by Farley Mowat
“ ‘This very wild whale. Must give him another shot, or Andersen will get hurt.’ He reached up and blew the steam whistle three times as a signal for the boat to return. In a few minutes Andersen’s cheerful face was looking up at us, the lance held high and streaming with blood.’
“ ‘Ha, so you stab him,’ said Stokken.
“ ‘Ja, just as you blow the whistle,’ replied the mate, with a smile. The pram and its occupants were soon aboard, and the whale rolled in and lashed alongside by the tail. The chase had lasted seven hours.”
So the great rorquals disappeared from Newfoundland waters—not fleeing to some distant sanctuary as apologists for their absence insisted—but into the trypots, pressure cookers, and fish-meal plants of the whaling industry.
The outbreak of the First World War brought a respite of sorts while men concentrated their destructive energies on each other. The big rorquals of the northwest Atlantic were by then in desperate need of respite. Since the beginning of the Norwegian onslaught in 1898, more than 1,700 blues, 6,000 finners, and 1,200 humpbacks had been “harvested” in the Sea of Whales. These numbers, be it remembered, only represent whales delivered to the factories. They take no account of those fatally injured, of calves that died of starvation after the deaths of their mothers, or of those that perished as a result of wound-induced infections.
If I stress this latter point, it is because whales appear to be singularly susceptible to terrestrial bacteria and viruses, against which they seem to have little if any natural immunity. This constitutes a mortality factor seldom mentioned in discussions of whaling practice and usually ignored in official statistics purporting to represent the damage inflicted by whalers. However, the whalers themselves have been well aware of the infection factor and have used it to their own advantage since earliest times.
As far back as the ninth century Norwegian fiords men were driving pods of minkes into the inner reaches of long fiords, then barring off escape with nets. The trapped animals were attacked, not with spears or lances, but by firing crossbow bolts into them—very special bolts that had been deliberately dipped in vats of putrid meat. The organisms introduced into the whale by this “innoculation” were so virulent that the infected minke would die within three or four days, its bloated body a seething mass of gangrene and septicaemia. Meat from such corpses was, of course, useless, but the blubber was unimpaired and was rendered to produce lamp oil, whale-oil tar, and other such products. Sei whales were still being killed in fiords near Bergen by what was essentially the same barbarous method until early in the twentieth century.1
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1 An earlier book of mine, A Whale for the Killing (1972), describes the death of a large female fin whale from septicaemia after she became trapped in a small lagoon on the south coast of Newfoundland where she was used as a target for rifle fire.
By 1908, having ravaged the great rorquals on both sides of the North Atlantic, packs of Norwegian killer boats were swarming across the equator into the South Atlantic. From there they soon found their ways into the Pacific, then into the Indian Ocean. Shore stations sprang up behind them and the stench of megadeath spread like a miasma. The havoc the killers wrought on the whales of the tropical and temperate oceans was of a previously unimaginable enormity. It included the virtual obliteration within a few brief years of the remaining southern black right whales, a devastating massacre of previously untouched tribes of humpbacks, and the near extinction of grey whales in the North Pacific.
It was not enough. The Norwegian whaling industry had become a modern Moloch whose appetite was insatiable—and unrelenting. And there was still one major ocean left to ravage. The killer fleet ranged even farther south until, off the tip of South America, it found whales in such multitudes as had not been seen since the first Basques sailed into the Sea of Whales 400 or more years earlier.
By 1912, sixty-two killer boats were steaming out of shore bases on the Falkland and South Orkney Islands, scouring the nearby waters with such rapacity that, in the summer of that year, they delivered more than 20,000 whale carcasses to the factories. About 80 per cent of these were humpbacks, the rest a mixture of right whales, blues, and finners.
