The Whaling Industry.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18889, 3 January 1927, Page 8

The Whaling Industry.

In the latest number to iiand of " Norway " —a beautifully produced monthly magazine devoted to the pushing of Norwegian trade —there is an article which ought to make New Zealahders think. The subject is "The 1920-1927 Whaling Season," and the article begins with the statement that " a larger whaling fleet than " ever has left Europe this year for " the Antarctic hunting grounds." In the zone of South Georgia three Norwegian companies will be working, ! two operating from a stationary factory and one from a floating factory, using between them eleven whale-boats and 740 men. Two British companies employing 530 men and one Argentinian company employing 200 men will also be operating in this zone. It) the South Shetland zone six Norwegian companies and two British companies, employing 1100 and 450 men respectively, will be hunting oil. In the South Orkneys two Norwegian companies will have 360 men at work, and in the Ross Sea two Norwegian companies will operate from three factories with 14 whale-boats and 560 men. Altogether the present whaling season in the Antarctic will find at work six stationary factories, 17 floating factories, 79 whale-boats, and about 4000 men. As "Norway" points out, the industry is mainly a Norwegian one, because both the British and Argentine ships employ Norwegian seamen and whalers. It can hardly fail to strike anyone that it is rather extraordinary that New Zealand, sitting on the threshold of the Antarctic whaling grounds, and aotually, owning, so far as there cao be ownership, the Ross Sea, is content to allow the whaling industry and its profits to remain in the hands of people as near to the North Pole as we are to the South. The industry it a very large and very profitable one. A fleet of ships and boats, including costly " floating -factories " like the ship Sir James Clark Ross, the C. A. Larsen, and the N. T. Niel-sen-Alonso, can bring 4000 men almost from Pole to Pole and do extremely well for the shareholders. New Zealand sometimes has moments when it says its people are, like the people of Britain, an island race, a race of sea-farers. "When it next has a moment of maritime exhilaration it mighl do worse than reflect upon the fact that although Norway does not talk much; it can come into our backyard across 15,000 miles of sea and carry away a fortune in oil. The answer may bt made that the Norwegians are borr sailors and born whalers, but there is no such thing as a born sailor or a born whaler. Good sailors and gooc whalers are men who have learned, and have diligently kept at, sailing anc whaling, and New Zealanders can, il they choose, do as well as the Norwegians. We do not know whether our Government has ever thought oi the possibility of adding whale-oil tc our list of exports, but it certainlj ought to think of the oddity of the present situ&tioxu

Bigger Cricket. Victoria's tremendous total of runs against New South Wales in the recent Sheffield Shield match has the same sort of impressireness as the champion pumpkin at. a horticultural show. Everybody 15 astounded, everybody admires, and everybody feels inclined to laugh. There is of course no right size for a pumpkin; but a pumpkin which weighs a hundred pounds is the wrong size. In the same way there is no right total for an eleven to make; but eleven hundred runs is a wrong total. Pumpkins big enough to fill a cart should not exist outside fairytales and the seed-merchants' catalogues; and totals of eleven hundred runs should not exist outside the imagination of cricketers like Mr Alfred Jingle. He, it will be remembered, scored seven hundred runs or thereabouts in a single-wicket match against Sir Thomas Blazo in the West Indies. It is easy to sympathise, of course, with Mailey, bowling away like faithful Quanko Samba, and with the other wretched members of the fielding side; but their discomfort is not the real point. That is, roughly, the disappearance of balance. The proportions of cricket are pretty well understood, and it is not difficult to feel when the game has swollen into .a stunt and an exhibition. When big cricket gets bigger it is not more thrilling, it is not brighter, or better. It is only in a fair way to becoming a bore.