The Evening Star FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1928. WHALING.

Evening Star, Issue 19799, 24 February 1928, Page 6

The Evening Star FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1928. WHALING.

Fouxune struck Llio groat whaling ship C. A. Larsen distinctly an underhand blow when, after surviving all the perils of the Antarctic, a defect which had developed in her steering gear caused her to run ashore at the entrance to tho desired harbor, with severe injuries to her fabric and the loss of much of her hard-won cargo of oil. Tho operations of tho whaling company have been highly successful up till now, and the sympathies of all New Zealanders will go out to tho enterprising Norwegians in this misfortune. Apart from this disaster, which might have been regarded as outside the risks of an industry of which the normal dangers are quite sufficient in number, the whale-hunting in Antarctica which has drawn highly equipped fleets from as far away as Norway prompts a number of considerations for this country. Tho whales arc caught largely in New Zealand waters—those of the Ross Sea. Why should not this be also a New Zealand industry? It was the earliest of all industries in the South Pacific, and until recent times it was plied by no small number of New Zealanders from their own coasts. But the whale has disappeared from immediate New Zealand waters, and that raises another question. Does the rare at which lie is being hunted threaten his extinction now in the Ross Sea and in'Antarctica? The question has been asked sundry times in our New Zealand Parliament, but it is not susceptible to any easy, offhand answer. It would be a misfortune for the world if the whale should go the way of the ichthyosaurus. He is tho greatest of its creatures. And tho loss would not be limited to his own loss. “It is a perilous thing,” it has been said, “ to upset tho balance of Nature by removing largo animals. Take tho case of the whales. Some are feeding on the surface-swimming crusfacea which swarm in the sea in such vast myriads that they color it red for fifty square miles. Exterminate the whales, and it may bo expected that the erustacca, by the removal of this check on their numbers, at first increasing enormously, will die off wholesale owing to their increase beyond tho means of subsistence, thereby materially reducing the numbers of crustacea-cating lish on which wo depend for our food. We do not know, of course, that this will happen, or what may happen; but what is certain is that we cannot afford to fake risks.”

That there is no risk would have been tiie opinion of Henna n Melville, who wrote the greatest of all books on whales and whaling, the romance of ‘Moby Dick.' Even m his time, more than seventy years ago, whales were becoming fewer in various seas of the world. But ho did not regard that as a portent. He believed that “theyare only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one shore is no longer enlivened with their jets, then bo sure some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.” His faith was built upon the fact that thousands of years of the most destructive hunting have not been able to extinguish the elephant, and that whaling operations were necessarily much Jess destructive. “ Forty men in one ship hunting the sperm whale for lorty-oight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish.’’ But Melville did not foresee the development of appliances which would make it possible for one ship, carrying 230 men, accompanied by chasers, to take 78,000 barrels of whale oil in a much shorter cruise. That would be the product of nearly nine hundred whales, The fact that so many were met with on this trip would be an argument that they are not yet being exterminated, and there seems force in another argument which has been urged, ft has been pointed out that, unless the whales were numerous, it would not pay to send highly expensive expeditions all the way from Norway to hunt them. They could always get shelter by moving further soutli and hugging the ice closer. When the fishing became unprofitable it would be abandoned, and there would still bo ample supply of whales left to breed and preserve the race. It sounds plausible, but the real factors of the problem are unknown to us. Wo do not know the rate at which whales breed. A scientific expedition on the Discovery returned recently from a four years’ cruise meant to increase our knowledge of whales, to determine, among other things, the variations of their environment in the southern seas, and whether they are in danger of being exterminated or not. Wo do not know what its report has boon, but apparently it found whales fewer in many places than they had been before. Many years will be required before the investigations which were set in train by it can bo fully worked out. The privilege of whale fishing in the Ross Sea was given to the Norwegian company before New Zealand took over control of those waters. The Government of this country receives an annual license fee and royalties on the oil taken, which in 192 G-27 amounted together to less than £3,000. The greatest danger to the whale’s continued existence is likely to lie not in the Ross Sea operations, but in the fact that no nation is in a position to exercise any control outside of its territorial waters, and that there is no' means of controlling killing in those areas. We must hope that Herman Melville, despite his disadvantages for forming a judgment, was right in his belittling of this peril. “ Wherefore, for all these things,” he writes, ” we account the whale immortal in his species, howeve'r perishable in his individuality. lie swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin, fn Noah’s Hood he despised Noak’s ark; and if ever the world is to bo again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and, rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”