An Ocean of Whales and Whaling

After the 1850s sealing peak, a continuing though small stream of seal­ing and whaling voyages continued to make their way into the Southern Ocean. Around the turn of the twentieth century, as European, Australian and Japanese explorers were swiftly crossing the ocean to get to the Antarctic continent, perhaps no one quite anticipated that within a few short years a significant whaling industry would emerge - an industry that would bring great profits to a handful of companies at the cost, by mid-century, of the near-extinction of the great baleen whales.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was neither given nor expected that a major whaling industry would develop and flourish for decades in the Southern Ocean. There had been boosters for Antarctic whaling in the late nineteenth century, especially in Norway and the Australian colonies, for both commercial and nationalistic reasons.^[842] While whale products were certainly on the market, demand for those products around 1900 was not a promising foundation for a massive enlargement of the industry. This is precisely the problematic with which J. N. Tonnessen and A. O. Johnsen opened their magisterial and still unsurpassed history of modern whaling: whale oil prices were declining and there seemed little use for it.

The Antarctic whaling industry began at the instigation of a very small number of people, and actually in the context of low whale oil prices.^[844] The symbolic beginning of the industry came when the newly formed Compania Argentina de Pesca - led by the Norwegian whaler Carl Anton Larsen, and funded by several foreign residents of Buenos Aires - shot its first whale off the island of South Georgia in December 1904. Within five years, several other companies had joined Pesca and oil production in the south was larger than the north.^[845] Whale oil was not an overly promising product in 1904, as its price was low and no great innovations had been made to add value to it. That changed very quickly, and helped to sustain the young Southern Ocean industry. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the process of hydrogenation of fluid oils into solid fats was discovered and developed into an industrially viable technology. At the same time there was a general concern about the lack of fats in the diets of modern industrial workers. Hydrogenation allowed whale oil to be included in margarine; at first as a small percentage, then increasing with the refinement of the technology. This supplemented existing uses. Hydrogenation also allowed whale oil to become a notable international commodity - as it was cheap and could be stored without spoilage for years - in contrast to other animal fats that were often kept for domestic markets.^[846]

Whaling began as a combined ocean and land-based enterprise. Ships caught whales near land (mainly around South Georgia), and then took them ashore for processing.^[847] In the first decade, humpback whales were the predominant catch; from the First World War to the late 1930s blue whales were the main catch.

From before the First World War to the early 1930s, whaling was almost exclusively an Anglo-Norwegian concern. Norwegian and British capital funded the industry, Norwegians almost exclusively manned the ships, the home port of those men was Sandefjord in Norway, and British scientists were the principal investigators of whales and the ocean. Yet British and Norwegian visions of the ocean were not fully coincident, as Peder Roberts has elucidated. Norwegian engagements with the ocean were commercial and industrial, led by a group of nationalist industrial­ists who saw a field for profit and personal aggrandisement rather than heroic exploratory endeavour.^[849] It was in their pursuit of industry and profit that the Norwegians led, even forced, the British to clarify their stance towards the ocean. Before the advent of the industry, sovereignty and control over the islands of the South Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean had been unclear and unresolved. The British imperial disposition towards this region was determined, to a great extent, by its attitudes to the Falkland Islands and the dispute over the islands with Argentineans, who refer to them as the Malvinas.^[850] The British government was happy to reap the financial benefit of whaling through taxation and the leasing of land for the shore stations at South Georgia. They used these funds to ‘develop’ the Falkland Islands and its dependencies, including the fitting out and despatch of significant scientific voyages (discussed below).^[851] By the early 1920s, some British policy-makers were concerned with the region as a whole, including the as-yet-poorly explored Antarctic con­tinent, leading in 1926 to an Imperial policy, joined by the dominions especially Australia and New Zealand, that the whole Antarctic should be British - an aspiration that did not come to pass.^[852]

Anglo-Norwegian dominance of the industry and the ocean was challenged in two ways from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

These new entrants and emerging ideas pushed whaling and the Southern Ocean into the international and diplomatic realms. The League of Nations cultivated the ICES and its whale committee (established in 1926), and work in the late 1920s led to the Geneva Convention for the Regulation ofWhaling of 1931, the first international agreement on whal­ing.^[855] Twenty-six nations signed the Convention even though Britain and Norway had ninety per cent of whaling production. An informal indus­try production agreement followed in 1932, which included the first use of quotas for both whales caught and barrels of oil produced.^[856] These agreements, though they involved the issue of protecting whales, were still basically agreements to preserve the industry by preserving profitability. When the Geneva Convention expired in 1937, a new agreement was made, known as the London Agreement, which combined aspects of the 1931 convention and the subsequent production agreements.^[857]

The most significant scientific work of the interwar years - and the first long-term, sustained research program in the Southern Ocean - was conducted by the British government in the service of whaling. Organised by a committee of the British Colonial Office, the Discovery Investigations deployed three ships over the period 1925 to 1939 (with a final cruise in 1950-51) to the Southern Ocean, initially concentrated in the South Atlantic sector.^[858] These investigations were a mix of pure scientific research, research in aid of industry and colonial development in support of imperial strategy.