Because the whales were so incredibly abundant, individual catchers could easily kill a dozen or more in a single day. And because they could—they often did. One catcher out of the Falklands killed thirty-seven whales between dawn and dusk. The corpses were flagged, then cast adrift to be picked up when the killer boat had finished her butchery and was ready to return to the factory. That is, they were picked up if they could still be found. All too often they were never seen again, having been lost in darkness or in fog, or carried away by wind and current. When we take into account losses from this cause alone, together with the usual mortality suffered by wounded whales and orphaned calves, the true magnitude of the slaughter begins to boggle the imagination.
Processing was as wasteful as killing. Because there was a glut of corpses, the flensers only stripped off the thicker back and belly blubber whereupon, as Ommanney tells us, “the skrotts, as the carcasses were called, were cast adrift in the harbour. They floated ashore to rot on the beaches and to this day [1971] Deception Harbour in the South Shetlands and many of the bays and inlets of South Georgia are edged with ramparts of bleached bones, skulls, jaws, backbones and ribs, memorials to the greed and folly of mankind.”
The stench of these harbours was legendary. But as the manager of a latter-day American whaling station defiantly proclaimed: “Who the hell gives a damn! That’s the stink of money and it sure smells good to me.”
It smelled so good to the Norwegians that, just after World War I, a few of their bigger killer boats pushed yet farther south to explore the possibilities of even more profitable slaughter. When they came within sight of the permanent ice pack of the Antarctic Ocean they discovered what Herman Melville, of Moby Dick fame, had believed would forever remain an inviolable refuge where “The whales can at last resort to the Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.”
That last resort was one no longer. When the returned catcher captains reported having found rorquals in such numbers as to be almost astronomical, neither the Antarctic Ocean’s remoteness from shore bases nor the white hostility of its climate could suffice to protect the whales from man’s remorseless avarice.
Initially, distance was a problem. Shore factories could not be established on the ice of the frozen continent itself, and the island bases were a long way north. However, in 1925, a Captain Sorlle of Vestfold, Norway, displayed the genius for destruction of a Svend Foyn and invented the ultimate weapon with which to convert what remained of the world’s great whales into hard cash.
He invented the pelagic factory ship—a very large vessel designed to operate in the open ocean, fitted with a gaping hole in the stern and a ramp up which whales could be winched into a combined floating abattoir and processing plant. Even the first of these ships was big enough and rugged enough to “work” whales at sea in almost any weather, and it could be stored for voyages of six months or more. Each factory ship became the nucleus of a fleet grimly comparable in composition to a naval task force. It included a pack of killers of new and even more terrible potential, buoy boats to mark the corpses, tugs to haul them to the factory, and freighter-tankers to resupply the fleet at sea, after which they would carry the accumulated whale products from the factory ships to distant markets.
Even Sorlle’s rudimentary prototype was able to penetrate southward to near the edge of the Antarctic pack, and later versions ranged the whole of the Antarctic Ocean, killing and processing rorquals and such other whales as might be found on a twenty-four-hour-a-day assembly line basis. There was now no place left on earth where whales could escape the fate we had ordained for them.
In 1931, only six years after the first voyage of the first factory ship, forty-one such ships serviced by 232 killer boats were savaging the Antarctic rorquals. They flew the flags of the several nations whose businessmen had rushed to gain a share of this lucrative enterprise. Among them were the U.S., Norway, Great Britain, Japan, Panama, Argentina, Germany, and Holland; but it was the Norwegians who dominated the shambles, either on their own behalf or by means of the crews and ships they provided on hire and charter.
That year, 40,200 rorquals, mostly blues, were ripped apart in the floating knackers’ yards... and the cold seas of the distant south ran dark with blood.
It was a banner year for the whaling industry and for the men who sat in board rooms in London, Tokyo, Oslo, New York, and other bastions of civilization. One factory ship, the nobly named Sir James Clark Ross, docked at New York after a six-month Antarctic voyage with a cargo consisting in part of 18,000 tons of whale oil worth just over $2.5 million.
A good time for whalers.
An evil time for whales.
