Evening in the North 309 



cceded at such a rate that new sources of raw material (new whaling 

 grounds) became an urgent necessity. 



In the continued absence of any constructive conservation plan, 

 they were sought and found, within the south polar ice, by none 

 other than the now famous Captain Carl Anton Larsen. These were 

 the last resorts of the whale, and this discovery marked the opening 

 of the final period of whaling. The story will be chronicled in the next 

 chapter. The fate of the whale provides food for solemn thoughts. 

 It took over five hundred years to eliminate the right whales as a 

 profitable source of raw material. The sperms lasted two hundred 

 years, but the open-ocean rorquals were decimated in just forty 

 years. Meantime, narwhals, belugas, bottlenose, and sundry other 

 species were disposed of in even less time. Fortunate it was that one 

 last retreat remained to the blue whales, the finners, and a limited 

 number of other species, including some wandering sperms, among 

 the vast and difficult fastnesses of the antarctic ice; and even more 

 fortunate was it that man grew up mentally just in time to realize 

 that some methods could and should be devised to save these great 

 beasts. Had it not been for the Second World War, however, and 

 the consequent ascendancy of America as the controlling power in 

 international affairs, this last stock of whales would doubtless also 

 have been eliminated, for it was only America's new-found ability 

 to twist the British lion's tail by means of the acute dollar shortage 

 that finally forced Britain to ratify the conservation code and thus 

 make it a truly international mechanism for the protection of the 

 whales, albeit an inefficient, shaky, and still somewhat powerless 

 one. 



The sperm whales and, to a lesser extent, the right whales have 

 made and are still making a remarkable and unexpected comeback. 

 Very fortunately, these animals, despite their enormous bulk and 

 comparatively long, though by no means excessive, gestation period, 

 appear to have a solid standing in the over-all economy of nature on 

 this planet and at this particular time. The dinosaurs died completely 

 away, so did countless great mammals, including the large proboscid- 

 ian called the mammoth, and there seems to be only one explana- 

 tion as to why they did so. Those creatures, it appears, simply came 

 to the end of their allotted time, and they died as species just as we 

 and other animals die as individuals. In some manner which we 



