Leviathan or The Whale

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