Twilight in the South 341 



each year, half are Norwegian, three British, two Japanese, and one 

 each Hollander, South African, Russian, German, Italian, and Ar- 

 gentinian. Almost all the actual whaling operations are, however, 

 conducted by Norwegians, though they are nominally managed and 

 controlled by the nationals under whose flag they sail. A very high 

 percentage of the various engineering departments in this fleet are 

 Scots, but the deck crews who actually sail the ships are almost in- 

 variably "Black" Scots, among whom the Shetland Islanders, or 

 "Shelties," are most numerous. Curiously, almost all the expeditions 

 are financed by British holding companies, despite protestations to 

 the contrary by the Norsk, the Argentineans, and the American 

 offices of the lone German outfit. This division of labor in the mod- 

 ern industry is interesting, to say the least, for in it we see the ulti- 

 mate outcome of all the vast history of whaling that has preceded it. 

 The Norsk do the whaling, the descendants of their ancient neolithic 

 cousins (the Shetlanders) do the sailing, the Scots build the ships and 

 maintain them and their engines, and the English pay for the whole 

 business, use most of the products, and take most of the profits. The 

 modern whaling expedition, however, carries also a polyglot crowd 

 of technicians, who run complex machines like radar, assess chemi- 

 cals, and prosecute purely scientific investigations. 



The principal results of Captain Carl Anton Larsen's first experi- 

 mental expedition to the Ross Sea were the proper organization of 

 the whale hunting and the proper designing of appropriate factory 

 ships. The latter began to come off the stocks in short order, cul- 

 minating in the immense Terdje Viking. Despite the enormity of the 

 initial outlay, the need was so great that the capital was immediately 

 raised and for the most part in England. 



The result is a number of small specialist fleets each consisting of 

 an enormous floating factory with a slipway aft between her twin 

 screws, and filled with a mass of tanks, cookers, chemical laboratories, 

 and machinery, and an assortment of other craft which today in- 

 cludes as many as a dozen chasers to hunt and kill the whales, two or 

 three buoy boats to collect and mark the catches and kill stragglers, 

 two corvettes to tow them to the factory, and sometimes even a 

 tanker to transport fuel and supplies to the fleet and take its finished 

 products to the nearest shipping port. The whole thing is utterly 

 fantastic, but it works. 



