Whales & War

Tall, husky Zoologist Robert Cushman Murphy gets mad when he considers what human rapacity has done and is still doing to whales. Though he is officially Curator of Oceanic Birds at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Murphy is an expert on whales & whaling. He fumes with invectives like "unalleviated carnage" and "butchered and rendered with horrible dispatch."

Most people think of the Moby Dick era as the heyday of whaling, but whaling did not actually reach slaughterhouse efficiency with floating factories and motor launch harpoon-gunning until the 20th Century. In the three centuries from 1620 to 1920 the average whale catch was about 3,000 a year. In the 1937-38 season 54,664 whales (yielding 615,500 tons of oil) were taken, the greatest number in history. Writing in Science recently, Dr. Murphy observed that during the 1938-39 season a record kill may again have been perpetrated, but there were so many ships in the field, especially the Antarctic, that preliminary reports indicate a very poor season in yield per ship.

Whale oil, unfortunately for whales, is especially valuable in war. It is a cheap source of fats for soap and margarine, and baleen whales yield glycerin for explosives. In World War I, up to 1917, Britain bought 660,000 bbl. of baleen oil for $185 a ton (normal: $120-125 a ton). At that time blockaded Germany was paying $1,500 a ton for such oil as she could get. This time, Britain contracted to take all the Norwegian oil for margarine. Next autumn, whether Norway is German-dominated or not, her great fleet of whaling ships will be out again in force, and so will those of other whaling nations, except perhaps Germany. In five years Dr. Murphy expects whaling to stop--for the simple reason that commercially useful whales will be so nearly extinct that hunting them will no longer be profitable.

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