Norway) the Basques received the same undue treatment they had met with in Spitsbergen and Iceland, this time from the Dano-Norwegian crown. Here, they hunted the "nordkaper" or North Atlantic right whale. One of the first may have been a Spanish Basque whaleship that was said to have been at Kjelvik, Magerøya, in 1614. This may have been the same "Biscayan" ship that was forced to pay a fee of twenty "oxheads" of whale oil and 100 Spanish "Reales" to the sheriff at Vardø. The following year, 1615, a vessel from Mutriku went to Northern Norway, as well as two from San Sebastian and two from the French Basque region. The Dano-Norwegian crown, on hearing of unlicensed whalers fishing in their waters, sent a naval expedition to Northern Norway, confiscating 600 oxheads of oil from the San Sebastian ships and seizing one of the French Basques, confiscating 500 oxheads of oil from them, and sending the other vessel home. The presence of Basque whalers in these waters continued to be recorded into the 1620s. They may have sent expeditions to Northern Norway as late as 1688–90, as secondary literature claims that a whaleship out of San Sebastián was present at Vannfjord, Magerøya during those seasons. First pelagic whaling and later Arctic ventures In order to avoid having to pay fines to the sovereigns of northern lands (e.g. Spitsbergen, Finnmark), the Basques began using ship-board tryworks to process blubber into oil. This technique was introduced in 1635. Whales could now be caught and processed offshore. Off Northern Norway, French Basque whaleships reported hunted whales "à flot", in other words, offshore