by Philip Hoare
It was a necessary advance, hence Foyn’s earnest prayers: the other cetacean species had simply run out. The sperm whale and right whales were so depleted as to make their pursuit uncommercial; and anyhow, the price of whale oil had plummeted since the introduction of petroleum and gas, and in 1879 the first electric light was switched on. The world looked elsewhere for illumination. The eastern Arctic fisheries were almost finished; when the young Arthur Conan Doyle took passage as a ship’s surgeon on the SS Hope out of Peterhead in 1880, the vessel returned after a six-month voyage having caught just two whales, and had to rely on seals for profit. Dundee remained an important port, historically prospering by marrying Scottish jute with the whale oil needed to treat it: seven hundred whalemen were still resident in the town in 1883, when a humpback swam up the Tay and, after six weeks’ feeding on shoals of herring, was harpooned by a steam launch from the Polar Star, and was subsequently embalmed and exhibited in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh.
In America, the industry experienced a fitful revival with the discovery of the bowheads of the western Arctic; these virginal herds were culled for their huge baleen, used for corsets and hoops to amend the female form. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, whalebone was being supplanted by steel and plastic, and as women emancipated themselves from constricted waists and deformed ribcages, it seemed the whales were about to be set free, too. In 1924 the last whaler sailed out of New Bedford. The trade had long been in decline; Charles Chace, one of few remaining whaling captains, refused to take ‘New England’ boys (that is, white men) as apprentices, knowing that they would be enrolling in a dying industry. The whaling city had turned to cloth rather than cetaceans. Textile mills lined its river banks, employing labour imported from Lancashire as well as the Azores, and steamships ferried tourists to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard–prettier places than the dank quays where rotting hulks stood derelict off wharves that still smelt of whale oil.
With the decline of American whaling–just one shore-based whaling station remained operational, in California–European whaling expanded to fill the space. In 1904 the armed steamships of the Norwegians and the British opened up the unplundered Antarctic to fulfil a new use for the whale: in the manufacture of nitro-glycerine. In a new century of war, placid animals supplied the world with the raw material to blow itself up. Fifty thousand whales perished during the two global conflicts–as much victims as those whose death and destruction theirs enabled. The same impulse which allowed slaughter on the Western Front seemed to permit the slaughter on the world’s oceans. As Europe suffered losses in their millions, the entire population of humpbacks in the South Atlantic were driven to extinction by 1918. Their oil prevented soldiers from suffering trench foot. In his report on stranded cetaceans of that year, Sidney Harmer noted that ‘several of the specimens were accordingly used for the manufacture of glycerine for munitions’. Whales, like men, were fodder for war.
The march of events set in motion by Sven Foyn was unstoppable. Within twenty years of the opening up of the sub-Antarctic whaling grounds, ‘the rorquals have declined alarmingly in numbers’, one author noted in 1925. That year, the first factory ship, the Lancing, was launched in Norway. With these ‘seagoing abattoirs’, the extermination proceeded, paralleling the most bloody century in human history with the death of one and a half million rorqual whales. It was clear that the slaughter could not continue. ‘Whales have been killed on such an extensive scale in the Antarctic regions that, had it not been for the fact that the whaling ground in the Falkland Islands is in British territory and therefore under certain control, the whales would have been killed off as they have been in the Arctic regions,’ The Times reported in 1926. ‘It is feared that unless measures are taken in time the whale will become extinct all over the world.’
As part of that attempt to document and limit catches, and to understand these animals before they entirely disappeared, the Natural History Museum sent its scientists to the southern hemisphere. In 1913 Sir William Allardyce, governor of the Falkland Islands, on whose shores the British whaling stations were sited, realized that the new techniques being used to hunt whales in the Southern Ocean were moving at such a rate that the populations would soon be decimated. The Colonial Office in London agreed to his idea of introducing licences, and to assess sustainability, G.E. Barrett-Hamilton of the Natural History Museum was sent out to investigate. Unfortunately, the scientist died of a heart attack shortly after his arrival in South Georgia, as the indefatigable Percy Stammwitz, who had accompanied him there, had to report.
