340 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



body-heated air with a high water-vapor content which, on contact 

 with the air, cools rapidly and forms mist. 



Monumental tomes have now been written on these great beasts, 

 references to which will be found in the appendixes and bibliog- 

 raphy to this book, and yet very little is really known about them. 

 Most of the best information is locked in the memories of profes- 

 sional whalemen, but none of those persons has so far put his real 

 knowledge on permanent record, while half of what they tell others 

 is pure balderdash, for the modern whaleman is just as strange a 

 creature as his old Yankee counterpart, and no better understood 

 than the whales he hunts. He Hves in a world of rather magnificent 

 but whimsical traditions, and carries on one of the most exacting 

 jobs with a dispatch and efficiency never demanded of a factory or 

 office worker or even of a farmer, and he grumbles more but com- 

 plains less than almost any other exploited specialist. Today, he is 

 caught in the clanking, chomping jaws of a monstrous mechanical 

 Moloch that is one hundred per cent inimical to his whole mental and 

 spiritual make-up and, if the apparently more reliable accounts are 

 to be believed, the results are fraught with interest, to say the least. 

 This is nothing new, for the Yankee greenhorns loathed sperming in 

 the tropics just as fervently, and many of the British whaling crews 

 were impressed against their will. Moreover, there does not seem to 

 be anything that can be done about the situation, because nobody 

 else either wants or is able to go whaling in the Antarctic, while a 

 modern factory ship can only be run like a chemical plant. The whole 

 business is equivalent to transporting a champion ice-skating team to 

 the Central Sahara for eight months every year in order to mine 

 subterranean ice to run a brewery. 



The whaleman is a skilled hunter but hunting to a schedule de- 

 vised to maintain a chemical plant is wholly foreign to his nature. 

 And when you add to this various other strains, such as national 

 frictions, impossible weather, a crushing quota system, the vagaries 

 of such unpredictable animals as whales, the arbitrary fluctuations 

 of world markets and raw material prices, and dull food combined 

 with the total absence of women, you must inevitably encounter a 

 curiously unstable situation. 



Nonetheless, whaling still proceeds and at a tempo never before 

 attained. Of the twenty-odd expeditions that sail to the Antarctic 



