l66 THE WHALE HUNTERS 



*The world was hungry for oil and we were the ones to 

 get it. Britain, Holland, Germany, South Africa and 

 Japan sent their ships to reap the harvests of oil from the 

 Antarctic waters and in every case, if the ships were not 

 actually manned by men of Sandefiord and Tonsberg then 

 the crews had been trained by them. 



'New big factory ships could swallow twenty whales 

 a day through the tunnels in their sterns. Their improved 

 factories could boil oil not only from the blubber but 

 from the flesh, the bones and the insides ; and to-day they 

 can take the oil from the liver to help sickly children grow 

 strong; they can turn the meat into concentrated extract 

 for invalids, they can dehydrate the flesh into meal for feed- 

 ing livestock ; and they can produce valuable by-products 

 such as insulin, hormones and fertilisers. Strangely 

 enough the one part of the whale which is discarded is the 

 baleen which before the invention of plastic substitutes 

 could fetch as much as £2,000 per ton. 



'Yes, Hans, the whales in the Antarctic have played 

 their part in helping a troubled hungry world through 

 the difficulties of this twentieth century.' 



But Hans looked puzzled. 'But, Grandpa,' he asked, 

 'isn't there a danger that the whales down south will be 

 almost exterminated like the ones up north were?' 



A new look of caution came into Peter's blue deep-set 

 eyes. Han's question had hit him quite unexpectedly in 

 the most vulnerable corner of his conscience and he needed 

 a few puffs of his pipe to recover his mental equilibrum. 



'That's quite a question, Hans. It was something 

 that we harpooners never gave much thought to until 

 others with more foresight brought us to our senses. 

 Luckily our government saw the danger and in 1929 

 they stopped us killing whales with young, and then they 

 forbade the old out-dated wasteful factory ships to 

 operate. Then they got together with the British and 

 put a little more common sense into our heads. The 



