Chapter XXI: The Present Whaling Industry

The average annual number of whales caught in the Dependencies in the years immediately preceding the Great War was 8,314: but this has now risen to 9,915. Many things, such as the varying directions of currents carrying the whales’ food elsewhere, are responsible for changing the localities of the cetacean; and therefore it is no fair assumption to argue in a bad season that at last the whale is being exterminated owing to excessive fishing. But where 304,002 barrels of oil were got from the former before the war, 611,372 barrels are now being obtained from the annual catch. In other words, each whale now yields over 61 barrels instead of less than 37 barrels: and the value has gone up to considerably more than three times what it used to be.

Well, for this we have largely to thank the Government restrictions, which not only limit the number of licences, but ever since the year 1921 have compelled the economical utilization of the carcase. The former practice was simply to remove the most valuable portions of the whale, leaving the carcase to rot on the beach. All this has been altered so that waste does not exist. The improved factory methods, mentioned in the last chapter, have further facilitated this innovation. In the olden days ships that used Greenland waters and the Davis Straits used to make more money from the bone than from the oil. For instance, in the year 1860 there were captured by British vessels eight whales off Greenland and seventy-six up the Davis Straits. Total eighty-four whales, whose produce fetched only £70,828, whale oil being then £1 12s. 6d. per cwt., but the bone realizing £20 10s. 0d. per cwt. To-day there is very little demand for whalebone, since many cheap and serviceable substitutes have been invented. The whale is hunted principally for its oil, and then only in a by-product sense for the fertilizing guano and meal made out of the meat and bones after the oil has been extracted.

If we take a fairly representative span of years such as from 1860 to 1888, that is to say, when steam was beginning to come in as auxiliary to the sailing whalers, we are in a fair position to compare the results with present-day whaling. And the figures show at once (even after allowing for the changed value of money) that the discovery of the Antarctic grounds has made those Victorian times seem ridiculous. Between those two first-mentioned dates of the nineteenth century there were several years when the Greenland region yielded not one single whale, and the highest figure for any season during that period was only thirty-five. During those same twenty-eight years the Davis Straits never afforded less than ten whales a season but never more than 208. The most remunerative year was 1861, when a total revenue of £112,305 was obtained. From the year 1875, with certain fluctuations, that whole northern fishing decreased both in whale numbers and in actual value, so that, when we come to the year 1886, from the two areas combined only thirty-four whales were taken, and only £34,652 obtained: but this notwithstanding that the price of whalebone had risen from £18 (in the year 1861) to £82 10s. 0d. per cwt. in 1886. In the last-mentioned year, when whale oil was fetching only a guinea per cwt., it hardly paid the cost of getting it, and it was only the whalebone which made it worth while to undertake these northern voyages.

We can therefore scarcely wonder that the industry gradually faded away. But if some of those astute old whaling skippers and hardened harpooners could come back to-day and learn that a fleet of fifty-five steam catchers had killed in one Antarctic season 9,915 whales and made £3,056,860 for their owners we should find some interesting comments. I hate to bore the reader with statistics, but this is the only way of proving the tremendous change of prosperity which has come about so recently and so quickly. Since the year 1853 British vessels ceased to hunt the sperm whale: in other words, confined themselves to the search for whalebone. And then flexible steel for umbrellas and women’s corsets was introduced, so that there was but little demand for the whalebone after the ’eighties.

But in the year 1880 that experienced whaler Captain D. Gray in the _Eclipse_ of Peterhead began hunting that toothed whale species known as the bottlenose. And, what was more, he killed thirty-two of this cetacean in those seas between Labrador and Nova Zembla which had been fished for centuries. Addressing himself to this particular kind, he found that the bluenose existed in large numbers; and in 1882 Scotch whalers killed 463, of which Gray alone killed 203. The year following the British and the Norwegian whaling ships chased the bluenose with such success that the market became glutted. But the incident is worth noting as showing that there were still just as good whales in the sea as ever came out.

