Whales and Nations

Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas

Kurkpatrick Dorsey

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295804941
• Categoría: Biological Sciences
• Categoría: Marine Biology

Before commercial whaling was outlawed in the 1980s, diplomats, scientists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and sometimes even whalers themselves had attempted to create an international regulatory framework that would allow for a sustainable whaling industry. In Whales and Nations, Kurkpatrick Dorsey tells the story of the international negotiation, scientific research, and industrial development behind these efforts —and their ultimate failure. Whales and Nations begins in the early twentieth century, when new technology revived the fading whaling industry and made whale hunting possible on an unprecedented scale. By the 1920s, declining whale populations prompted efforts to develop "rational"—what today would be called sustainable—whaling practices. But even though almost everyone involved with commercial whaling knew that the industry was on an unsustainable path, Dorsey argues, powerful economic, political, and scientific forces made failure nearly inevitable. Based on a deep engagement with diplomatic history, Whales and Nations provides a unique perspective on the challenges facing international conservation projects. This history has profound implications for today's pressing questions of global environmental cooperation and sustainability. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QsLlM5KTx0

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A GLOBAL INDUSTRY AND GLOBAL CHALLENGES

THE DECISION BY LANDLOCKED SWITZERLAND TO SIGN THE LEAGUE OF Nations' 1931 Convention for the Regulation of Whaling might seem merely a humorous oddity, an inexplicable footnote to the history of diplomacy. Indeed, members of the Swiss Parliament commented during debate that the prime risk of the convention was the creation of a Swiss navy, replete with highly paid officers, to protect the Swiss merchant fleet that was sure to follow from the convention.¹ But the very existence of the convention and the Swiss signature affixed thereto reveal two related but ultimately contradictory realities: whaling in the twentieth century was a global industry of great value, both in terms of its raw material and the market for its products; and people who paid attention to whaling believed that it was a self-destructive industry that defied regulation and sometimes even common sense. The League of Nations' attempt to provide some structure for the industry was simply an early step in what would turn into a long—and failed—effort to use diplomacy to make whaling sustainable.

The captains of the whaling industry of the early twentieth century would have attached a different meaning to the word sustainable than someone might in the early twenty-first century, if they would even have cared much about the long-term implications behind the modern use of the word. Whaling was difficult and dangerous work, the oceans were vast and whales comparatively small, and the markets for whale products were unpredictable. Under these conditions, a long-term outlook for whaling might be a few years, or even just the end of the whaling season, when debts would be settled and crews paid. For most of the early twentieth century, it seemed far more likely that the whaling industry would go extinct before the whales themselves even came close to that fate. People feared commercial extinction, not literal extinction of the whales.

In the decade before Swiss representatives smiled as they approved the whaling convention, the industry got on an unsustainable path very quickly. Technological shifts made it possible to capture large whales, render them, and market their oil. Those developments also made it possible for whalers to operate on the high seas for months at a time, free from oversight and licensing schemes. Whaling companies developed into multinational firms with huge capital expenditures and hence the need to take large numbers of whales; and because most whales were processed into a very basic substance, margarine, the demand was almost insatiable. By the late 1920s, observers were concluding that there needed to be some sort of international control mechanism before whaling burned itself out. Thus the Swiss, consumers of whale products and hosts to the League of Nations, felt compelled to make their small statement on behalf of regulating whaling.

THE RISE OF PELAGIC WHALING

Had whaling remained largely confined to island stations in Antarctic waters in the twentieth century, whale populations in the early twenty-first century might be largely unchanged from a century before. Instead the value of whales rose enough that in the early twentieth century Norwegians in particular applied their genius to devising new ways to process whales at sea. Working with the new harpoons, killer ships, and inflation technology had made it possible to catch blue and fin whales, but it took two critical steps—the invention of the stern slipway and the improvement of methods to generate freshwater—to free whalers from the confines of land stations. One other change, the development of better refining techniques, which allowed for greater use of whale oil, provided the final ingredient in the vast expansion of whaling on the high seas. Such an industry had the power to pursue whales and sell their products anywhere in the world, and, perhaps more important, it could easily transfer its equipment to fishing, shipping, or military activities. Hence whaling became more important and powerful politically, not to mention more destructive ecologically. Despite the talk about commercial extinction saving the whales before literal extinction set in, these new whaling companies were gaining the ability to hunt until the last whale was taken, after which they would move to another way of making money.

