Evening in the North 301 



Iceland along the ancient Norse oceanic highway. The second 

 marked a sudden thrust to the Antarctic, the establishment of the 

 first permanent shore stations beyond the Atlantic, and a very large 

 expansion of the whaling fleet and of capital investment in the in- 

 dustry. The third saw the establishment of Norwegian whahng sta- 

 tions all over the world, but it also marked the beginning of a reces- 

 sion in certain areas, due both to a reduction in the number of 

 whales, and to certain national restrictions. The fourth marked the 

 consolidation of the Norwegian whahng monopoly but also saw a 

 rapid and almost complete revolution m technology that brought an 

 end to this phase and the beginning of another, which we call "Nor- 

 wegian II." This is the truly modern industry, founded on the float- 

 ing factory ship and only made possible by the invention of the 

 Kvaener cooker, which we shall introduce in more detail in the next 

 chapter. The whole period which we call Norwegian I was based 

 upon the use of the shore station, either permanent or seasonal, and 

 this operation represents a recrudescence of the engineering princi- 

 ples first put to use in this industry by the Hollanders at Blubber- 

 town in Spitsbergen. 



The details of the history of the rise and expansion of Norwegian 

 shore-based whaling are as outstandingly dull as are the details of 

 any other history, except to a few profound students and those with 

 some emotional interest in the business. Nonetheless, they are star- 

 tling enough to warrant some brief over-all elucidation. The facts 

 have been published innumerable times and in several different ways, 

 each as muddling as all the others. If anyone really wants to know 

 exactly how many barrels of each kind of oil resulted from the ac- 

 tivities of those chasers operating in any one area during any one 

 season, he may find this recorded in any of four languages and in 

 masses of statistics in at least a dozen different serial publications. If, 

 on the other hand, simple souls like ourselves want to know just 

 what went on in the field of whaling as a whole between 1880 and 

 1920, they will be very hard put to it to find any single lucid exposi- 

 tion of fewer than three hundred closely printed pages in any lan- 

 guage. This period is more precisely documented than even the 

 "golden age" of American whahng, but it is just as complex and 

 much less commonly understood. 



In 1882 a shore station was established at Sorvaer in Norway with 



