Drawn on the walls of caves by our ancestors, studied by Aristotle four thousand years ago, hunted by peoples around the world, whales have always amazed and fascinated mankind. For early men who lived thousands of years ago, the sight of a whale, a mammoth creature 10 or 20 times man's height, [V 003 / leaping out of the water] must have been truly awesome.
When [L2 301 / men first started to hunt whales], it was the whale and not the man who was dominant. Although whales were killed thousands of years ago by men armed only with spears in small boats, whales were the masters of the oceans. It was not until the Middle Ages, when the [L2 302 / Basque whalers] perfected their boats and sailing and hunting techniques that they could claim to master the whale in any way.
These early whalers devastated the whale population in the [M 007 / Bay of Biscay], but they were only hunting the relatively slow swimming [I 012 / northern right]. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries were the great whales like the [I 013 / blue], the fin, the sei and the [I 011 / sperm] successfully hunted by man. [L2 303 / Whales were hunted for their baleen, gut, meat and oil], which were made into a number of different products. It was at this point that the balance of domination began to tilt. Whales were slaughtered in such numbers that by the mid-20th century, several species were in grave danger of extinction.
EARLY WHALERS
Once the Bay of Biscay whale population had been wiped out, the [G 03 / Basques] moved on to the North Atlantic. They were joined by the [L2 304 / Danish, Dutch and English whalers in the 17th and 18th centuries]. The Dutch and English whalers arrived in [M 004 / Spitsbergen], a group of the Svalbard Islands in the Greenland Sea in 1611. Here they established whaling towns. They were joined by French, Danish, [G 15 / Hanseatic] and Norwegian whalers. From these whaling towns, hundreds of ships were sent out to catch whales.
On the other side of the world, [L2 305 / Japanese whalers] were using nets to catch whales. Towards the end of the 18th century, [L2 306 / American whalers] set out from whaling stations on the east coast to hunt sperm, northern right and humpback whales.
MODERN WHALING:
By 1850, almost every ocean in the world was hunted for right and sperm whales from around 700 whaling vessels. Although some whale populations had been virtually or completely wiped out, these species still survived commercial hunting. Whaling techniques had not developed to such an extent that any individual species was in danger of extinction and the great [G 27 / rorqual] whales - the blue, Bryde's, fin, [P 003 / humpback], minke and sei - had not yet been hunted. Whalers had been defeated by the size and speed of the rorqual whales, and by the fact that they sink when dead.
NEW TECHNOLOGY:
But this was all to change. Modern whaling really began in the 1860s, with the invention of the [L2 307 / explosive grenade harpoon] by a Norwegian whaler named Svend Foyn. This [G 16 / harpoon] could be fired accurately at a whale from a canon attached to the front of a steam-powered [P 013 / catcher boat]. Once the harpoon had exploded inside the whale's body, the whale became attached to the catcher boat by a line running from the harpoon to the boat.
At the same time as the new technology was introduced, the demand for whale oil increased substantially. [G 01 / Baleen] whales in [L2 308 / the South Atlantic, South Pacific and Antarctic Sea] were hunted in large numbers from the beginning of the 20th century. New techniques improved the safety and efficiency of whaling, and with it, the profits.
Engine driven ships replaced the sailing vessels of the 19th century. These whale ships could out-distance even the large rorqual whales and chase them over many miles. Whaling companies began to kill far more whales than were born each year and numbers dropped steadily.
Another important invention was the '[L2 309 / factory ship]' - a floating factory where the whale carcasses were cut up and processed at sea. This improved the efficiency of the whaling industry and made it more cost effective. The result was that greater numbers of whales were killed.
PROTECTING WHALES:
By the 1930s, it was no longer easy for whalers to find whales. The once numerous blue, bowhead, [I 008 / fin], humpback and sperm whales had been hunted in such numbers that their stocks had dropped substantially in many parts of the world. There were [L2 310 / calls for protection as early as 1911], but they did not yield any results.
In 1946 the [L2 311 / International Whaling Commission] (IWC) was formed to regulate the number of whales which could be hunted annually. The IWC did not manage to reduce whaling to the extent that species could recover their former populations. Between 1950 and 1970, whaling nations killed around 50,000 - 60,000 whales a year. This reached nearly 70,000 whales annually by the mid-sixties. A New Management Plan abolished the BWU and introduced new quotas in 1975, but it was not sufficient to help the whales.
In 1986, a [L2 312 / moratorium] on whaling was introduced by the IWC. Despite this, [L2 313 / whaling still continues today] under the guise of 'scientific whaling.' The [G 17 / Inuit] are allowed by the IWC to hunt between 20 and 30 whales a year, thus [P 024 / continuing their traditional lifestyle]. The islanders of the Faeroes in the North Atlantic still also kill a few hundred whales each year for meat and oil.
THE FUTURE:
Despite the protests against whaling, the lack of a real market for most whale products except meat, the regulations and the scientific research, whales are by no means safe. [L2 314 / Some species are still endangered] and it is feared that they will never recover their former numbers. They are now [L2 315 / threatened by a number of environmental factors]: water pollution, being caught in fishing nets and underwater cables and the depletion of the [G 19 / krill] population in [M 005 / Antarctica] because of the hole in the [G 23 / ozone layer]. A number of nations still see whales primarily as prey.
By 1990 Norway, Japan and Iceland were openly calling for the IWC to lift the [G 22 / moratorium]. The IWC was by now largely a conservationist organization, and they believed that if the ban was lifted, the whaling nations would again push many whale species to the verge of extinction. Public opinion in whaling nations is strongly opposed to whaling, and organizations like Greenpeace fight for a permanent ban on all whaling. Despite the opposition Iceland left the IWC in June 1992 and Norway announced that it would once again hunt whales commercially.
