1 The Twilight of Britain's Antarctic Whaling Industry Lyndsie Bourgon Matriculation #1500

189 Pages·2017·2.12 MB·English

“I tell you, they’re oil mad”.1
The Twilight of Britain’s Antarctic Whaling Industry

Lyndsie Bourgon
Matriculation #150018736

Supervisor: Dr. John Clark
Date of Submission: 18 August 2017

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of MLitt Environmental History in the
School of History, University of St Andrews.

1 Harry R. Lillie, The Path Through Penguin City, p. 167.
2
Candidate's declaration:

I, Lyndsie Bourgon, hereby certify that this MLitt dissertation, which is 14,746 words in length,
has been written by me, and that it is the record of work carried out by me, and that it has not
been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree.

Date: 18 August 2017
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Abstract: The final days of Britain’s Antarctic whaling industry took place in the years following
the Second World War. In considering the factors that led to the decline of the industry, this
dissertation argues that societal and technological changes that occurred in tandem with the
Second World War influenced – and in some cases, hastened – the final years of the whaling
industry. Leaps in technology made it easier to fish for, and process, whales in the waters
surrounding Antarctica, and shifts in whale product usage at home altered the way that whaling
companies conducted business. At the same time, post-war changes in public conceptions of
violence and cruelty influenced the way governments and whalers saw the act of whaling overall.
As Britain entered the latter-half of the twentieth century having experienced violence at home
and in Europe, the overfishing of whales became another example of cruelty that would soon
become intolerable.
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Introduction:
“A small speck near the bottom of an unfamiliar map may be all that South Georgia means to
most”. -- Robert Cushman Murphy2

The death rattle of twentieth-century British whaling took place at the edge of the world.
By 1963, whaling in Antarctic waters (indeed, British whaling worldwide) had run its course –
the “catch logs”3 of whaling companies showed an ecological and economic loss that had played
out over decades. 4 “We all realided that we were near the end of our great whaling venture”,
wrote whaling station manager Gerald Elliot, of the early-1960s.5 Britain’s industry would peter
out through slow ecological and social demise: whale stocks had been depleted, and thousands of
whalers found themselves without work.

This dissertation aims to determine what factors contributed to the end of British-
Antarctic whaling, and how that end was experienced by those who worked in the industry. It
argues that three main contributors, nestled together like a matryoshka doll, led to the demise of
Britain’s Antarctic whaling: overfishing, a change in demand for whale products, and a shift in
public conceptions of cruelty and morality. A closer look at these factors, in turn, demonstrates
the overarching influence of technological and societal changes that arose from the Second World

2 Robert Cushman Murphy, “A Sub-Antarctic Island”, Harper’s Magazine, January 1914,
<https://archive.org/stream/harpersmagazine05projgoog/harpersmagazine05projgoog_djvu.txt> [16 August 2017]
3 Paperwork, often handwritten in large notebooks, kept by whaling companies that tracked how many whales, and
of which species, were caught during the season.
4 Gerald Elliot, A Whaling Enterprise: Salvesen in the Antarctic (Wilby, 1998), p. 163.
5 Elliot, Whaling Enterprise, p. 163.
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War. These changes and their influence on the industry were a precursor to broader anti-whaling
sentiment and activism that would take place 20 years later.

A brief overview of Antarctic ecology and a history of the region provides initial and
important context for understanding whaling as an economic and social force. What we know as
Antarctic “pelagic” whaling – that is, whaling that took place in the Southern Ocean, as opposed
to harvesting from a base at shore – was, in actuality, sub-Antarctic whaling which revolved
around the isolated island of South Georgia.6 A crescent-shaped sliver of land sixty-two miles
long and eighteen miles wide, South Georgia is located in the waters between Antarctica and the
Falkland Islands.7 It boasts a chain of large, spiky mountains that run through its centre, which
slope via glacial valleys towards the shoreline, and the island’s many harbours.8 The core of
South Georgia makes it a unique and particularly useful outpost—unlike neighbouring islands,
which were formed by volcanic action, its rocks are sedimentary.9 The coasts were carved via
“drowned topography”, meaning its bays rest on a foundation of old mountain valleys that have
been flooded by the ocean. These submerged summits guide undersea currents travelling from
the southwest to create a rich feeding ground of crustacea for animals including seals, penguins,
seabirds, and whales.10

Britain’s early-modern whaling occurred in the North Atlantic and around Greenland and
spanned three hundred years, laying the groundwork for eventual expansion into Antarctic