Stammwitz’s other letters were full of life, however; his words portray a scene of almost unbelievable, prelapsarian schools of whales. Writing in the year before war laid waste to Europe, his descriptions commemorated the vast and peaceful plenty that existed before man came south–and which was soon to disappear. ‘The Whalers say that the Whales are very plentifull [sic] in the Southern Seas,’ he wrote, ‘& can be seen spouting in the thousands, round South Georgia, some of them larger animals reaching one hundred feet in length.’ This last phrase was underlined in blue pencil when the letter was received by the curator, Dr TW. Calman, who added a scribbled note: ‘Can we suggest getting one for the NHM’.
Stammwitz worked tirelessly for the museum, and for the whales, in those years. He was as intrepid as any Edwardian explorer, a specimen hunter in his own right, although the trophies he brought back were destined not for the walls of a stately home, but for the cabinets of the nation’s museum. As a young man, he would leave his home in Turnham Green–from where his wife would write anxious letters to Sidney Harmer, asking after her husband’s whereabouts and whether she should continue to pay his insurance premiums–travelling to the Shetland Islands to work with the Alexander Whaling Company, reporting that fin, sei and minke whales were there in plenty; they were ‘hoping for Humpbacks, too’. There he gathered sometimes dubious information on whale behaviour in the dawn of modern cetology–Gunder Jenssen, manager of the company, replied to one query, ‘I never heard of Killers attacking Sperm, as the Sperm are regarded as rather a frightening brute and will go for anything, even sharks’–but also sent back body parts from fins to fætuses, to the delight of his bosses. Back at the museum, Stammwitz took moulds of whale carcases, creating the models that would hang alongside his greatest achievement, the blue whale.
Percy Stammwitz’s annual appraisals, still held in his staff file at the museum’s library, are testament to his abilities, not only as Technical Assistant, but as a cetologist in his own right. They list the replica whales–killer, beluga, caaing (or pilot) whale; Commerson’s and Heaviside’s dolphins, white-beaked dolphin, common porpoise, sei whale, and even a young sperm whale–all recreated in plaster by Stammwitz’s expert hands from stranded animals he collected, sometimes in harsh conditions. (After one particularly difficult attempt to recover a sixty-foot sperm whale in Yorkshire–which necessitated a formal request for new boots–it was agreed ‘that Mr P. Stammwitz may be allowed six days’ special leave in view of his long hours and arduous work at Bridlington’.) Stammwitz’s loving fashioning of specimen whales was an intimate tribute to their inherent beauty, one that his young son Stuart would inherit as he assumed the same post at the museum under curators who knew him from his boyhood, noting his ‘great mechanical skill’ and endearing personality and behaviour when sent on his own collecting missions with the Royal Navy.
As the Scoresbys had seen the rise and falling of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century whaling, so the Stammwitzs’ careers mirrored the modern rise and fall of whaling, and the zoologists’ deepening concern for the future of the whales themselves. As early as 1885, the museum’s first director, William Flower, had made a speech decrying the avarice of whaling in Atlantic and Australian waters. It was the work done in the Southern Ocean by those pioneers that laid the foundations for conservation efforts which would save entire species, at the very moment that they came closest to extinction.
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As ever, bureaucracy and finance slowed matters, and it was not until 1925 that the Royal Research Ship Discovery–a steam-assisted, three-masted wooden sailing ship first built in Dundee along the lines of a whaler for Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1901, and now refitted at Portsmouth–left for South Georgia, where a laboratory was built next to the Grytviken whaling station. Here the scientists could study whales brought ashore, albeit in hellish circumstances. ‘Flesh and guts lay about like small hillocks and blood flowed in rivers,’ one researcher wrote, ‘…while clouds of steam from winches and boilers arose as from a giant cauldron.’ Four years later, a new ship, Discovery II, was built, a 232-foot vessel dedicated–as the memorably named Sir Fortescue Flannery declared at her launching–to collecting data that might bring about an international agreement to restrict hunting in the Antarctic. It would be joined by a newly equipped vessel ‘of the whale-catcher type’, christened after another famous explorer: the RRS William Scoresby.