Between 1904 and 1939 well over two million great whales died the death prescribed for them by modern business practices.
By 1915, the last Norwegian killer boat had abandoned the wasted Sea of Whales to join in the South Atlantic carnage. The surviving North Atlantic whales were not, however, safe from death-dealing men. As the U-boat menace mounted in the Atlantic, the Allies launched more and more anti-submarine vessels until several hundred lean and lethal destroyers were committed to battle against equally deadly mechanical whales. But green crews for the destroyers needed training and, man being what he is, it was decided that an effective way to hone the killer skills would be to practise these on living whales. Unofficial reports suggest that some thousands of whales were killed in consequence. Most were victims of naval gunfire, but others were imploded into shapeless masses when they were used as targets for depth-charge training. There is also at least one known case of destroyers using whales as targets for ramming practice. Probably as many or more whales died in “accidental” encounters when they were mistaken for enemy submarines; but no one kept a record of how many whales were sacrificed to the cause of Victory at Sea.
When the Armistice brought an end to the military murder of men and whales, the commercial whalers hastened back to work. Although the major assault was directed at the South Atlantic and Antarctic rorquals, the wartime discovery that train oil could be processed into a prime ingredient in margarine so escalated its value that even the remnant populations of rorquals in the North Atlantic became attractive quarry. Thus, between 1923 and 1930, three Norwegian stations again worked the coasts of northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador for a landed kill of 153 blues, 2,026 finners, 199 humpbacks, 43 seis, and 94 sperm whales.
Profits were small compared to those of the southern fishery, but by making greater use of each whale they were kept at a satisfactory level. After trying all the oil out of the blubber, the residue, including meat, bones, and guts, was dried to produce fertilizer—manure as it was called. In a paraphrase of the age-old farmer’s joke, a Newfoundland partner in the Hawkes Harbour whaling plant told the St. John’s Evening Telegram: “We put every inch of the whale to profit, except the spout.”
Nevertheless, when the Depression struck in 1929, profits fell below acceptable levels; so, from 1930 until 1935, there was another brief hiatus in whaling in the Sea of Whales. However, in 1936, two stations reopened, one in Labrador, the other in northern Newfoundland, and one or both remained active until 1949. During that period, they were able to kill and land 1,100 finners, 40 blues, and 47 humpbacks.
Figures have but small impact on the imagination, but perhaps these will have more significance if we think of the whales involved as being equivalent in biomass to some 12,000 elephants—or a mountain of flesh, fat, guts, and bone weighing considerably more than the liner Queen Elizabeth. Small as this local butchery may have been by comparison with what was happening in the Antarctic, it was by no means a negligible slaughter.
The cataclysmic advent of World War II afflicted the few remaining North Atlantic rorquals with even worse horrors than they had endured during World War I. Corvettes, destroyers, and frigates, eventually numbering in the thousands, prowled the dark waters of the Western Ocean and they were much more lethal than their ancestors had been twenty-five years earlier. Sonar, for the detection of underwater objects, together with a wide range of new weapons not only made them deadly hunters of submarines but, more or less incidentally, of whales, whose sonar echoes were often indistinguishable from those of submarines. As the war at sea grew fiercer, the drifting carcasses of bombed or depth-charged whales became a familiar sight to the crews of naval and merchant ships alike.
This military massacre did not cease with war’s end. Beginning in the mid-1940s, U.S. naval aircraft flying out of their leased base at Argentia, Newfoundland, regularly used whales as training targets, attacking them with machine-gun and cannon fire, rockets, depth charges, and bombs. When this came to light in 1957, as a result of an investigation by Harold Horwood of the St. John’s Evening Telegram, the naval authorities appeared baffled by and even indignant at the resulting public outcry. Having pointed out that all navies routinely practised gunnery and anti-submarine warfare on marine animals, they questioned the logic and even the motives of those who would condemn such an eminently practical procedure. Large whales, they pointed out, not only provided excellent simulacra of enemy submarines, they cost the taxpayer absolutely nothing. Surely, the naval brass concluded, the death of a few whales was a small price to pay for helping to preserve our freedom.2
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2 During the 1960s U.S. naval units stationed in Iceland boasted of carrying out target practice on orcas (killer whales) using aircraft and surface vessels. Although the excuse given for this atrocity was that it was done to benefit Icelandic fishermen, there was no scientific or economic justification for it. It is believed that several hundred whales—by no means all of them orcas—were killed in this “exercise.”
