The Whale's Journey by Stephen Martin
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001 ISBN 1865082325
This is a fascinating book, summed up by the note on the front cover "a year in the life of a humpback whale, and a century in the history of whaling". Martin tracks the yearly migration of southern humpbacks from their feeding grounds in Antarctica to Northern Australia and the Pacific Islands, interspersing descriptions of the creatures and their habits with man's efforts to hunt them as they travel.
Martin notes throughout the book how little we know about some aspects of a humpback's life even "now" (the book was written in 2001), and how much of what we do know came from a collaboration between science and commercial whaling.
The information that interested me most was about the shore-based whaling that occurred in Australia and New Zealand, which tended to focus on catching humpbacks, as they usually kept close to shore and were relatively easy to catch given their slow speed. The surprising thing for me was that most shore stations were only active for relatively short periods of time, sometimes barely a dozen years in some cases.
What Martin makes clear in this book is that from even the late nineteenth century it was becoming clear to many whalers and scientists that the numbers of whales were diminishing quite quickly, and that catch levels were unsustainable. This didn't stop the industry from growing, even though many governments sought to put limits around catch sizes. When the Norwegians (followed by the Japanese and Soviets) developed factory ships that didn't rely on a shore station to process the whale, fisheries developed in international waters and little could be done to effectively manage whales and whaling.
Whaling for humpbacks eventually ceased for the simple reason that they had been fished out. From populations of tens of thousands, numbers were down to a few hundred by the 1960s. This made the catching of humpbacks uneconomical, and the catastrophic drop in numbers led to a complete ban on catching the species from 1962. Whaling in general was becoming more uneconomic by that time anyway, as the products of the whale, particularly the oil, were no longer needed for items such as foodstuffs.
The whaling itself, from shore stations, was often financially very precarious. Martin relates how some stations closed down and re-opened several times over the course of the twentieth century, as the economics of whaling waxed and waned. The lives of the people engaged in this activity were often hard - the whaling stations were usually in remote areas, the work was hard, dangerous and offensive to the senses, and the quarry became more elusive as each year passed. There is a certain sense of irony that much of the scientific knowledge we have about humpbacks come from scientists studying the whales caught by the whalemen, not to mention that whale tourism now brings almost as much money as whale killing used to, and is altogether a much more pleasant interaction for all involved.
This book well conveys the story of both the whales and the (mostly) men who fished for and studied them. There are some interesting photographs to illustrate the text, but I feel that there could have been a few more maps to help illustrate not only the whale's journey north to their breeding grounds and back south to the krill, but also illustrating the locations of the main whaling efforts.
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