DESTRUCTION FOR SKINS AND OIL 175 



Now the Sperm Whale and the Whalebone Whales are 

 so scarce that they no longer offer a profitable fishery in 

 our northern waters, and attention has been turned to species 

 which formerly were passed by in contempt. 



On the coasts of Scotland, before the war, the whaling 

 stations of the Outer Hebrides and of the Shetlands, manned 

 by Norwegian fishermen, accounted for hundreds of Rorquals 

 (Bal&noptera) a year; and here as well as in the Southern 

 Oceans, where in the Falkland Islands group, 9429 Whales 

 were slain in the season of 1913-14, the slaughter is bound 

 to bring even these flourishing species of the Whale stock 

 near extinction, if legislation does not speedily protect them 

 by close seasons or other devices. Rorquals or Finners are 

 slain entirely for their blubber, and in South Georgia the 

 carcases are set adrift to rot in the sea, so that huge decaying 

 masses are said to lie for miles round the different stations. 

 But in these lean days the attention of the Food Controller 

 might with profit be drawn to the fact that in the seventeenth 

 century the people of the Western Isles of Scotland found 

 by experience that Whales supplied nourishing food, for this 

 Martin was assured of, "particularly by some poor meagre 

 people who became plump and lusty by this Food in the 

 space of a week; they call it Sea Pork." Their method of 

 capturing the "Whales," probably the Pilot or Ca'aing 

 Whale the Round-headed Porpoise (Globicephalus melas] 

 was of the simplest. A school having been sighted 



the Natives employ many boats together in Pursuit of the Whales chasing 

 them up into the Bays, till they wound one of them mortally and then it 

 runs ashore, and they say that all the rest follow the track of its Blood, and 

 run themselves also on shore in like manner ; by which means many of 

 them are killed. About five years ago there were fifty young whales killed 

 in this manner, and most of them eaten by the common People. 



Of Whales it may be said that inordinate destruction 

 compelled by the greed of gain, has far outrun the natural 

 increase of the race, so that all the oceans of the world have 

 been impoverished, and the seas of Scotland have shared in 

 the loss, being deprived of many a visitor such as, in the 

 old days, made a chance pilgrimage from the northern ocean. 



