EASY WHALING.

Hokitika Guardian, 28 July 1921, Page 1

EASY WHALING.

AND VERY GOOD GATING

GIBRALTAR. (By G. Ward Price.) I have been out whaling today. It was whaling de luxe, combining the attractions of dpjort, business and yachting. We killed two small spermwhales and one enormous “fin wliale,” seventy feet long, that looked like a white-bellied submarine as it basked, idly awash in the blue wave-. All my previous ideas about whaling had included icebergs and polar bears as a background, but these creatures —as fine whales as could be found anywhere in the world—were harpooned five miles off the African coast, with the Rock of Gibraltar shimmering in the sun astern.

Just three weeks ago tills southernmost whaling station in Europe was opened at Sandy Bay, four miles to the west of Algeciras. Those three weeks have yielded thirty whales and as many more could have been kilted were the factory sufficiently complete to boil down their blubber.

By name it is a Spanish Company—the Compania Ballerena Espanola. but most of the capital and staff are Nor-

wegian. Sunburnt and blue-eyed Scandinavian skippers here find on earth the happy hunting-ground to which all good whalers go when they die. ° Hitherto the whole of their lives had been spent in the stormy solitudes of South Georgia, a bleak group of islands 500 miles to the east of the Falklands in the South Atlantic, or in wild outposts of the Northern Shetlands, or

forsaken spots on the coast of Green, land. Only at lonely Blacksod Bay, on the west coast of Ireland—the most southerly station until this Spanish one was opened—did they touch the fringe of civilisation.

But here they can catch many whales

ujidctr azure skies on peaceful seas of ultramarine, and come ashore to rest from their gentle labours sitting in the sunshine with a view of the fairest and most historic corners of two continents before them and the scent of roses and geraniums to moderate the perfume of boiling blubber.

“Where else in tbe world could one have such an experience as mine today of talcing breakfast in an hotel like the R.oina Cristina —probably the most comfortable, in Spain—and an hour and a half later seeing two whales made fast alongside the trawler While eight others had been sighted* Catching whales ds easy. “Their

lends are too full of fat to have any ;ense in them.” one of the crews exilained to me. Certainly they pay no attention to the whaler ns she steams alongside

with the skipper standing hy the har-poon-gun in the hows. And when with a loud hang of black- powder the harpoon, with its explosive head, plunges deep into the whale’s side and the sea for fifty yards around is dyed a brilliant crimson with his blood, other whale , close hy continue to swim calmly about like amiable torpedoes till their own turn comes.

The dead whales arc towed in and

pulled up hy winches on to a. platform at the factory. The white blubber is cut off them and boiler! down to yield the best oil. A lower quality is also extracted from tbe meat and the bones.

Captain Torgersen, tlic manager of the station, asked me to lunch, and T helped myself liberally to fried steak and onions. “Excellent beef this,” T remarked in all sincerity, and received the surprising reply: “It isn’t beef; it’s whale.”

I would defy anyone to toll the difference. and as whale meat can he sold at one-third the price of beef the company is hoping to put it on the local market. As Whale average one ton in weight per foot of length there will lac large supplies available for Gibraltar if the authorities there authorise, its sale.