322 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



made its appearance — as at the end, which marked the prohibition 

 of Norsk whaling on British coasts and the final abandonment of 

 shore stations in the north by the Norwegians themselves. More- 

 over, there was a primitive floating factory at work in 1903 and 

 there are still a fair number of shore stations running today in vari- 

 ous parts of the world — no fewxr than five were established in 

 Australia in 1951 alone — so that the blending is almost complete. 

 This overlap should not, however, in any way be construed as mean- 

 ing that the two periods are not absolutely distinct. Further, the 

 change-over was not just a matter of putting a shore station on 

 board a ship and transplanting it to new whaUng grounds. A great 

 deal more had to be done before Norwegian Period II could get 

 under way. 



The idea of the floating factory was presumably first initiated by 

 Francois Sopite, the Basque, for the only evidence we have regarding 

 the earlier Phoenician whaling activities strongly indicates that 

 those peoples towed the whole animal ashore for processing on land. 

 Since Fran9ois Sopite's time, whaling technique has wavered back and 

 forth between the shore station and some form of floating factory, 

 each new industry starting on shore, then taking to the high seas, 

 and usually ending up on shore again. Shore-based whaling requires 

 less capital, but it remains economical only so long as a sufficiency 

 of whales is available within a limited distance, and this one which 

 can be traversed by the ships used during the time that it takes for 

 decomposition to start breaking down the oil in the whale. As soon 

 as the stock of available whales within this distance drops below a 

 certain point, one of three things has to be undertaken. Either the 

 station has to be moved, faster ships with a greater cruising range 

 have to be employed, or the whales have to be wholly or partly 

 processed at sea. 



If there is still an abundance of whales available somewhere else, 

 and efficient-enough ships can be employed, while the value of the 

 products obtained is currently high, we get that most inefficient, 

 bastardized procedure, so much favored by the British, Scots, and 

 Yankees, whereby the whales are semiprocessed on the high seas and 

 the products then freighted back to a shore station for refinement. 

 This is even stupider than freighting crude mineral oils to the area 

 of their consumption for refinement, especially with the introduction 