That year 1882 was certainly memorable in the annals of our subject, and the _Eclipse_ had a short but highly prosperous season: for she caught her first whale as early as April 27th, but by June 29th she had done so well that every available space in the ship was full of blubber. She had even to throw into the sea all her coal--except just so much as would get her home--in order to find room for her cargo. The result was that she was back in Peterhead by July 5th, with a full ship: that is to say, with 230 tons of oil valued at £60 a ton, or £13,800 for a voyage of only a few weeks. It is perfectly true that for a long time whalers had occasionally taken a bottlenose, and the _Chieftain_ of Kirkcaldy had killed twenty-eight off the Frobisher Strait; but it was not until the year 1877 that the _Jan Mayen_ of Peterhead, having missed getting seals, captured ten bottlenose whales. After that date the smaller whaling ships began hunting them every season, and the larger ones commenced hunting the bottlenose between seasons: that is, after the end of the seal fishery and before the start of the whaling proper, coming down to the north-east Scottish coast for that purpose.

The relation between the seal and whale fisheries in the north is interesting. Ever since the last quarter of the eighteenth century sealing had been going on off Newfoundland, but it was not till the year 1876 that whalers from Dundee began to engage in this occupation, off there. The right whale had been for such a long time regarded as the only produce worth hunting that attention at first was not paid to anything else in the northern waters. Neither seals nor the white whales were considered worthy of attention. But those British whalers which went up to the Arctic from about 1882 found the whales were getting so scarce that they were only too pleased to fill up with seals as well, if the chance presented itself.

The following brief résumé will show just how the northern, as distinct from the South Seas whaling, fared from the year 1814, and we can see at once how extreme was the change from good fortune to bad in a very few years. Thus the number of whales killed in the waters of Greenland and the Davis Straits by British ships during the years 1814 to 1823 was 12,907: from 1824 to 1833 it dropped to 9,532, and in 1834 to 1843 it fell remarkably to 1,221. There follows now a serious slump: for whereas in 1857 Peterhead still sent out thirty-four whalers, she possessed not one in the year 1893, the pride of place having passed entirely to Dundee. In the year 1882 there went to the Davis Straits for whales nine Dundee ships, which came back with seventy-eight whales, whose oil and bones yielded a sum of £58,876, oil being at that time £33 a ton, but the value of the whalebone was as much as £1,150 a ton, so rare had it become. The position by 1883 was this: both the Greenland whaling and the Greenland sealing were getting worse and worse, though off Newfoundland it was good. It was bad also in the Davis Straits, and only six vessels went there from Dundee, whilst one from Peterhead got up to the Cumberland Gulf. One of these seven vessels was the whaler _Thetis_, and she came home with the loss of both her carpenter and bo’sun; for whilst they were fast to a whale the boat was carried under by the fouling of the line. In this same year only seven vessels went to Greenland waters and they came back with only nineteen right whales. But whalebone was scarcer than even in the year previous, and had now gone up to £2,000 a ton. And it was just this rise which encouraged the ships and made it worth their while to keep on trying for a time, especially as already the bottlenose, which had been overfished, was beginning to get wary and scarce.

Two new Peterhead whalers were actually added to the fleet in 1883, and in the following year several steamers were added to the fleet of Dundee, so that by 1885 the latter had the largest collection of sixteen whaling ships, but there was a big fleet working out of Norway chasing the bottlenose whales. However, the down-grade was still continuing, and if we take the period of 1893 to 1902 British ships caught only 172 whales off Greenland and in the Davis Straits. In the year 1903 Dundee’s fleet had diminished to five whalers, of which one got wrecked. Thus it was that Arctic whaling had now come down to four vessels and they were only partially successful, and in 1905, although there were six whalers at work up the Davis Straits, which were now the only possible resort, yet this season was so notorious that only a couple of medium-sized whales and one small one were killed up there. The _Eclipse_, one of the most lucky of whalers, came home “clean”; that historic _Diana_, which had once been to the Antarctic, came home “clean”; the _Windward_, another famous ship, came home “clean”; the _Balæna_, which had also once been to the Antarctic, came home now from the Arctic with one whale; and the _Morning_ arrived with one whale. In each of these cases only fifteen cwt. of bone were obtained, and the _Active_, that other ship which had once been in that Dundee Antarctic whaling squadron, now came home from the north with one small whale that yielded but three cwt. of bone. The _Morning_, by the way, was another historic vessel. Up till the year 1902 she was a Norwegian whaler and known as the _Morgen_, but she was purchased by the Royal Geographical Society and sent out to the Antarctic, where she discovered a new island, reached Scott’s ship _Discovery_ and came home in the year 1904, and went back to her career as a whaler.

