32 



WHALES 



whale a few moments after it was fired. The explosion caused so much 

 damage to the whale that it was killed very quickly. 



Fast catcher-ships, harpoon guns and shell harpoons thus made it 

 possible to pursue Rorquals, animals which had previously eluded the 

 whalers. As we have seen. Rorquals have slim bodies (Fig. 9), a small 

 dorsal fin, longitudinal grooves on their throats and chests, flat heads 

 and shorter whalebone plates than Right Whales, from which they are 

 furthermore distinguished by their speed and by the fact that their car- 

 casses do not float. To keep them afloat in the water, air must be pumped 

 into them. The biggest Rorqual is the Blue Whale, a gigantic animal that 

 can attain a length of 100 feet and a weight of 130 tons (Fig. 135). Its 

 average length, however, is just under 79 feet. The somewhat smaller Fin 

 Whale has an average length of 68 feet and a maximum length of 82 feet. 

 Both species behave in much the same way as the Humpback Whale, 

 which we have discussed earlier; in the summer they keep to the colder 

 waters of the Arctic and Antarctic and they winter in tropical or sub- 

 tropical oceans, covering vast distances during their yearly migrations. 

 The Sei Whale is yet another Rorqual - smaller and slimmer than the Fin 

 Whale, and generally found in warmer waters. Finally, there is Bryde's 

 Whale which differs little from the Sei Whale but which is found exclu- 

 sively in warm waters, i.e. off the coast of Southern Africa, in the Bay of 

 Bengal, in the Malacca Straits, in the Caribbean and in the Northern 

 Pacific. (There are some indications, however, that it also occurs off 

 Australia.) The Little Piked Whale, too, is a Rorqual, but it is a dwarf, 

 less than 30 feet long, and we shall discuss it separately because it is of no 

 interest to what is called the big whaling industry. 



Svend Foyn's discoveries c^uickly led to a vast expansion of land 

 stations all along the Norwegian coast and it was not long before similar 

 stations were set up in Iceland, Ireland, the Faroes and the Shetland 

 Islands. As early as 1885, 20 Norwegian companies with 34 stations caught 

 1,287 whales off the Finmark coast (Norway), and other countries soon 

 followed suit. As land stations in Newfoundland, Labrador, Murmansk, 

 British Columbia, California, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand 

 were brought up to date, the peace of Rorquals was shattered all over the 

 world. In 1908 South Africa established her first land station, soon to be 

 followed by Chile, Brazil and Peru. 



The great discoveries of Koch and Pasteur had caused such changes 

 in antiseptic techniques, particularly in North America and Western 

 Europe, that the population of these areas increased by leaps and bounds. 

 Simultaneously there occurred a general increase in the standard of living 

 caused by a variety of factors. Both sets of circumstances led to an increas- 

 ing demand for fats. Whalebone had by then fallen out of favour because 



