DISCOVERY EXPEDITION

Hokitika Guardian, 19 April 1924, Page 4

DISCOVERY EXPEDITION

10.000 WHALES A SEASON

LONDON, .March 0

In a lecture on whaling research at the Art Workers’ Guildhall, Sir Sydney Manner referred to the new Discovery Expedition in the Antarctic.

The average catch of whales lor a season, he said, was from 10,1)00 to 11,000, with a value of about one million sterling. Britain’s control ol the whaling areas during the war had been most valuable, owing to the use made of whale oil in the manufacture of explosives. The question ot the extermination of the whales in South Georgia and the South Shetland:.! was causing anxiety to the Government ot the Falkland Islands, and the Colonial Office, and Scott’s old ship, the Discovery, was being fitted to sail to those seas, and to make the closest investigations, and report as to the best means of averting the tragedy of the extermination of the "hales in these areas.

Dealing with the history of whaling in general, the lecturer said that at the beginning of the present century any ordinary well-instructed person, if asked about winding, would have said, that the period when people hunted whales bad (omo to a definite end, that the greater number n( whales to be found in the oceans had been caught, and that what remained were not worth troubling about. The Swedish Antarctic Expedition had, however, opened up an entirely new field as regards whale fishing since the beginning of the present century. I lie crew of this expedition had to abandon their ship, the Antarctic, but the captain was struck with the number of whales he saw in the bar South, and, being a shrewd man, he founded a company at Buenos Aires, which got to work in 1004, to hunt; the whales. The marked success of this company was followed by the formation of other companies in the neighbourhood, and at the present time there was a large and nourishing whaling industry conducting its operations on a scale which had never before been approached in the history of whaling. The two localities where these operations were carried out were South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands, and the South Shetlands. Mi- J. Middleton, Governor of the Falkland Islands, expressed the gratitude of his Government to Sir Sidney Manner for the interest he had taken in the whaling industry, and the deep studv ho had made of the subject for fifteen years, ’the studies of Sir Sidney, he said, had led to tbe appointment of a committee, which doling the war assumed a very great importance, for it was from the whales that an enormous amount of Jyrenne was obtained for munitions.

The British tax-payer, he added, was not to be taxed for the Discovery expedition, ‘"because the. whales were paying for it themselves.” (I. aught- v ) The Discovery would he a better tc-ssel than sho was twenty years ago, ii d would be the finest vessel of the kind which had ever left these snores.