OCEANOGRAPHY 209 



Mr. Miller. Doctor, could you, just for the record, tell us how the 

 Commission is established^ who sits on it? how many members are 

 chosen ? 



Mr. Chapmax. The Commission is established under a convention 

 between Costa Rica, Panama, and the United States. This is an open 

 end convention to which any other country interested in the fishery can 

 adhere upon notification to the signatory governments and their agree- 

 ment. 



My understanding is that Ecuador is now in the process of adhering 

 to that treaty. Mexico, El Salvador, and Peru have shown a great 

 deal of interest in adhering to it ; and my guess is that in a year or two 

 or three they probably will, because the benefits that have come from 

 the research work of the Commission are becoming apparent to these 

 other governments, also. And I think this is the thing that Mr. Pelly 

 brought out that sometimes you cannot solve international political 

 problems just by voting. You liave to proceed on the basis of the 

 acquisition of new knowledge to eliminate the subsidy problems with 

 which you are dealing before you can have really something to vote 

 sensibly upon in these international forums. 



Here is a case where we could not and have not solved that interna- 

 tional political problem, but it is being solved in spite of us by the 

 generation of scientific information and the countnes are getting to- 

 gether on a practical basis even though at Geneva they talked very 

 bitterly against each other. 



The work that Dr. Schaefer lias done has led us OA'er into many 

 directions. To leani about the variations in the populations of fish 

 M-liich he was studying, he had to know more about the movements of 

 ocean currents; he did not have appropriations or facilities sufficient 

 to do this, so that this has led him to cooperate extensively with the 

 Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Office of Xaval Research 

 in particular, which does contract work with the Scripps Institution, 

 had many of the same interests with regard to ocean circulation in 

 that area of the world as did Dr. Schaefer in his specialized problems, 

 so that they have joined in almost a cohesive program of work in the 

 eastern Pacific Ocean which has been lately joined in by the Bureau 

 of Conuiiercial Fisheries in its specialized work on the tuna resources 

 there. 



There started off rather accidentally another organization wliich 

 has contributed materiall}^ to our whole knowledge of Pacific oceanog- 

 raphy. We in 1947-48, you will remember, were expanding very rap- 

 idly. The tuna market was expanding very rapidly and the Japanese 

 production of tuna had not yet hit this market, so that our whole tuna 

 industry along the coast was looking for possible new resources of 

 tuna within their geographic reach. Therefore, your people in Wash- 

 ington and Oregon and California joined with those in Hawaii to seek 

 through the Congress the establishment of the Pacific Oceanic 

 Fisheries Commission of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries based 

 in Hawaii. 



The results of this investigation again were quite unexpected and 

 not along the line that we were seeking originally. They have not 

 established any new fisheries out there although I would not say 

 that their work would not in the future lead in that direction ; but 

 what they have found under Dr. Sette and various other admin- 

 istrators since is a great deal of knowledge about the manner in which 