But this disastrous Arctic season of only three whales had been aggravated by the long prevalence of easterly winds, which had made the ice so dense that for the first time since 1878 the whalers were unable to get through into Melville Bay, and thus could not reach their favourite grounds near Lancaster Sound. The season of 1906 was unusual in that for the first time since 1899 whales were killed in East Greenland waters, that great expert, Captain Robertson (who had brought the _Scotia_ back from the Antarctic to the Clyde in the summer of 1904), having captured four small ones which yielded forty cwt. of bone. But altogether in 1906 seven whalers had been up to the Arctic, of which three came home “clean,” and the total catch of the other four from East Greenland, the Davis Straits, and Hudson Straits consisted solely of eight white whales besides a number of seals, walruses, bears and foxes. But oil was now £23 a tun, and whalebone had soared up to £2,500 a ton.

However, at this point Arctic whaling practically fades out of history and the scene of activity shifts to South Georgia and other islands in the Antarctic approaches. Nothing is more significant of the manner in which the Arctic has been fished out than the difference between capturing over a thousand right whales annually at the beginning of the nineteenth century and obtaining only eight white whales in 1906, although in the latter case steam had come in to aid the ships. Since that time the best use to which these stout vessels have been put has been either as exploration craft for Antarctic expeditions or for service with the Hudson Bay Company. It is sad to think that this fine type of wooden ship with her auxiliary steam power must be relegated to the golden age of sailing ships, but now that the steam whale-catcher and the explosive harpoon have so completely altered the industry it is no use wasting time in vain regrets: we have to face the new conditions and make the best of them.

When Svend Foyn commenced the fin-whale industry with his explosive harpoon and shore factories in the ’sixties, he operated off the coast of Finmarken, that most northerly and most poorly populated part of Norway. Only the coast became permanently inhabited, the settlers having been attracted by the fisheries. The fin whale was practically the only kind of whale found in those parts and Varanger Fjord was the first station to be the scene of the new methods which Foyn inaugurated in 1865. But gradually these steamships began to exhaust the whale supply, and the work moved westward. But in that same year 1886 just mentioned the peak of his success was reached; one station after another had closed down, the numbers of blue whale, fin whale, sei whale and humpback (all of them rorquals) became fewer and fewer so that at last the entire whaling fleet, which by 1886 numbered thirty-four ships, was obtaining from the whole Finmark Sea only half the number of whales which in the ’sixties Svend Foyn had been getting from Varanger Fjord alone.

As to the sperm whale, which at one time was so much hunted by American and British ships, this species is still found in considerable numbers and in various localities: but it is indisputable that the sperm is far less abundant than formerly. The southern right whale has become not exterminated, but much scarcer than he was formerly in the South Seas. The Greenland whale was numerous at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but a hundred years later Davis Straits, as we have seen, became his home, and now he has practically ceased to be hunted there. So, too, we have seen the American whalers chase him through the Bering Straits into the Arctic, but the industry in this part has now practically ended. The Japanese hunt the Pacific grey whale off the south-east of Korea, but the rorqual fishery off Newfoundland which began in 1897 has gradually got worse and worse, and yet at one time it used to capture an average of 400 whales a year. It is interesting to note that off the south-west coast of Africa all the whales caught were thought to be really those making a passage from the southern ice-barrier towards the waters of the French Congo. But now it is found that fifty per cent. consist of blue whales, and only ten per cent. of humpbacks.

