Thar She Blows!

Into New York harbor last week steamed two Norwegian whalers, the huge, 22,000-ton Sir James Clark Ross and the smaller Thorshammer. Two weeks out of Norway, they had hardly tied up in the shadow of the skyscrapers before their crews were busily dismantling their anti-aircraft guns, hauling aboard six months' supply of food.

By working at top speed, the ships were able to cast off and head for sea again in seven days. Reason for the haste: they hoped to be the first ships in the Antarctic for the opening, next month, of the first full-blown whaling season in five years. And the first to reach the ice-and whale-filled seas, comparatively unhunted during the war, should make a heavy killing. This year they would not have to worry about U.S. competition. There wasn't any.

An End to Romance. Once the U.S. had been the world's greatest whaling nation. In the 1840s as many as 735 ships and 40,000 men went out from narrow New England ports to hunt in the seven seas. The incredibly hard life which inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick also inspired less printable tales. Said one shocked observer: "In Hawaii, intemperance and lust have run riot. Almost every ship anchored is a floating brothel."

With the rise of the oil industry, the number of whalers dropped. Yet the catch swelled enormously. Romance gave way to cold, scientific slaughter, chiefly to supply soap and oleomargarine makers. Whale ships became enormous floating factories, fed by small, 150-ft. killer ships firing harpoons tipped with explosive shells. (An electric harpoon, which paralyzes whales and keeps them from sounding, is now being tried out.) The whales were jerked aboard the factory ship through a hole in the stern, cut up and rendered into whale oil in a few gory, noisome hours.

By 1938, the low pay of foreign whalers had put all but two U.S. ships out of business. Harpooners, who reportedly have made as much as $125,000 a season, were so scarce in the U.S. that Norwegian killer ships had to be hired. Then Congress, prodded by the farm bloc, delivered the final thrust. In 1939 it slapped a 3-c--a-pound tax on all oil from whales caught by foreign killer ships after the 33 floating factories of all nations had made their greatest kill ever: some 64,000 whales. Forced to quit, the two U.S. whalers were sold, one to Argentina, the other, eventually, to the Japs.

End of the Fleet. War, which scattered the international whaling fleet, caught the U.S. short of sperm oil, badly needed for lubricating delicate submarine and aviation instruments. Most of the British and Norwegian whalers were converted into tankers and sunk or captured. But the Thorshammer and the Sir James Clark Ross managed to sneak past the Nazis, arrived in U.S. ports. They promptly went to work to keep the U.S. supplied with sperm oil.

Escorted by the Navy, the Thorshammer hunted for the U.S. off Peru and in the Antarctic for three seasons, brought back a total of 263,000 barrels of oil worth nearly $8,000,000.

With Europe starved for fats, Britain and Norway are hustling to get big fleets operating again. Norway expects to send another three or four ships into the Antarctic this season; Britain launched three new whalers last summer (one for Norway) at a cost of some $4,500,000 apiece. With two captured Nazi ships, Britain expects to have three factory ships operating this season.

In addition to oil, Anglo-Norwegian whalers hunting near their home ports hope to bring back whale meat for butcher shops, boast that a new method of quick freezing makes it as tender and tasty as beef.

End of Whaling? Already counting on getting 150,000 tons of whale oil this season (worth $27,000,000 at present prices), whalers hope to have a $30,000,000-a-year business before many years have passed. They intend to ask, at the meeting next month, for a relaxation of the international whaling agreement, which now restricts kills to 16,000 blue-whale units (two fin whales, or two and a half humpbacks are counted as one blue-whale unit). They argue that with fewer ships, tight restrictions are no longer necessary.

But zoologists feel differently. Tall, husky Robert Cushman Murphy, Curator of Oceanic Birds at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History and top U.S. expert on whales, last week predicted: if the floating factories again make their heavy prewar kills, commercial whaling will come to an end in five years.

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