Harpoon

Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling

By Andrew Darby

Allen & Unwin, 2007, 296 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

It is hard to kill a whale. Hand-held harpoon, grenade-tipped harpoon, high-powered rifle, anti-tank gun, electric lance — all have been tried, all are inhumane. Mostly, says journalist Andrew Darby in Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling, the whale will take minutes, sometimes hours, to die a painful, terrified death. This has been their lot as this majestic, intelligent, peaceful giant of the ocean has been plunged to the brink of extinction in just a few hundred years.

The decline in whale numbers has been catastrophic. The right whale was reduced from perhaps 160,000 before whaling to as little as 300 by 1920 — "about 60 breeding females from extinction". The awe-inspiring blue whale, the largest mammal ever, crashed from 239,000 to 360 or less by 1970. The Humpback, the great communicator in song, used to migrate in the tens of thousands along the coasts of Australia but by the 1960s, barely 600 could be seen off the west coast and just 100 off the east. Sperm, fin, sei — all plummeted to perilous levels.

These whales were a casualty of industrial capitalism. Whale oil was the everyday oil before petroleum. It lit cities and homes, lubricated machines, tempered steel, made jute pliable for weaving, made leather supple, and went into soap and paint making. The whales' long, elastic baleen (a tooth substitute used for skimming its main food, krill) wound up in sofa springs, chimney brushes, umbrella ribs and crinoline dress frames.

As hand-held harpoons and rowing boats gave way to more industrial killing methods in the twentieth century, the slaughter escalated. By the 1950s, factory fleets were "vacuuming whales out of the ocean". Most were taken by whalers from Norway, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands and Argentina. Australia added to the take at Albany in WA. The super-fleets of the Stalinist Soviet Union were notorious for strip-mining the ocean and grossly fudging their catch figures to circumvent the early international efforts to manage whale numbers.

Whaling nations had formed the International Whaling Commission (IWC) after World War II to preserve their industry. Their heart, however, wasn't into conservation or whale welfare. It was a whalers' club and their early decisions exacerbated the slaying. For two decades, quotas were set in terms of Blue Whale Units (BWU) rather than species by species, so the highest oil-yielding whales (after blues, the fins at two whales per BWU, sei at six BWU) were knocked off one species after another. The quota was also global, rather than nation-specific, which set up a "Whaling Olympics" as nations raced to be the first to kill as many whales as possible.

On paper, there were limits - rights (in the 1930s), humpbacks and blues (in the 1960s) were protected or had limited hunting seasons, and undersized whales, and lactating and pregnant females, were off-limits. There was, however, no monitoring of these restraints (it took decades for the IWC to agree to independent observers on the factory fleets) and the prohibitions were routinely circumvented through data falsification (at which the Soviet Union and Japan excelled). Any nation could also formally object to any limitation and simply walk away from a binding commitment. In addition, each member nation was given absolute control over how many whales it could kill in the name of "scientific research", a "truck-sized loophole" of which Australia, Britain and the US were enthusiastic early adopters before Japan was to outdo them all.

Pirate whalers abandoned even the pretense of deferring to the IWC's flimsy regulations. Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping millionaire, added millions to his fortune from pirate whaling, harpooning indiscriminately for five years in the early 1950s, and equipping the drinks bar of his motor yacht with footrests made from sperm whale teeth and bar stools upholstered with the foreskin.

It took near-extinction before the IWC, in 1982, at last decreed a global moratorium on commercial whaling. Even here, the one remaining whale in any numbers, the relatively small minke, was not safe as Japan and the Soviet Union invoked the IWC's "universal get-out clause", lodged formal objections to including the minke in the moratorium and hunted them with deadly fanaticism. Today, Japan maintains the "scientific" killing of minkes, which Japanese officials call the "cockroach of the ocean".

Japan has a bigger aim than the minke, however, and seeks international legitimacy through the IWC for overturing the moratorium and the recently declared Southern Ocean Sanctuary for whales. In the 1990s, Japan began its "Vote Consolidation Operation", a bureaucratic weasel term for a program, run by the Japanese government and whaling industry, to recruit, bully and bribe the poorer nations in the IWC.

There was a mixture of threat (against Panama's sugar exports to Japan) and bribery as "a river of yen", mostly for fisheries projects, flowed to the desperately poor Caribbean, Pacific and African recruits such as St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Palau, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, the Soloman Islands, Togo, Senegal, Morocco and land-locked Mali. Japanese grants to these countries were then held hostage to continued voting compliance.

This corruption was prettified with propaganda ribbons and bows. "Whales eat fish" was one of the increasingly bizarre fibs given a workout by Japanese officials. Poor countries were said to have the right to support Japan's killing of whales because whales ate the tuna and other fish on which the poor countries depended for food security and income. This ignored basic marine ecology — whales mainly eat krill and the greatest predators of fish are not whales but other fish, and, above all, humans, through destructive drift-net and bottom-trawling fishing methods, and habitat loss through pollution.

Japan's desperate subterfuges in the IWC are a sign of the strength of the tide of opinion against a cruel whaling industry which serves no human need (even in Japan, where whale comprises just 0.3% of total seafood consumption). Creating the waves, as Darby shows, have been, not governments or the IWC, but "environment and wildlife protection groups". Anti-whaling governments, like Australia's, are vocal in the IWC but, outside this body, their "diplomatic pressure" is ineffective — in Tokyo, "protest notes" are used for toilet paper and chauffeur-driven ambassadors are met with a sneer.

This is not surprising. Former PM John Howard called Japan "Australia's best customer" and anti-whaling rhetoric not backed by action safely earns "handy political points at home without ever troubling the stock markets" from economic sanctions that might affect the $45 billion annual trade between Australia and Japan which is heavily weighted in favour of Australian minerals, beef and seafood.

It has, instead, been Greenpeace which, from the 1970s, made whaling a "lightning rod for global species conservation", chasing whalers to the ends of the earth and bringing to light their terrible butchery. The combativity of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (ramming and sinking whaling ships) has also given vent to the frustration of a popular desire to marvel at, rather than murder, whales.

As some whale species inch their way back from extinction, the lesson, says Darby, is that there are "limits to the natural world" and (despite his optimism that "all we need to achieve is a change of heart") it will take environmentally aware, grassroots political action to save the whales and the rest of the wonderful natural world we live in and depend on.