The blue whale is the largest animal in the world, and may measure anything up to a hundred feet in length. He was generally supposed to remain in cold waters, and like the fin whale is hunted in preference to the humpback; because whereas the humpback will yield only twenty to sixty barrels of oil, the fin whale will produce a hundred barrels, but the blue whale is good for 250. Our knowledge of whaling habits is, however, still anything but complete, because in the past our ancestors were too reckless in killing the whale that brought them fortune to study its mode of life. But thanks to modern study and those factories, it is possible now to form deductions which were not practicable in the days of the hand harpoon. For when the whale is hauled ashore, instead of being brought alongside the floating factory, he is pulled up the slip to the flensing platform and can be examined like the human body on the operating table. On the shore are the open boilers for extracting the oil from the blubber. The pressure boilers deal with the carcase after it has been flensed, and after the oil has been run off the dried residue is put into bags as a most wholesome and nutritious meal for cattle-feeding. At the land station in South Georgia of one company where the manager earns about £2,000 or £3,000 a year, he has under him a whole army of foremen, mechanics, blacksmiths, stewards, cooks, storekeepers, cookers for the open boilers, cookers for the pressure boilers, workmen, flensers, carcase dividers, meat and blubber cutters--all additional to the crews.

But in a floating factory the staff consists of three mates, boatswain, steward, cooks, seamen, firemen, cookers, flensers, carcase dividers and engineers. The personnel of a whale-catcher consists of gunner, mate, steward, four seamen, two engineers and a couple of firemen. All that can be done both ashore and afloat in regard to organization is there. Rather it is in respect of further detailed knowledge concerning the whale himself that the industry stands most in need. But the waters of the globe cover many thousands of miles: so it will take time before complete information arrives. And whilst we know, for example, that the humpback and fin whales are generally met with in schools, whereas the blue whale cruises alone; that the humpback usually goes north about May, returning to South Georgia about October; and that the South Shetlands fin whale moves in February with the current from the south-west to the north-east: yet there is much else besides this that we wish to know, and can obtain only by much observation and long study.

Thus we desire to settle definitely the question whether the southern whale does go to the extreme north from the extreme south. There is a strong probability that he does, for similar barnacles and parasites have been found on northern and southern whales. Certainly the humpback whale has been observed to pass the Equator from south to north, and from the whalebone there seems to be no difference between the fin whales of the north and south. On the other hand, nothing is less satisfactory than to draw conclusions from an incomplete set of premises. At present there is no sure knowledge of fin whales or blue whales migrating from south to north or north to south. In order to obtain reliable information on this subject metal cylinders have in recent years been fired into the whales from rifles with a view to marking the animals: yet so far none of them has been recovered. But of the fact that whales do migrate we have definite, though limited, information from the harpoons discovered in certain whales. Off the east coast of Africa a whale has been found, still with the harpoon in him, several hundred miles away from the position where he was first attacked.

Ross’s erroneous statement as to the right whale being seen in the south has been responsible for the failure of those expeditions of Enderby’s Aucklands scheme, of the Dundee whalers, and also of Bull’s adventure with Kristensen; for Racovitza, the great zoologist, and other experts believe that what Ross saw were fin whales. Furthermore, the expeditions of Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen have confirmed the fact that the Ross Sea and the pack-ice outside its mouth are visited by many species of rorquals, such as are to-day captured between South Georgia and Graham Land. Whilst there is still a certain amount of whaling being carried on off Alaska, Africa, Brazil and Japan, yet fuller knowledge of the distribution and migration of the whale, the collection of statistics and so on, would conceivably open up new grounds.

With the exception of the humpback, the whales in the Dependencies are just as numerous as ever, though varying with the amount of ice each season. And when we consider the vast size of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic Seas it would seem hardly likely that the whale will be exterminated there for a considerable period. South Georgia and the South Shetlands are but tiny dots in a sea far bigger than that old area between Greenland and Spitzbergen. The whale can go on breeding and multiplying over such extensive grounds that Captain Larsen, for one, believes there is no need for anxiety in regard to the future. And he is a supporter from actual observation of the belief that the humpback and the bottlenose do cross the Equator. But there are hundreds of thousands of whales whose habitation is along the edge of the Antarctic ice and land. In the Ross Sea, as all explorers for nearly the last hundred years have testified, whales exist not in dozens but in immense quantities. Two quotations will be sufficient to substantiate this. The first is a statement by the biologist in Shackleton’s volume _The Heart of the Antarctic_: the second is contained in Amundsen’s book, already noted.

“This bay, which we afterwards referred to by the appropriate name of the Bay of Whales, was teeming with all the familiar kinds of Antarctic life. Hundreds of whales--killers, finners, and humpbacks--were rising and blowing all round.”