The Discovery Investigations were also central in constituting the rela­tionship of the British state with the ocean in the interwar years. The dis­patch of scientific researchers was one strategy of showing interest and, by scale of endeavour, to crowd out other states - especially Argentina - that would seek their own deep relationship with the ocean. Adrian Howkins has categorised these strategies as ‘environmental authority’, the idea ‘that the production of useful scientific knowledge about an environ­ment helps to legitimate political control over that environment’.^[861] Peder Roberts has looked at the ways in which the Discovery Investigations marked a shift in the British relationship with the Antarctic region, away from strenuous heroic efforts to wide and rational colonial development advanced with expertise.^[862] In a similar way, though with less intensity, the Australian government, under the lobbying of the scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson, also engaged with the Southern Ocean, deploying expertise and science to justify presence and acquisition.^[863]

The Second World War interrupted the whaling industry as it did many others.

Throughout the 1950s it was painfully clear that whale stocks were near the brink of total collapse. The catch was consistently under the already low quotas and the industry basically uneconomical, propped up by vari­ous governmental incentives and subventions. There was little agreement about how to respond to this fact, for each whaling nation wanted to maximise its position. There was even disagreement among the scientists at the IWC. Issues of catch quotas, fleet sizes, bans on specific species being caught or protection of particular ocean areas were all part of the discussion. And in addition to the worries for the whale stocks, there was a concern that disagreement within the IWC would lead to its collapse, and a final free-for-all of whaling. The IWC’s work in its first decade and a half - in both its political sense, and in the work of its scientific com­mittee - was haunted by the spectre of a Southern Ocean stripped of its great whales. To work through issues of quota numbers, the IWC tasked its scientific committee with evaluating whale population dynamics. The final report was handed in in 1963, clearly demonstrating the decline; yet there was still no action.^[866]

There has been a persistent question about the IWC, asked not only by historians but scholars from the social and biological sciences: why did it fail? One response has been that whaling demonstrates the curse of open, uncontrolled resources, in the spirit of Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’. Dorsey’s summation of whaling’s modern history has strong overtones of this: ‘Whalers recognized that they were overtaxing their resource, they tried to organize their trustworthy colleagues, and they did what they could to ruin outsiders. And in the end, they decided that they would not leave a whale behind for some other, less scrupulous, whaler.’^[867] Tonnessen’s answer is similar: in the 1950s, the demands of Japan, the Soviet Union and the Netherlands forestalled agreement on lower quotas (which, in any case, would still have been too high). Burnett, in his larger study of whale science and scientists, has interpreted matters differently. Reacting to the many analyses of the IWC that see a deficit of scientific knowledge as the problem, Burnett argues for an entanglement of long- and short-term developments, whereby the boundary between science and politics was mutable. In the first decade of the IWC, (most) scientists were sensitive to the politics and optimistic about the promise of scientific expertise in an international regulatory regime; they tried to cooperatively shape the industry, but in the end became disillusioned at their failure to temper it.^[868] Furthermore, Burnett suggests that the dif­ficult decisions of the IWC were passed to the scientists, so political deci­sions were made scientific, rather than the common idea that science was politicised. Whatever the interpretation of the IWC’s failure, in a sense it was probably all too late in any case for most of the whale populations; and though whale products still sold in the global market, changing tech­nologies were reducing demand.

Whaling began to recede from its dominant position in the human story of the Southern Ocean from the early 1960s. In 1963, more whales were killed outside the Southern Ocean, and by 1968, only the Soviets and Japanese were still whaling there.^[869] One recent estimate put the num­ber of whales taken from the Southern Ocean in the twentieth century at nearly two million individual animals.^[870] The work of the IWC turned to whaling in other oceans, and a great deal of public and scientific atten­tion was turned onto the Antarctic continent rather than the ocean. Yet, the end of whaling was not the end of the human desire to exploit the ocean. In the decades to follow, scientific, commercial and diplomatic concern turned to the Southern Ocean’s other denizens.