Advances in the arts of war had another and even more disastrous effect on the whales. When the Antarctic whalers went back to work in 1946, they were armed with a panoply of new weapons. These included sophisticated communications systems, sonar, radar, new navigational equipment, and electronic devices to disorient, scare, and confuse the whales. Spotter aircraft or helicopters operating from immense new floating factories (some of which displaced 30,000 tons) were combined with ex-naval corvettes and frigates converted to whale killers. The largest of these were 700-ton vessels of 3,000 horsepower, capable of making thirty knots and armed with harpoon guns of formidable efficacy. The overall combination ensured that any whale that came within the wide-ranging ken of a pelagic fleet now stood no more than a fractional chance of escaping death. What followed was annihilation.
By the end of the 1940s, some twenty to twenty-five pelagic fleets were annually killing 25,000 to 30,000 whales, mostly blues, from an Antarctic whale population that had already been reduced to less than half its initial size. By 1950, the Antarctic blues, which had originally numbered between a quarter and half a million, were all but gone and the killer fleets had shifted their attentions to the finners. By 1955, it was estimated that no more than 100,000 Antarctic finners remained from an original population in excess of three-quarters of a million; and in the following year, the whalers landed 25,289 fin whales—about a quarter of what was left.
Although even the statistics released by the whaling industry during the late 1950s made it brutally clear that the great whales everywhere on earth were entering upon their final days, no steps were taken to reduce t
he slaughter. Multinational corporations as well as national interests from the U.S., Great Britain, Norway, Holland, Japan, and the Soviet Union made it abundantly clear that they were not only determined to continue the carnage, but intended to increase the scale of the bloodletting. As one discouraged conservationist expressed it: “They clearly felt the whales were just too valuable to be allowed to live.”
The voice of mercy, or even of sanity, was not often heard speaking out on behalf of whales during those years. To the contrary, the world was treated to a spate of novels, non-fiction, and even feature films that not only justified but glorified the continuing slaughter, at the same time praising the heroic qualities of the whale killers and the financial acumen of the whaling entrepreneurs.
Equally revolting was the prostitution of science to justify the holocaust. In 1946, the countries most actively engaged in whaling formed the International Whaling Commission, which they claimed was dedicated to the protection of whale stocks and to the regulation of the industry through scientific management. A surprising number of scientists were prevailed upon to lend themselves and their reputations to creating and maintaining a most unsavoury subterfuge.
From its inception, the IWC has been little more than a smoke screen created by corporate industry with the full support of national governments and justified by subservient science, under cover of which the world’s whale populations have been systematically destroyed. A detailed account of its evasions, outright lies, queasy morality, and abuse of science is beyond the scope of this book, but those who can stomach the unpalatable details are invited to read Robert McNally’s So Remorseless a Havoc.
McNally summarizes the sham of self-serving interests policing themselves in the following terms: “A cliche of liberal ideology has it that an entrepreneur profiting from a resource will strive to protect that resource in order to make profits over the long run. Thus, the argument continues, market forces contribute to the preservation of the environment. This may be good corporate public relations, but the whaling capitalist cares not a fig whether there will be whales in the sea in fifty or a hundred years. His sole concern is whether the whales will last long enough for him... He will keep on killing as long as some gain can be had... Market forces provide no check to extinction; they actually contribute to it. Greed preserves only itself.”