“The name ‘Bay of Whales’ was given by Shackleton, and is well chosen. From the time when the sea ice breaks up, this big gap in the Barrier is a favourite haunt of whales, which were very often seen playing about for hours at a time in flocks of some fifty strong.”

So it would seem that about this southern whaling there is something likely to be more permanent than has been the case in the north. Everything, therefore, that can be learned through scientific inquiry as to currents and so on will help commerce: yet whether they will eventually induce the British sailor to forsake his North Sea fishing for the Antarctic is quite another matter. But if there are whales to be got, we must leave them to the Norwegians so long as supply and demand exist, and yet somehow I cannot conceive that British Dependencies will be neglected by our own countrymen for ever.

It should be mentioned that at the end of the season those factory steamers, having finished flensing, and having filled up their tanks with the whale oil, steam back to Europe. The “catchers,” however, return no further north than Monte Video and Buenos Ayres, where they pass the winter, refit and eventually start out again to go south for the following season; the factory steamers, of course, returning with fresh coal and supplies from Europe. During the Great War half a dozen of the latter were torpedoed and one mined; for some of these vessels were employed to carry oil fuel to France and Britain from the United States. In return for this assistance, the British Government has not forgotten to deal favourably with the Norwegian whalers in the Dependencies.

Every one of those whale-catchers is really a pioneer: for these handy little steam craft poke their bows, during the course of their hunting, into all sorts of strange bays and bights and corners, totally unsurveyed, where the factory ships could not venture. Without instruments, but feeling their way in with the lead, these Norse seamen are really repeating history: it is the old Viking idea expressed in action at the other end of the world. No one to-day has such coastal knowledge of these our Falkland Dependencies. Commerce and science being interdependent, a complete hydrographical survey of these parts must soon come: but that which is most pressing is the knowledge of real harbours and sheltered anchorages where the catchers can anchor and the factories can be carried on as they normally are, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Off the islands of the South Sandwich group blue, bottlenose, humpback, fin and even sperm-whales have been sighted by Captain Larsen; but this group has not been surveyed since the year 1819, and it is obviously desirable in such a tempestuous locality that at least one reliable harbour should be known where ships may rely on finding safety. But South Georgia, South Orkneys, South Shetlands and Graham Land all need to be laid out adequately on the chart with proper sailing directions. Dr. Bruce has suggested the use of aircraft in the summer for settling the existence of islands hinted at by previous explorers but never yet established. When the surveys have been done, it will be possible for the whale-catchers to extend their operations into the waters around the Sandwich group. But until then, how can you expect that vessels in that perpetual weather of hard winds and fog will risk themselves?

Sealing voyages to South Georgia during the eighteenth century, and British whaling trips thither from 1819, were no mere isolated instances: rather they foreshadow what is possible down south. For in the two seasons of 1820-1 and 1821-2, the fur-seal industry was such that ninety-one vessels came to these islands. But after that date the seals had been so wantonly slaughtered that they were practically extinct. Would it not be possible some day to resuscitate the fur-seal fishery? Perhaps the time will come when by a combination of protective laws in regard to the seals, and commercial enterprise in regard to the ships and men, this old industry may be revived like the whaling.

When Captain Cook came to South Georgia and rediscovered it in 1775 he approached it from the north-west. For first of all he sighted an island of ice, but at noon was not sure whether it were ice or land, but anyway it bore east by south, distant thirty-nine miles. But eventually he saw that it was land, but “in a manner wholly covered with snow. We were confirmed by finding soundings at 175 fathoms, and a muddy bottom.” He first came in view of Wallis Island, which lies just off the north-west corner, and “as we advanced to the north we perceived another isle lying” between that other island and the mainland. This is marked on the present-day charts as Bird Island, Cook having noticed so many of these creatures occupying it. The two headlands Cape North and Cape Buller were both named by him and appear still in the modern charts.

