RORQUALS OR FIN WHALES 239 



nearly 14,000 — an enormous number when compared with the 

 scale on which the old Right Whale fishery was pursued. 

 Although the figures given here are mainly taken from shore 

 station and floating factory records, another element, presently 

 to become the dominating one, played a part in the catch 

 secured. In 1923 the same Captain C. A. Larsen who had 

 started whaling in the south sailed into the Ross Sea with a 

 factory ship, the " Sir James Clark Ross", accompanied by 

 five whale catchers, and, working on the high seas at the edge 

 of the ice, brought back a cargo of 17,000 barrels of oil. This 

 method of fishing was continued with increasing success in 

 the years that followed. This venture of Larsen's led to a 

 geneml adoption of pelagic whaling, as the method of using 

 factory ships in the open sea is called. New ships were built, 

 and old ones converted, and these vessels, having slipways to 

 take the whales on board for flensing and being independent 

 of a harbour for shelter and for supplies of water, could go 

 where whales were most abundant. They went to the whaling 

 grounds at the beginning of the season and remained at sea 

 till its close. Fuel was transferred to them and whale-oil 

 from them by transport vessels, and as work was carried out in 

 high latitudes, where during part of the time, at any rate, there 

 is no darkness, it continued throughout the twenty-four hours 

 of the day. The whalers were not restricted at first by 

 regulations comparable to tnose under which licences had 

 formerly been granted to shore stations, and by the end of the 

 southern summer of 1930-31, 3,420,410 barrels of oil had been 

 produced in the one season from 37,465 whales. Factory ships 

 with their attendant catchers, extending round three-quarters 

 of the Antarctic continent, had effected a slaughter of the 

 great whalebone whales quite unprecedented in the history of 

 whaling. A drop in the price of oil resulted. In the following 

 season the Norwegian-owned companies did not send their 

 factories south and the world production was reduced to a 

 figure of less than a million bairels, comparable with that of 

 about eight years earlier. 



The seasons 1932-33 and 1933-34 saw Norwegian and some 

 British companies working under a quota agreement which 

 was to limit the number of whales to be slaughtered. Even 

 then the catches for the two seasons were over 24,000 and 