Whalers quickly realized that there was far more money to be made by chasing the blues and fins than waiting for them. The primary obstacles to pelagic, or high-seas, whaling were the size of individual whales and the amount of water necessary to render their fat and meat into oil. It was one thing to drag a whale back to land and carve it up on a cement pad near the water, but to flense a ninety-ton whale on the open seas presented quite a different challenge. Readers of Moby Dick may well remember descriptions of the steps involved in stripping the flesh from a large sperm whale in the relatively calm Pacific. It was particularly dangerous work to climb down from the deck onto the whale to commence the process of stripping blubber from the carcass—the whale's body was slippery, the workers carried large knives and sharp hooks, and large predators lurked that might as easily eat a whaler as a whale.² With rougher seas and fin and blue whales weighing at least twice as much as sperm whales, the Antarctic whalers faced significantly greater obstacles than the men of the wooden ship era.

Their “triumphant answer” came with the invention of the stern slipway.³ An obvious solution to the hazards of flensing a whale in the water was to bring it on board, and by the 1920s it had become possible to build a steamship capable of holding a large whale on its deck without capsizing. What was not so obvious was how to get the whale from the rolling ocean to the relative stability of the deck. Lifting a dead weight over the side of the ship was generally tried only once. As early as 1912, a Norwegian whaler, Petter Sørlle, who had caught and processed whales alongside his ice-bound vessel, had designed a model of a ship with a slipway in the stern. Distracted by other things, including the difficulty of pulling a whale over his rudder and propeller, Sørlle did not patent his ideas until 1922, but after that just about every new or converted whaling ship used the slipway to get carcasses on deck. Powerful steam winches and grappling hooks dragged the animal up the inclined surface. The stern slipway kept the whale's weight relatively low and in line with the ship's axis.⁴ Even this system was not foolproof. In 1978, much to the cheers of environmentalists, the rogue whaling ship MV Tonna capsized when the crew tried to haul a fin whale in via the stern, the winch malfunctioned, and the whale became a dead weight rolling from side to side with the sea.

Once the whale was on deck, flensing became significantly less hazardous and more efficient. Crewmen in spiked shoes clambered over the carcass with long flensing knives that they used to cut the blubber and meat into strips of various sizes, which were then carried to large vats, called cookers. Speed was of the essence, because decomposition and autolysis set in soon after the animal was killed. With the thick layer of blubber keeping in the whale's heat, the carcass could get quite hot, and the meat and blubber could spoil quickly. But the need for speed was countered by the benefits of thoroughness. Roughly as much oil could be extracted from the meat and bones of the average large whale as from its blubber. The director of whaling operations, on land or sea, had to calculate quickly whether it was worth working on a whale that had been stripped of most of its blubber or whether that carcass should be tossed overboard to make way for a new whale.⁵

Rendering—or trying—the whale into oil, water, and by-product was a fairly straightforward process. Crewmen used cranes or muscle to transport the raw material to cookers or boilers, where steam, heat, and pressure broke it down to its basic parts. Oil rose to the top of the liquid mass, and solids fell to the bottom. As technology improved, whalers were able to more easily drain off the oil and get most of the valuable material out of the water.⁶ While the oil was the focus in the 1920s, whalers recognized that the by-product, which they called whale meal, was a valuable source of protein that could be used in animal feeds and the like. Given that meal could easily make up 25 percent of the end product of rendering a whale, it could make the difference between profit and deficit for an expedition. Meat for human consumption rarely drew the attention of commercial whalers in Britain or the United States. At both the low and high end, consumers received encouragement to eat whale meat, whether in the form of wartime propaganda posters that emphasized that whale meat was neither fish nor expensive, or in the form of a fancy meal at Delmonico's in New York that offered “whale pot au feu.” But Americans, at least, tended to compare whale meat with horse meat, ignoring that it was supposedly a “first-rate food that is palatable and wholesome.”⁷