But Cook’s description of the interior of South Georgia is hardly encouraging. “The inner parts of the country were savage and horrible,” he wrote. “The only vegetation we met with was a coarse, strong-bladed grass growing in tufts, wild burnet, and a plant like moss, which sprang from the rocks. Seals were numerous, and several flocks of large penguins were seen. The oceanic birds were albatrosses, common gulls, terns, shags, divers, etc. The land birds were a few small larks. No quadruped was seen.” He mentioned that the island “seems to abound with bays and harbours, the N.E. coast especially, but the vast quantity of ice must render them inaccessible for the greater part of the year, or at least it must be dangerous lying in them, on account of the breaking up of the ice cliffs.” Weddell, who reached South Georgia nearly fifty years later, was getting rather nervous as to his crew being stricken with scurvy, and hoped that the island would yield some green-stuff. There was precious little, but it was better than nothing for men who had been without fresh vegetables for so long. “Our crews,” he wrote, “here fed plenteously on greens which, although bitter, are very salutary, being an excellent anti-scorbutic. With regard to meat we were supplied with young albatrosses, that is to say, about a year old: the flesh of these is sweet, but not sufficiently firm to be compared with that of the domestic fowl” ... “almost the only natural production of the soil is a strong-bladed grass, the length of which is in general about two feet. It grows in tufts, on mounds three or four feet from the ground.”

Thus Weddell in 1823 confirmed what Cook saw in 1775, but neither could have foreseen what a gold-mine those watery regions were to become in the twentieth century nor how busy many of those north-east bays were to show themselves with steam craft and smoke and oil. Cook named that bold bight, which is just below where to-day the Southern Whaling and Sealing Company have their station, Possession Bay, and took possession of the entire group of islands on behalf of Britain.

Apart from the violent weather, one of the worst drawbacks of the Falklands and its Dependencies is that ancient enemy of all seafarers, the fog. On October 26, 1921, there left Sandefjord the 8,000-ton factory ship _Guvernoren_, bound out for the Dependencies for the season in the usual manner. Originally she had been a Bibby liner, but had been converted for her special work. At Monte Video she picked up three whale-catchers which she was to escort south. But about eleven o’clock one pitch-dark night, when about twenty miles short of Port Stanley, the _Guvernoren_ had the bad luck to run ashore in a thick fog. There were ninety-six men aboard her, and they naturally became a little anxious as to their predicament, but the ship’s boats were lowered and every man succeeded in getting away from her and put aboard the catchers. And then to those somewhat nerve-tried, jumpy men there came quite a dramatic happening. Some of the crew were rowing back for others which remained to be fetched off the big steamer, but on the return trip there suddenly came out of that fog a terrifying sound as of a man crying out for help. So the boats turned this way and that, trying in the thick atmosphere to find some desperate shipmate struggling in the water. It was both startling and saddening, for it was going to be no easy task if he were to be located in that fog. However, sorrow soon turned to amusement, for the cries were not of men but of seals: so all was well.

The whale-catchers were able to get fairly near to the wreck, but there was a very high sea running, and it was a lucky achievement to have saved everyone. Throughout the night these catchers stood by, and next morning, after the _Guvernoren_ had settled down on to the rocks, some of the men went back and pluckily climbed on board to salve some of their clothes. The catchers then made for Port Stanley--that port always to be famous for its connection with the Battle of the Falklands--whence a crowd of shipwrecked mariners embarked for Liverpool in the _Orcoma_ liner.

Once a liner in the Pacific off Santa Maria was caught in a dense fog, and since the coast was dangerous, the captain stopped his engine and waited for the atmosphere to clear. But at six in the morning there was a strange sound coming up from the sea and suddenly the ship trembled. Everybody wondered what had happened, for the tremor was too gentle for an earthquake, and it was accompanied by bumping, as if the steamship was hitting soft ground. But the anxiety did not last long in this case: for that noise was unquestionably a whale blowing, and now there rose out of the sea a great cetacean a good 100 ft. long, and came floating alongside just as if it were one of those capsized sailing vessels one used to see after enemy submarines had been busy in certain waters.

But aboard the liner the mammal caused a sensation, for he now dived, and as he collided with the steel ship the tremors began again. Once more he floated alongside, and then the barnacles and shellfish which had been scraped off by contact with the steamer’s bilge keels came rushing up to the surface. Evidently the whale was enjoying himself, for now he proceeded to the other side of the ship, and began scratching himself once more. The passengers pelted him with potatoes and coal, but the great animal took no notice whatever until he swallowed a piece of the latter, and then, sending up a drenching spout of water, passed majestically on his way.