6 W.F. Budd, “The Scientific Imperative for Antarctic Research” in J. Jabour-Green and M. Haward (eds.), The
Antarctic: Past, Present and Future. Antarctic CRC Research Report #28 (Hobart, 2002), p. 43.
7 Harrison L. Matthews, South Georgia: The British Empire’s Subantarctic Outpost, Bristol (1931), p. 1
8 Ibid., p. 1.; R.B. Robertson, Of Whales and Men (London, 1956), p. 57.
9 Matthews, South Georgia., p. 2.
10 Ibid., pp. 4-6, 37.
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waters. A century before northern waters became unproductive, South Georgia had been spotted
by merchant explorers, and in 1775 the island was circumnavigated by Captain James Cook.11
Later, the doomed 1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (famously led by Ernest
Shackleton) would associate the romanticism and danger of exploration’s Heroic Age with the
island’s name.12 The promise of whale oil brought men to South Georgia’s shores permanently
in the early-twentieth century—while the potential for whaling in the Southern Ocean had always
looked promising, the early-1900s provided the technology needed (such as steam-powered
whale catchers and the explosive harpoon) to make it a reality.13 The whales in southern waters
consisted of rorqual whales, like the blue and humpback, and sperm whales (sperm oil was so
valuable that it was kept pure and separated from the rest).14 Antarctic whaling would go on to
become a global industry, though one dominated by two countries: Britain and Norway.15 The
British Colonial Office had turned its gaze toward the region as a site of national interest, because
whaling activities could encourage scientific advancement, and economic progress.16 After
Argentina built a station in South Georgia in 1904, the British government established the South
Georgia Company, which leased two harbours along Stromness Bay – Leith Harbour and
Stromness Harbour – separated from one another by low headlands and a dirt track.17 The nerve

11 Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade (London, 1978), p. 97; Robert Clarke, “Whales and Whaling”,
Advancement of Science 11(43), 1954, p. 305; Robert Headland, The Island of South Georgia (Cambridge, 1984) p.
17.
12 Budd, “The Scientific Imperative”, p. 46.
13 The explosive harpoon was pioneered by the Norwegian Svend Foyn, whose inventions bridged the divide
between what we now know as “modern whaling” and the preceding, handheld harpoon early-modern methods. J.N.
Tønnessen and A.O. Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling (London, 1982), pp. 6-7; John Newton, A Savage
History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans (New South Wales, 2013), p. 210; Jackson, British Whaling
Trade, pp. 97-98, 158-160, 170.
14 Clarke, “Whales and Whaling”, p. 307, 309.
15 Tønnessen and Johnsen, Modern Whaling, pp. 182-187.
16 Matthews, South Georgia, p. 2; Budd, “The Scientific Imperative”, p. 43.
17 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, p. 172; Tønnessen and Johnsen, Modern Whaling, p. 157; John Bannister, Great
Whales (Collingwood, 2008), p. 22; Matthews, South Georgia, p. 9; UECSC, Tranche 1, A/140, “Notes on the South
Georgia Company”.
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centre of British activity in the region was Leith Harbour, opened in 1909 and leased to the
Edinburgh-based company Salvesen of Leith.18 While two British companies operated in South
Georgia – the other being Hector Whaling – this dissertation focuses on Salvesen, as it was the
larger of the two. Leith Harbour was equipped with tin buildings that housed not only living
quarters for thousands of whalers and captains, but also full processing plants that did everything
from grind whale bones into meal, to melt blubber and produce oil that would be shipped home in
barrels.19

The history of commercial fishery trends is an underdeveloped subject in the field of
environmental history, in part due to a scientific focus on contemporary trends over analyses of
marine population changes over broad swathes of time.20 However, the development of marine
history provides scientists with a background in environmental management, and historians the
context necessary for understanding larger ecological trends.21 As marine scholars have argued, a
fundamental aspect of environmental history is identifying the equilibrium between ecosystems
and human societies.22 Marine history, however, is most often built upon statistical records
compiled from company catch logs and national records.23 Likewise, the history of modern
Antarctic whaling is often an inherently economic undertaking, analysed through barrel counts,
bags of meat meal, and quotas of whales caught. In analysing the decline of Western whaling, the
major works, such as J.N. Tønnessen and A.O. Johnsen’s tome The History of Modern Whaling

18 This dissertation refers to the company simply as “Salvesen” for clarity.
19 Vamplew, Salvesen, p. 213.
20 Poul Holm, David J. Starkey and Tim D. Smith, The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental
History (St. John’s, 2001), p. xiii.
21 Holm, Starkey and Smith, The Exploited Seas, p. xiii.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., p. xiv.
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and Gordon Jackson’s The British Whaling Trade, agree that through technological advancement
and changing markets, whaling could not remain profitable.24 Alongside this, political historians
have deconstructed the diplomatic history of the International Whaling Commission (IWC),
arguing that there was a failure not only in corporate restraint, but in the establishment and
monitoring of government-assigned quotas.25 Despite the fact that more than half of all whales
officially killed in Antarctica were hunted in the years following the Second World War, the links
between these changes and the war have not been expressly unravelled—a closer consideration of
the implications of war promises insight into larger cultural forces applied to the whaling
industry.26 Similarly, considerations of Salvesen’s whaling enterprises have been chronicled
through memoir from company executives and inspectors, but oral histories collected from
former whalers have thus far been underrepresented in whaling historiography.27 The scholar
Bjorn Basberg has applied a social historian’s gaze to the happenings on whaling ships and
deconstructed the ship-like social organisation of shore stations, for example, but most employee-
level perspectives primarily come from published primary sources. 28 As Basberg notes,
industrial decline has been extensively researched within business and economic history: the
following aims to consider that decline from a tightrope strung between the social and economic
realms. 29