Restraint in whaling, however, came out of self-interest rather than scientific study. British and Norwegian whalers petitioned the League of Nations–formed to prevent another human Armageddon–to request restrictions on the factory fleets. The need for control became all the more urgent, as Sir Douglas Mawson observed from his Australian perspective, in light of the ‘tremendous onslaught’ of the 1930-1 whaling season, although another correspondent with an evocative name, Arthur F Bearpark, wrote from his St James’s gentleman’s club to point out that both Britain and Norway already had voluntary agreements in place.
In 1935 an international agreement was drafted under the auspices of the League of Nations and ratified by Britain and Norway as the major whaling nations, fitfully united against newcomers in the field. It was soon clear that its precepts were insufficient, and Norway approached Britain to suggest that the scope of the agreement be widened. In May 1936 an International Whaling Conference convened in Oslo, with only two members, Britain and Norway; Germany, under its new leader, refrained from attending officially but sent an observer, saying it wanted ‘full liberty of action as being the world’s greatest consumer of whale oil’, both in margarine, and by the soap firm, Henkel’s, which had its own 12,000-ton factory ship. It was not a peaceful meeting. After negotiations described as protracted and interrupted by threats of boycotts by Norway, it was agreed ‘to prevent excessive diminution of the whale population by restriction by close season and by limitation of the number of whale catchers used…with a whale factory ship’. The season would run from December to March. ‘It is hoped that…thus a somewhat stormy chapter in the history of modern whaling will be happily brought to a close.’
In an echo of its pragmatic attitude to the abolition of slavery, Britain placed itself at the forefront of these ever more urgent attempts to control whaling while admitting its self-interest–even as other acts of diplomacy tried to stabilize a world moving towards war. In May 1937 an expanded international conference gathered in London, with representatives from South Africa, America, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Norway. Mr W.S. Morrison, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, told the delegates that ‘the blue whale would be exterminated if things went on as they were, and the Antarctic whaling industry would soon cease’. A new convention was announced, banning pelagic whaling for nine months of the year. ‘In some areas it is prohibited entirely; some species of whales, whale calves, and females attended by calves are protected absolutely, as are also whales below a certain size; and whaling from land stations’–such as those in the southern hemisphere–‘is to be subject to a close season for six months.’
The conference also hoped that other countries, ‘particularly Japan, whose operations are rapidly expanding, will adhere to the present Convention’. Although its coastal settlements had whaled for centuries, and the British ship Syren had discovered the prolific whaling grounds off Japan and the Bonin Islands in 1819, it was a visit by Tsar Nicholas II in 1891, who saw great numbers of whales in the Sea of Japan, that prompted modern whaling in Japanese waters. By 1934, using techniques learned from the Norwegians, Japan was making its first whaling voyages into the Southern Ocean. By declining to join the international agreements its industry prospered, and within five years it had six factory ships operating in Antarctic waters.
There was already a degree of equivocation about this east-west split. While they adhered to self-imposed controls–in May 1939 a Norwegian captain was prosecuted for killing a fifty-nine-foot female blue whale, below the limit of seventy feet–Britain and Norway remained responsible for ninety-five per cent of the annual toll of thirty thousand whales, each sending out ten mother ships busy making orphans. The remainder were divided between Germany, Russia, Holland and Japan; America had just one mother ship in an industry it had once dominated, but which Ishmael would have found unrecognizable. There was little that was heroic about this chase, as catcher boats fired on whales from the safe vantage point of prows towering high above the water. In the days of Yankee whaling, at least the whales could fight back; now they no longer stood a chance. A whale once seen was as good as dead.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, huge ships with crews of two hundred and forty were catching five hundred thousand tons of whale a year. As Mary Heaton Vorse wrote in Provincetown: ‘the destruction has been so great that the size of the huge monsters is becoming smaller each year, and unless international action is taken the whale will become one of the fabulous monsters of the past.’ The whale had become an unwitting symbol of a century of suffering. It was no coincidence that Auden, himself now an exile in America, wrote in his poem, ‘Herman Melville’, in March 1939, ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human’.
