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Article Excerpt
In late October of 1966, an imposing ship steamed quietly through the placid waters of the Suez Canal. Clad in drab industrial gray, and flying a Soviet hammer and sickle flag at her masthead, the vessel was accompanied by a large fleet of smaller craft. Any observer able to decipher Cyrillic script could have read, in rusting metallic letters on her bow, the name Sovetskaya Ukraina. The more experienced would perhaps have identified her as a whaling factory ship, traveling with her attendant fleet of catcher boats and scouting vessels on a transit that would take them south into the Red Sea and beyond.
Although the whaling fleet may have presented a noteworthy sight, Sovetskaya Ukraina's passage through the Canal was nothing unusual. As far as anyone knew, she was bound once more for the great whaling grounds of the Antarctic, and was simply taking the shortest route there from her home port of Odessa on the Black Sea.
A few days later, however, as the fleet entered the Gulf of Aden, it abruptly broke its southbound track. Unmarked by anyone except some local fishermen, Sovetskaya Ukraina and her catchers turned to the northeast. As they cruised within sight of the desert coastline of Oman, the fleet fanned out. On November 4th, they began to kill whales.
A whaling fleet engaged in the practice of whaling is hardly cause for comment. What made these catches unusual, however, was that almost all of them were illegal.
Over the next two weeks, the vessels of the Soviet fleet swept the northwestern Indian Ocean. Their search for whales took them from Oman to the Gulf of Kutch off Pakistan, through offshore waters west of the Indian city of Bombay, and south to the Maldive Islands. By the time Sovetskaya Ukraina finally resumed her course for the Antarctic on November 21st, her catcher boats had delivered more than three hundred whales to the huge floating factory for processing. Most of the animals had been either humpbacks, Megaptera novaeangliae, or blue whales, Balaenoptera musculus, two species that were officially considered "protected" under the international regulations that governed commercial whaling.
When the Soviet fleet reached the Antarctic, the pattern was repeated. Already-depleted and supposedly protected stocks of whales were plundered for several months until the onset of the austral winter. Finally, as the weather turned increasingly foul, the factory ship and her catchers began the long journey home.
In keeping with its obligations as a signatory to international whaling agreements, the Soviet government dutifully reported that the Sovetskaya Ukraina fleet had taken a total of 2,727 whales during the 1966-67 season, all of them "legal" species such as sperm, Physeter macrocephalus; fin, Balaenoptera physalus; and sei, Balaenoptera borealis; whales. The actual catch was 5,127--a difference of 2,400 whales. Nor was Sovetskaya Ukraina operating alone. Elsewhere, two other Soviet factory fleets had taken a further 5,323 animals that went unreported. In a single season, 7,723 whales had literally disappeared without a trace.
This was neither the first nor the most productive year for illegal whaling. In just two Antarctic seasons (1959-60 and 1960-61), Sovetskaya Ukraina (Fig. 1) and another floating factory, Slava (Fig. 2), killed a staggering 25,000 humpback whales in the waters south of Australia and New Zealand.
This flagrant disregard for international agreement, and for the declining status of Antarctic whale stocks, was no renegade act of piracy by the commanders of the fleets concerned. The illegal catches of that whaling season were simply the latest in a carefully planned official strategy that had been implemented almost 20 years before. Few people suspected it, but the Soviet Union had been plundering the world's whale populations with abandon since 1947. By the time that the illegal catches finally ended in 1973, the Soviets had killed probably over 200,000 more whales than they had officially reported. And in the process, they had quite possibly succeeded in dooming at least one population of whales--that of the right whale in the eastern North Pacific--to extinction.
The story of whaling in the twentieth century is largely one of excess. It is also a story of technology finally catching up with greed.
In Herman Melville's day, whales were caught using methods that had changed little in centuries. Men set out in small boats and had to approach dangerously close to a whale before hurling a hand-held harpoon at the animal's huge body. It was a risky business, and not very efficient. Whales could escape. Boats could be overturned. And some species were simply too fast to be caught.
By the turn of the 20th century, two inventions had changed all this. Introduction of the steam engine allowed men to hunt even the fastest whales. Species which had been out of reach of vessels powered solely by wind in a sail, or human strength applied to oars, were suddenly fair game. In particular, whalers could now easily catch the greatest prizes of all, the huge blue and fin whales. At the same time, the invention of the explosive harpoon provided whalers with a means to kill whales more quickly and efficiently, and from a distance.
This revolution in whaling was completed with two more innovations. The compressor solved the long-standing problem of how to prevent whale carcasses from sinking: now, whalers could pump compressed air into a dead whale's body to keep it afloat. Finally, in the 1920's, the factory ship was introduced, freeing whalers from their ties to land. Factory fleets could remain at sea for months, killing and processing large numbers of whales with grim efficiency. Whaling had finally come into the industrial age.
With timing that was ironically coincidental, the beginning of the...
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