24 Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, pp. 608-609; Jackson, British Whaling Trade, p. 258;
Vamplew, Salvesen, p. 253.
25 See Elliot, Whaling Enterprise; Jackson, British Whaling Trade; Tønnessen and Johnsen, Modern Whaling; and
Kurkpatrick Dorsey’s Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle, 2013).
26 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, p. 239.
27 Including Graeme Somner’s From 70 North to 70 South: A History of the Christian Salvesen Fleet (Edinburgh,
1984), Wray Vamplew’s Salvesen of Leith (Edinburgh, 1974), and W.R.D. McLaughlin’s Call to the South: A Story
of British Whaling in Antarctica (London, 1976).
28 Bjorn Basberg, “A Ship Ashore? Organisation and Living Conditions at South Georgia Whaling Stations, 1904-
1960”, International Journal of Maritime History XIV(1), June 2002.
29 Bjorn Basberg, “A Crisis that Never Came: The decline of the Antarctic Whaling Industry in the 1950s and
1960s”, The Mariner’s Mirror 99(20), May 2013, p. 197.
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While the Second World War presaged much of the whaling industry’s final days, the
efficiency of Leith Harbour was also tied to the upheavals of the First World War. In the lead-up
to that war, the whaling industry’s processes were modernised and honed for efficiency—for
instance, the process of hydrogenation facilitated en masse production of margarine.30 After war
broke out, whale oil also became of crucial importance beyond foodstuffs. It acted as a vital
ingredient in glycerol, a residue from soap making that was used in the production of
explosives.31 As stocks of oil were depleted during wartime shortages, the government eased
regulations on operations in the Antarctic, and British companies were free to whale throughout
the conflict.32 This would lead, however, to irreparable damage to the humpback whale stocks in
the waters around South Georgia. Humpbacks have a reputation for being lazy and sociable
whales, meaning they required relatively little effort to hunt and kill and were thus easier for
whaling companies like Salvesen to harvest. 33 Eventually, overfishing would deplete their
numbers, forcing a shift towards hunting rorqual.34 By 1926, it was clear that a scarcity of blue
whales should also be expected, and catchers were forced to turn to smaller whales, like the fin,
to make their quotas. Still, whaling companies believed there were, “more and better whales over
the horizon…”35 In the interwar years, serious measures were put in place to encourage whaling
outside of the immediate vicinity of South Georgia.36 Salvesen invested heavily in new vessels
that would allow them to expand out from whaling near the bay.37 These massive, 10,000-ton

30 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, p. 179.
31 Ibid., p. 176; Matthews, South Georgia, p. 143.
32 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, pp. 176-77.
33 Ibid., p. 163, p. 173; Matthews, South Georgia, p. 38.
34 Matthews, South Georgia, p. 147.
35 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, p. 197.
36 Ibid., p. 195.
37 Ibid., p. 193.
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“floating factory” ships were manned by hundreds of whalers that would butcher and process
whales at sea. This left catchers free to travel further into the open ocean to find more whales –
they simply caught a whale, placed a flag in it to be identified by factory ships, and sailed off to
chase more.38 Hauls were then delivered to factory ships, overcoming the logistical hurdle of
carcasses rotting beyond usefulness before reaching Leith Harbour.39

This era of immense harvest with exalted technology did not last. Declining oil prices in
the late 1920s suddenly made whaling inefficient. At the same time, it was easier than ever to
take more whales, and the hunting grounds had extended.40 By the 1930/31 season, consumers
had shifted away from paying for whale oil.41 The next season, all countries other than Britain
had stopped whaling.42 It proved a temporary slump, caused by investment in technology that
produced a glut of whale oil and allowed an ease in overfishing. Natural resource industries are
cyclical – this dissertation argues that the British-Antarctic whaling industry in the mid-twentieth
century fell to similar forces that almost crushed the industry right after the First World War. 43
The outbreak of the Second World War prolonged whaling’s life and fundamentally altered the
world in which the industry would then be asked to operate within. However, the lead up to 1963
was influenced greatly by the changing atmosphere of post-war Britain. This era marked a
change not only in the processes of whaling, but the public perception of cruelty as well. Using a
thematic structure to understand the overlapping forces at play in the demise of an industry, this

38 Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, p. 335.
39 Ibid., p. 201.
40 Ibid, pp. 204-205; Vamplew, Salvesen, p. 188.
41 Tønnessen and Johnsen, History of Modern Whaling, p. 386-387.
42 Ibid., p. 391.
43 Jeffrey Frankel, “The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey”, NBER Working Paper #15836, 13 May 2011,
<https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/jfrankel/AzerNaturalResourceCurse.doc> [25 July 2017]