The machinery necessary to render a whale was basically the same on land as on the water, but limited space on board the ship presented a challenge. At the start of the twentieth century, the technology for rendering large animals consisted mostly of big vats that required a lot of energy and water. Big open vats on a slippery, pitching ship were not especially popular with crewmen, so whalers experimented with ways of placing and minimizing vats, lids, and other equipment that maximized deck space, cooking capacity, and safety—it is hard to find a replacement worker three hundred miles south of the Falklands. One observer in the 1950s reported at least four deaths from stripping baleen, but Gerald Elliott of Salvesen's thought that “whalers were remarkably free of accidents.”⁸ Whalers also worked to create cookers that worked better with bone and meat, and they experimented with ways to try the blubber more quickly. The major breakthroughs in that regard came first in 1911 with the rotary operation of the Hartmann cooker, followed in about 1930 with the invention of the Kvaerner cooker, which was reputed to be especially good at getting oil out of meat.⁹

Having solved the problems of bringing a huge whale on board without sinking their ships and taking it apart in a confined space, whalers faced one last hurdle: getting the enormous amount of freshwater necessary to reduce a piece of megafauna into clear oil, bones, and sticky by-product. As historians J. N. Tønnessen and A. O. Johnsen noted, “On the very first trip it was evident that supplies of fresh water would be the major problem for floating factories.”¹⁰ The original floating factories had enough steam to power the engines or run the processing plant, but not both.¹¹ Even a small whaling vessel could use 80 tons of water a day, and the big ones of the 1950s were designed to produce 600 tons of water per day.¹² Shore stations had usually been located near vigorous streams, but there was no way that a ship could carry enough water for its steam engines and all of the rendering apparatus. The solution was to build large evaporators to squeeze water out of the air, making a factory ship truly independent of land.

All of the technological developments made it easier to catch and process whales but did not address the other end of the problem; the uneven market for whale oil. Having lost out to petroleum as a fuel for lamps, and usually too strong to be palatable as human food, whale oil was dismissed by one author as “an inferior industrial fat.”¹³ Lars Christensen argued that the rise of pelagic whaling ended whale oil's status as a seasonal commodity, which was critical for getting it into the supply chain for margarine.¹⁴ Really high-grade whale oil was converted into margarine by 1910, but most whale oil was not suited for that purpose yet. It still was useful in the production of the explosive nitroglycerine, though, so the First World War created a surge in demand that drove prices to more than 100 British pounds per ton. The return to peace and the inevitable postwar recession weakened the industry's position. In 1925, chemists changed the shape of industrial whaling by figuring out a way to refine whale oil that eliminated the strong taste, making it a prime edible fat, ready to be sold to consumers as margarine. American scientist Remington Kellogg later noted that “whale oil moves freely in international commerce…. It can be stored after treatment for a period of at least five years without deterioration.”¹⁵ Companies like Unilever saw the potential in whale oil and began buying most of the world's supplies to make margarine for Europeans, so that in the late 1920s the whaling industry was booming. Oil was the dominant product from whaling until about 1960, when it fell below meat and meal in importance.

Combined, these advances in technology allowed for a new business strategy for the whaling companies. Rather than investing in fixed plants on the limited number of islands near the southern whaling grounds, they could now invest in building floating factories or, more commonly in the early years, converting cargo vessels for the task. In a way, the twentieth-century floating factories were just updated versions of the wooden whalers of nineteenth-century Nantucket, but they were huge, far more complex, and more specialized. One sailor concluded that the Southern Reaper “offended every concept of grace; she violated every law of naval architecture.”¹⁶ Where the Essex and the Pequod went out on their own, the new floating factories took with them small flotillas. Most important were the killer or catcher boats; over the course of the century anywhere from four to fifteen went out with each factory. The factory was frequently accompanied by a tanker or two, which would take on the oil and transport it to the market so that the factory could stay on the whaling grounds. When a wooden whaler's hold and deck were full, it had to go home. With all of these vessels, companies began to speak of whaling expeditions, which seemed only appropriate heading into the wild waters of Antarctica, in the neighborhood of expeditions led by men like Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton.

