Tivilight in the South 323 



of powered ships. Using sail, the long and useless hauls did not mat- 

 ter so much, despite the deterioration of the oil, but when fuel has 

 to be burned to effect the transport, the procedure becomes purely 

 asinine. The modern floating factory is bad enough, filling its 

 bunkers with twenty thousand tons of mineral oil in order to go and 

 collect twenty thousand tons of animal oil; but at least the product 

 gained is worth more than the product used. It was not always so. 



In the past, whenever the supply of whales gave out inshore, bet- 

 ter ships were devised and the animals were sought farther afield. 

 This process could have gone on indefinitely but for one fact. The 

 whales refused to cooperate: they started becoming extinct, or they 

 retired to areas beyond the reach of man. As it became impossible to 

 bring them back with any ship, man finally had to either abandon 

 the whole business or go after the whales and process them entirely 

 i?i situ in order to cover the vast cost of merely getting there. The 

 factory ship had to come; it is the final and the only answer to cur- 

 rent whaling. But the modern factory ship had to be something 

 quite different from a Basque caravel with a brick oven amidships. 



If the hackneyed phrase "the law of diminishing returns" were re- 

 phrased as "the law of aggravating returns," it would better fit the 

 predicament of the whaling industry during the second decade of 

 this century, for the more essential it became to process the whales 

 on the high seas, and the farther those seas receded from the areas of 

 consumption of the whale products, the more involved the whole 

 process became and the greater the capital outlay it required. The 

 complexities of the problem were already becoming overwhelming 

 when World War I broke out. This added three more factors to the 

 conundrum. 



First, it gave an enormous stimulus to all manner of researches in 

 many fields, which resulted in demands for products of hitherto un- 

 imagined refinement. Second, the cost of everything went up, and 

 much equipment became, at least temporarily, hard to obtain, while, 

 in the fiendish way of the so-called law of supply and demand, the 

 value of many raw materials and notably that of whale oil slumped 

 to unimagined depths on the cessation of hostilities. Third, the un- 

 bridled slaughter of whales during the war years so reduced the then 

 available stocks — we speak of the years 19 19 to 1923 —that almost 

 any whaling, either offshore or on the high seas, looked unprofitable. 