The whale had become the enemy by default. Every kind of device was used to kill the animals: exploding harpoons, strychnine, cyanide and curare poisoning (inspired, perhaps, by the Aleutian Islanders who used barbs contaminated with rotten meat to infect a whale with blood poisoning). Even electrocution was attempted: the same method by which the civilized world got rid of its most venal criminals was brought to bear on dumb animals. The hunters came armed with cannon and bomb-lances, ostensibly hastening death, but in practice causing what we can only imagine to be agonizing pain; an apparent indifference to the dignity of animals illustrated by the fact that men on Antarctic whaling stations threw penguins on their fires, using the oily birds as kindling.
As cetacean war was waged from above, using aeroplanes to spot their targets, bombers mistook whales for submarines below, with the inevitable consequences. British and Norwegian ships left the dangerous Atlantic for the Pacific coast of South America; from 1941 to 1943, a Norwegian flotilla working off Peru captured 8,500 sperm whales. These young men working on the whalers were as much a part of the war effort as my mother, busy making machine gun parts in a Southampton factory, or the now elderly Percy Stammwitz, proud to serve in the Home Guard, defending London during the Blitz. War even evoked the whale in an animated propaganda cartoon, in which an insular Britain was menaced by a Nazi whale morphing out of the map of Europe, with Scandinavia as its sinister swastika’d head and the Baltic as its evil-toothed jaw.
As German U-boats extended their operations south of the Equator and the Pacific too became a theatre of war, whaling virtually ceased. Some shore stations still operated in South Africa and Australia, but most whale-catchers were converted to warlike uses, ‘and such of the large factory ships–some of them displacing more than 17,000 tons–as escaped destruction are required for more urgent purposes’, The Times noted under the headline, ‘WAR AND THE WHALE’. ‘It will be interesting to observe the results of the close season imposed by war,’ added the newspaper, which hoped that the rapid decline in numbers noted in the last open season of 1939-40 ‘will prove to have been but temporary. At the same time,’ it admitted, ‘the virtual extinction of the Greenland whale, the Pacific grey whale, and the Biscayan and southern “right whales” is a warning against optimism.’
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aftermath of war did not bring peace for the whales any more than it did for their fellow species. Whale oil–and meat–was more valuable than ever as a supplement to rationed diets, and the whaling nations agreed that, in the first year after the war, the season would be extended. In 1945, only months after the cessation of hostilities, the first British whaling steamer to be built since the war sailed from the Tyne for South Georgia in her colours of red, white and blue, with a crew of four hundred on board. ‘The Southern Venturer is in a hurry…The vessel, which has only just been completed, will not reach the whaling waters by the official opening of the season.’ Two Norwegian vessels would arrive before her; but so too would two British whalers, converted from captured German ships.
The urgency was to feed a hungry nation. A new technique had been developed of shipping dehydrated whale meat–‘which is said to have high degrees of proteins…and of digestibility’–and soon recipes were appearing in the popular press. ‘How to Cook Whale Meat–Goulash Recommended’ (Add tomato ketchup to colour…Serve with macaroni or dumplings’), while Waleburger Steaks’–deliberately misspelt, perhaps to obscure their origin–appeared on the menus of London restaurants. (After he had eaten his “Waleburger” Mr Lightfoot said he was agreeably surprised by the taste…There was no flavour of fish.’)
‘Whale meat was neither fish nor fowl,’ Dr Edith Summerskill of the Ministry of Food admitted, ‘but it was now hiding its “Jack Tar” accent and insisting upon roast beef connexions. As a result all the whale meat obtained was being accepted and sold.’ At one shilling and tenpence the pound, it was excellent value, and could be grilled, braised or minced, and served with fried onions, mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts, although one commentator noted, ‘it might be advisable to eat sparingly of it until the digestive system has become more familiar with it.’ Meanwhile, in Norway, the Red Cross gave sperm whale teeth to the war disabled for scrimshanding, much as British veterans assembled paper poppies.