From the north to the south
For most of the nineteenth century, whaling was concentrated in the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the Pacific. The older whaling vessels were sailing ships that carried small rowing boats for the chase and boiled the blubber on deck. As stocks of those whales declined, attention turned to the Southern Ocean, where large whales such as blue, fin, humpback and sei whales fed on krill.
Those whales were fast and sank when killed, so they were hard for rowing boats to take. Two changes opened the way. The Norwegian Svend Foyn developed a practical explosive harpoon gun mounted on a steam-driven vessel in the 1860s and 1870s, and steam catchers gave the speed needed to chase the big rorquals. Southern whaling began on a large scale in the early twentieth century.
Shore stations on South Georgia
A key moment came in 1904, when the Norwegian captain Carl Anton Larsen founded the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia, which was run by a company from Argentina. Larsen had earlier been captain of the Antarctic, a ship used on a Swedish expedition that was crushed by ice. Other stations followed on South Georgia and in the South Shetlands, the Falkland Islands dependencies and other places.
At a shore station, catcher boats towed the dead whales to a slipway where they were hauled up and cut up by flensers. Boilers and presses extracted oil. The whales were killed near the coast, which meant that catchers did not have to travel far. Whale oil had a range of uses at the time, including soap, margarine and lubricants.
Conditions for workers were hard. Men from Norway and other countries spent months at remote stations, and the smell and waste were notorious. Today, the abandoned stations, with rusting boilers and catchers, are a reminder of the industry.
The catcher boats
The catcher was the working heart of the fleet. These were relatively small steam vessels, often of a few hundred tons, with a high bow, a gun platform at the front and a lookout in a barrel on the mast. Gunners aimed a grenade-tipped harpoon at the whale. The line attached to the harpoon ran through a pulley system with springs and a winch to absorb the strain.
After the kill, compressed air was often pumped into the carcass to keep it afloat, and a flag marked it for later pickup. Catchers were fast and manoeuvrable, but the work was dangerous in rough seas and ice.
Factory ships and pelagic whaling
The shore stations were limited by their locations, and governments in some territories began to regulate whaling near them. A solution was the factory ship, a large vessel on which whales could be processed at sea. Early factory ships in the 1900s were converted old vessels anchored in sheltered harbours. A major step came in 1925, when the Norwegian ship Lancing was fitted with a stern slipway, allowing a whale to be hauled directly up the back of the ship onto the flensing deck. With that innovation, factory ships could operate in the open ocean, far from land, and were no longer tied to harbours.
The first factory ship to work in the Ross Sea was the Sir James Clark Ross, in 1923. By the late 1920s and 1930s, fleets of factory ships, each with a number of catcher boats, were hunting across the Southern Ocean. The industry was dominated by Norway and Britain at first, with others such as Germany and Japan, and later the Soviet Union, joining. Catch figures were very large in this period, and they are widely believed to have severely depleted blue whales in particular.
Regulation and decline
Concern about overhunting led to international agreements in the 1930s, though they had limited effect. After the Second World War, the International Whaling Commission was established in 1946. Over the following decades, quotas, species protections and falling catches led many countries to leave the industry. Southern Ocean whaling by factory fleets declined sharply from the 1960s, and the commission agreed a pause on commercial whaling that took effect in 1986. Antarctic waters are also now designated as a whale sanctuary.
Scientific research on whales continued in some countries under special permits, which remains controversial. The history shows how technology allowed hunting to outpace what whale populations could sustain.
The industry and polar science
The whaling fleets had an unexpected link to exploration. Their ships travelled to waters seldom visited, and the stations offered bases for expeditions. The British Discovery Investigations of the 1920s and 1930s were funded in part by whaling revenues and studied whale biology and Southern Ocean conditions. Shackleton’s Endurance expedition relied on the South Georgia stations, whose crews gave help at the end of the boat journey. The industry’s records also gave data for oceanographic research later on.
Today, many former whaling stations are preserved as heritage sites, and some are the subject of conservation and environmental clean-up projects, a reminder of a trade that shaped both the ships and the ecology of the far south.