SHARING THE CATCHES OF WHALES IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE S.J. Holt 4 Upper House Farm,Crickhowell, NP8 1BZ, Wales (UK) <[email protected]> 1. INTRODUCTION What historians have labelled modern whaling is largely a twentieth century enterprise. Its defining feature is the cannon-fired harpoon with an explosive head, launched from a motorised catcher boat.1 This system was first devised about 1865 by Svend Foyn, the son of a ship-owner from Tønsberg, in Vestfold, southeast Norway. Foyn believed that “God had let the whale inhabit the waters for the benefit and blessing of mankind, and consequently I considered it my vocation to promote these fisheries”. He has been described as “...a man with great singularity of vision, since virtually everything he did ...was dedicated to the profitable killing of whales”. Foyn’s system allowed for the first time the systematic hunting and killing of the largest and fastest swimming species of whales, the rorquals, a sub-class of whalebone whales (Mysticetes spp.). The basic technology was supplemented by significant developments in cabling, winches and related hardware and in processing. Powered vessels could not only tow the dead rorquals back to land bases quickly and thus in good condition for processing, but could provide ample compressed air to keep them afloat. Modern whaling could not, however, have become a major industry world-wide, without other technological developments. Other kinds of whales had already been killed in enormous numbers, primarily for their oil, for over a century.2 In 1905 it was discovered that oil from baleen whales could be hydrogenated and the resulting product could be used in the manufacture of soap and food products. During World War I it was the prime source of glycerine, for production of explosives. Although margarine had been produced since 1869 by a French process, it was not until 1929 that a satisfactory, tasteless product from whale oil became available for this purpose. In the first half of the twentieth century other products included meal (from flesh and bones from which the last drops of oil had been wrung) - called guano in the trade - while in the second half of that century meat for human consumption became dominant. Foyn tried to market whale meat in Norway but it was not palatable to Norwegians, and did not become so until after the 1930s through intensive marketing campaigns. In Japan, on the other hand, eating whale meat had a long tradition, though even there the great expansion into the Antarctic was driven by demand for oil, not protein. In this study I examine three episodes - and an incipient fourth - in the history of modern whaling in which governments, and the whaling and trading companies legally dependent on them, have sought to reach necessary agreements on total catches or commodity production, on the sharing of those catches and on the “policing” of those agreements. Their dual purposes were to maintain (and enhance) profitability by regulating competition among participants in the industry and to impede entry by others. These efforts were more often than not cloaked in the rhetoric of “conservation”, and indeed, to the limited degree that they were successful, they could be seen as a factor in dragging the industry towards sustainability and “saving” the stocks of whales. I confine the discussion to whaling in the Antarctic (although a similar analysis could be made of whaling in the North Pacific). This was, almost from the beginning of the twentieth century, by far the most important sector of the industry, and by the 1930s the pelagic-whaling (using factory-ships to process caught whales and move the products) was by far the biggest part of that sector. In each episode the negotiations had to take some account of the fact that there were other sources of identical products from whaling elsewhere, that each operation took a variety of species of whale and produced a variety of commodities, and that industries other than whaling yielded products that could substitute for products from whales and hence affect the market for those. The first 1 The explosive head was dispensed with for some years in the 1970-1980s when the “small” minke whale was the prime target; the explosion destroyed the whale’s body and also spoilt much of the meat. The “cold grenade” was substituted for the explosive head. This was, however, eventually prohibited by the IWC, on humanitarian grounds. A smaller explosive (penthrite) head is now used. 2 Whale oil (once called train oil) is the statistical term for edible oil from baleen whales. Inedible sperm oil comes from the sperm whale, and a similar oil is obtained from other toothed whales, particularly several species of bottlenose whale (not to be confused with the bottlenose dolphin of Flipper fame). Baleen whales (having baleen plates - “whalebone” - on their palattes rather than teeth in their jaws) include the gray whale, the right whales and the rorquals. This last group is comprised of blue, fin, humpback, sei, Bryde’s and minke whales (in roughly descending order of size); in some of those classes - including the presently important minke - there are now known to be two or more species or sub-species. The statistical category oil includes both whale and sperm oil. Of the baleen whales, right whales’ carcasses float, rorquals’ sink. 322 323 Holt two of the three episodes also occurred in periods of recovery from the World Wars and the economic disruption that followed them. The three episodes were: i. the 1930s (during and after the global economic depression) ii. the 1960s (when it was agreed that biological sustainability was a universal management objective) iii. the decade from about 1976 to 1986 (after Norway, its originator, had dropped out of Antarctic whaling and before the general moratorium on commercial whaling adopted in 1982 came into effect for most countries). An incipient fourth episode arises from the possibility that some commercial whaling might be legitimised3 under a Revised Management Scheme (RMS) currently being negotiated by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This is complicated by the emergence of three new factors: first, world-wide growth of whale-watching as an economic activity which is not entirely compatible with whaling; second, the idea that if the whales “belong” to anyone it is to humanity as a whole and not merely to those who kill them for profit; and third, the slow but steady increase in concern that commercial whaling is intrinsically inhumane, and because it no longer satisfies any human need it should cease. On top of these there remain widespread doubts that commercial whaling can, in the present state of world affairs and the Law of the Sea, be effectively regulated (given especially its history as partially recounted here), and hence it should not be legitimised. In each episode the negotiations were conditioned by events in the preceding decade, so these are described first. The thrust and flavour of the long, complicated and frustrating negotiations in the 1960s (the second episode) can best be understood from a rather full and detailed chronological account, which is therefore included. 2. PRECURSOR TO THE FIRST EPISODE Sven Foyn’s new whaling system was first deployed in the far north of his country. In 1864 he set up a shore-station, with one catcher-boat, on the east coast of Finnmark (the region north of the Arctic circle) in Varanger Fjord, at Vadsø, giving ready access to the whale-rich Barents Sea. For a decade Foyn was the sole operator, gradually increasing the number of his catcher-boats to four by 1880, taking at first mainly blue whales. But by 1882 the catch was predominantly fin whales, and remained so until 1903. By 1896 19 whaling companies were operating from Finnmark. But catches fell steadily as local whale populations were exterminated, and operations had to move further afield, to Bear Island and Spitsbergen (Svalbard).4 This shift called for the employment of tugs to tow dead whales much longer distances to shore, an operation made practicable by the cold environment. To facilitate this the shore-stations were moved westward. This move brought the whalers into the realm of the cod fishers, who considered that whaling was prejudicial to their interests.5 They prevailed on the Norwegian authorities to prohibit whaling off the north coast, from 1905. This reinforced a further shift to other areas where modern whaling had already begun - to Iceland, Faeroes, Shetlands, Hebrides, Newfoundland, and eventually to the Orient and the coasts of Africa and South America. The expansion was facilitated by the use of floating factories. These were mostly converted cargo vessels on which whales could be processed, rather than being dragged up ramps at land-stations. The carcasses could not be taken aboard, but were stripped of blubber and meat on a floating platform next to the moored factory. They made the whaling operations more mobile and also possible in regions with poor or non-existent landing places. They could also be used to transport products in bulk, rather than whale carcasses, to the home bases. But they could not work in the open ocean. The first such factory, Telegraf, was used at Spitsbergen in 1903, and was immensely successful. By 1905 a second factory, Admiralen, was sent to the Antarctic, where great things were in the offing. A Norwegian whaler and sealer, Carl Larsen, set up a shore-station on South Georgia, in 1904, established as an Argentine company. Other parts of the Falkland Islands dependencies were less hospitable for shore-bases, but in 1905/06 the Admiralen was also able to moor in and work from South Shetland.