Leviathan or The Whale

single season…This does not include 2,459 whales taken by the Russians.’
    It is salutary to see how sharply the figures escalate throughout the twentieth century. In 1910, 1,303 fin whales and 43 sperm whales were taken; in 1958, the totals stood at 32,587 fin and 21,846 sperm whales. It was a momentum exacerbated by politics. From 1951 to 1970, the Soviet Union increased its catches outside international agreements, taking more than three thousand southern right whales, although only four were reported to the International Whaling Commission. First convened by President Truman in Washington, DC, in 1946, the IWC–whose headquarters were based in Cambridge, England–introduced successive steps to limit whaling further, but commercial pressures and unsustainable quotas overtook good intentions.
    Humpbacks were particular victims of this slaughter. The Russians claimed to have taken just over two thousand animals, but the figures show that they killed more than forty-eight thousand. Young whales, mothers and calves, protected species were taken indiscriminately, and the figures falsified. Sperm whales, too, suffered badly. At the turn of the century they had enjoyed an illusory reprieve as the newly mechanized fleets began to pursue the rorquals, but after the Second World War, with baleen whale populations rapidly shrinking, the harpoons were aimed again at the cachalots, whose numbers had just begun to recover.
    By the 1950s, at the height of a new antagonism between east and west, an average of twenty-five thousand sperm whales were dying each year, ending up as vitamin supplements or animal feed. ‘Boiled sperm whale flesh can be used for feeding fur-bearing animals,’ noted one Russian scientist, Alexander Berzin, a Soviet-era Beale whose book was illustrated with indistinct images of whale pathology and dissection. His countrymen also used the tendons in the whales’ heads to make glue, and in 1956 alone, 980 tons of whale hide were processed in a single Russian factory, tanned and dyed and destined to make soles for shoes. Men walked on whales.
    The Cold War was taken to the whales in their ocean fastness. North Atlantic right whales, protected since 1935, were reduced to one hundred animals by the USSR, which also killed 372 of the even rarer North Pacific right whales. Southern right whales had already reached a low point of tens off the coast of apartheid South Africa, while Arctic bowheads suffered similarly under the disunited nations.
    The reason for this renewed interest was, of course, financial. Whaling was rapidly becoming the province of new multinational companies. By 1957 whale oil was fetching £90 a ton; in Oslo that year Unilever acquired 125,000 tons of the stuff, from Norwegian, Japanese and British manned ships, although, when asked, the company declined to comment on its purchase. A few years later, it was estimated that whales were worth £50 million a year to the global economy. Helicopters were being used to spot whales in the Southern Ocean, where one whale-ship received a regal gam when the Duke of Edinburgh boarded the
Southern Harvester
from the royal yacht
Britannia
, the princely person being hoisted across in a basket slung from the masthead, while a fifty-foot sperm whale provided the buffer between the two vessels. (Later, the Duke was heard to remark in a television interview that ‘A whale has an odour peculiar to itself).’
    The tenth meeting of the International Whaling Commission at The Hague in 1958 implemented new restrictions, extending the existing prohibition on killing humpbacks in the North Atlantic and in part of the Arctic, and limiting their hunting in the Antarctic. Such limits meant nothing to those who had not signed up to the organization. ‘The whaling industry lives with a recurring nightmare: the extinction of the whale,’
The Times
stated in a forthright editorial in January 1959, foreseeing ‘a massacre in the Antarctic next season’. It demanded neutral observers and a ban on the building of new whale-ships without consultation. ‘Britain’s role as peacemaker is a laudable one. It can, however, hardly be pursued to the detriment of British whaling, and cannot be pursued without the cooperation of others.’ As another scientist pointed out, ‘conservation had failed mainly because whales belonged to no one and it was no one’s direct interest to look after them.’
    While the IWC investigated more humane ways of killing whales, Holland