Like those expeditions, these lasted for extended periods of time. A typical cruise could take eight months, beginning with the departure from European ports in September. The factory vessel would then head to the vicinity of the Falklands, with a stop or two in the tropics for fresh food and to add a few extra crewmen if need be. Crewmen would be kept busy preparing the ship, doing such things as putting a new layer of wood over the deck or tuning up the rendering plant. The catcher vessels would usually be retrieved from storage somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, and by November the whaling flotilla would be on the whaling grounds.¹⁷ Operations would continue until the weather deteriorated too much in April, and the factory vessel, accompanied by a tanker usually, would return north sometime in May. For many Norwegians in the Vestfold area, southwest of Oslo, the whaling season was just short enough to allow them a brief farming season in the northern summer. When whaling was good, these men around Tønsberg and Sandefjord could live quite well. In fact Vestfold was the human center of the whaling industry from the early 1900s into the 1950s. Most European harpooners and many crewmen came from there, and their highly paid jobs were very important to the entire Norwegian economy.

The ability to hunt any whale meant that, from a hunting standpoint, the bigger whale was finally the better whale. Gunners referred to blue whales shorter than 68 to 70 feet as “inexperienced youth” because they would come right up to the catcher boats “without exhibiting any kind of fear.” Once the whales crossed the 68- to 70-foot threshold, they became shy of the catcher—at least those that had survived being so inquisitive. Given a choice, whalers preferred the largest whales, but no harpooner would turn down a shot at a 68-foot blue whale or a mature fin whale of the same size unless he had specific instructions to do so. But in favoring the largest blue whales, those over 75 feet, whalers were taking adult females disproportionately, which was not sustainable.¹⁸ From a management standpoint, the best long-term strategy would have been to focus on adult males more than on females or immatures, but that is the kind of advice that sounds better in a committee meeting than while pitching and rolling near the pack ice in pursuit of a whale that might be anywhere from 70 to 75 feet in length.

The one limiting factor that technology could not overcome was the weather. The austral summer petered out by late March, not that it ever got too much momentum below the Falklands anyway. When the days got shorter and the ice on deck got too thick to chip away, then it was time to head north. The drawback was that the whales were at their peak then in terms of fat, so there was an incentive to stay as long as possible. Given that the crews got bonuses based on performance, they were probably nearly as ambivalent as the expedition commanders. Conversely, whalers opened the season as soon as the pack ice opened enough to get at the whales, usually around 1 November, but at that time of year the whales really were too thin to be hunted profitably. Data from the early 1950s shows that whales at the end of the season could produce 44 percent more oil than at the start.¹⁹

The whaling expedition brought with it a hierarchy of command, although at times that command was not militarily linear. Usually, each expedition had a manager who had overall authority vested in him by the whaling company. The floating factory had a captain, who usually had the most practical nautical experience. It is easy to imagine that the business sense of the manager and the nautical sense of the captain did not always mesh and that authority occasionally had to be hammered out on the spot. This relationship might be even more clouded by the presence of a political officer, whether a Soviet commissar or occupation military officials on Japanese whalers right after the Second World War. In addition, each of the catcher boats had its own captain, and these men were usually the lynchpin of the whole operation because they also served as the harpooners. One whaling company owner said that a harpooner had to have “a combination of a steady eye with drive, stamina and leadership.”²⁰ Harpooners were subordinate to the officials on the factory, but in a way they were the hardest to replace and thus the most valuable; they had their own union but were usually paid several times what the average sailor made. The men on ...