Some of these companies work with shore factories, others with both shore factories and large floating factories on board steamers of up to seven thousand tons burden, and each company hunts the whales with, on an average, three to four small steamers, which harpoon the whales within a radius of eighty or ninety miles and tow them in to the shore factories, or the floating factory which is at anchor in some sheltered bay. The bodies are rapidly cut up at a fully equipped land station, and both the blubber and carcass are entirely utilised. At a floating station the bodies, as a rule, are cast adrift.
Whale Meat Meal and Guano
Whale meat meal is made from fresh whale flesh; it is used for feeding cattle. It contains 17½ per cent. proteid, and guano is made from the remaining flesh and about one-third bone. The analysis of this gives 8·50 per cent. ammonia and 21 per cent. triboric phosphates. The whole of the dried bones and meat may be made into one product—a rich guano with 10 to 12 per cent. ammonia and 17 to 24 per cent. phosphates. The best whale meat is better to eat and tastes better than the best beef; it is “lighter” and more appetising. The writer proposed to supply an immense quantity to our military authorities, but the offer was not accepted.
Whalebone or Baleen
The baleen or whalebone of these finner whales is only worth about £30 per ton. It hardly pays to cure it and market it. The whalebone of the Australis or Southern Right whale has fallen to £85 per ton; it is occasionally caught. Its bones and that of the finner brought down the price of the Greenland whalebone, which a few years ago was sold at between £2000 and £3000 per ton, one good whale having a ton in its mouth, which paid the expenses of the trip.
During the short season, 1st November till end of April, in a recent year the catch in South Georgia by twenty-one steamers amounted to five thousand whales, finner, hump-back and blue whales, which gave two hundred thousand barrels of whale oil and eight thousand tons guano.
Returns from Whaling
Taking in the other islands of the Falkland Islands Dependencies in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn, the catch in a recent year amounted to four hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil—eight thousand three hundred and seventy-five tons guano, the gross value of which may be reckoned at £1,360,000. Practically the whole of this goes to Norway.
For forty-eight years this Modern Whaling has been carried on in the North Atlantic, and since 1904 the Modern Whaling which we advocated in Edinburgh in 1895 has been prosecuted by Norwegians in the South Atlantic from desolate barren British possessions, with the great results mentioned above. There are vast areas of ocean teeming with these whales where, so far, they have not been hunted, and still the general British public stands aloof and takes no share in it. Whaling to-day, from the Norwegian point of view, is an industry: three generations have been brought up on it; but from the average British point of view it is still a speculation.