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"Modern"
Whaling,
1861-1987–Overview
Beginning
in the 1860s, the Norwegian sealing captain-entrepreneur
Svend Foyn pioneered revolutionary methods for hunting
and processing whales. Instead of the rickety, old fashioned
sail- and oar-powered whaleboats favored by traditional
Yankee whalers, Foyn introduced mechanized, steam-powered
catcher boats equipped with bow-chaser deck cannons and
heavy-caliber harpoons that exploded on impact. These
increased efficiency and volume, enabling the harvest
not only of all of the species that had been hunted for
centuries (notably, Northern and Southern right whales,
sperm whales, Arctic bowheads, humpbacks, and gray whales),
but also blue whales and finbacks–the largest species,
which, by reason of their speed in the water, had eluded
all previous hunting technologies.
The
Norwegians first exploited their own coastal waters. Later,
between 1904 and 1940, they established shore-whaling
stations on six continents (including on the American
Northwest Coast) and pioneered pelagic factory-ship expeditions
to the vast, hitherto unexploited grounds of Antarctica,
employing entire fleets or a dozen or more vessels for
months-long voyages to high South Latitudes. Many technological
innovations followed, including stern slipways on factory-ships
for hauling entire carcasses aboard, integrated fleets
of vessels with specialized tasks of catching, towing,
processing, and bunkering, spotter aircraft and radio
communications to track migrating whales, and remarkable
advances in ordnance, food chemistry, and processing machinery.
Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Korea, Argentina,
and Japan followed Norway into pelagic factory-ship whaling;
two factory-ships partly owned in the United States and
technically registered at Wilmington, Delaware (which
had also briefly been a conventional whaling port in the
1840s), were also sent whaling in Antarctica in the 1930s.
It
was this relentlessly efficient technology, and the failure
of the whaling nations to adhere to protective quotas
regulating the catch, that in the decades following World
War II devastated several species to the point of extinction.
International treaties were negotiated in the 1930s to
regulate the hunt, and the International Whaling Commission
was established in 1949, with an expert Scientific Committee
to monitor population and abundance. However, lack of
enforcement authority, inherent administrative flaws,
and persistent international disputes, combined with clandestine
over-fishing and under-reporting of the catch (notably
by the Soviet Union), fatally weakened IWC effectiveness.
In 1972 the United Nations called for a cessation of whaling
and the United States Congress passed an Endangered Species
Act; whale sanctuaries were declared in the 1970s and
’80s, and a general moratorium on commercial whaling,
adopted by the IWC in 1982, took effect in 1987–measures
intended to protect whales from ultimate annihilation.
Nevertheless, some nations have resumed limited whaling
outside the jurisdiction of the IWC (taking species that
are not generally considered to be critically endangered),
and the condition of several species–notably, the
North Atlantic right whale, the Arctic bowhead, and the
Pacific blue whale–remains critical.
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