REVIEWS 83on a South Georgia beach littered
with try-pots abandoned by sealers.
Larsen’s first financial backer was
whaling captain Svend Foyn, an in-
ventor of the grenade- harpoon gun,
which had made whaling possible on
an industrial scale when it was intro-
duced in the mid-nineteenth century.
Blue whales were especially prized,
and were larger and faster than the
right whale, but were no match for
Larsen’s fleets. Other businessmen fol-
lowed, setting up shop in the South
Shetland, South Orkney,
and South Sandwich Is-
lands. The unregulated
industry left carcasses to
rot on the beaches.
Right whales and preg-
nant females of all spe-
cies were protected by
new regulations in 1914,
just as demand for whale
oil soared with the onset
of World War I. Whale
oil greased the war ma-
chine. It was used to
produce nitroglycerin
explosives, and also pro-
tected soldiers from
trench foot. Between
1915 and 1916, nearly
twelve thousand whales
were caught off South
Georgia, and humpbacks
went commercially ex-
tinct. McCann describes
an emerging pattern:
As one species was
hunted to the brink of
extinction the whalers
turned to another, con-
verging on areas where their prey
gathered to breed or feed, then
slaughtering and extracting precious
oils until the beaches were silent and
the waters empty.In 1925, the British introduced steam-
powered factory whaling ships, which
could flense a whale and boil its blubber
in less than an hour, without needing to
return to land. The same year, the Brit-
ish government, fearing for the contin-
ued productivity of whale stocks,
launched the Discovery Investigations,
a series of scientific voyages to study the
life cycles, diets, and migration patterns
of whales, and to observe firsthand the
effects of the industry. Francis Downes
Ommanney, a naturalist with the pro-
gram, reflected on his visit to Grytviken:What an outcry there would have
been long ago, as Sir Alister Hardy
has remarked, if herds of great land
mammals, say elephant or buffalo,
were chased in armored vehicles firing
explosive grenades from cannon, and
then hauled close at the end of a line
and bombarded again until dead.By 1930, there were forty-one factory
ships in the Southern Ocean, takingnearly thirty thousand blue whales in a
single season. Within five years, that
species, too, was commercially extinct.
Whaling abated during World
War II but resumed in force after
that conflict’s end. The newly formed
Uni ted Nations established the In-
ternational Whaling Commission to
conserve what was left of whale
stocks, which no longer supplied
lighting fuel but rather the essential
ingredient in margarine. By the mid-
Sixties, however, fin and sei whales
were slim pickings in the Antarctic,
and the industry inevitably shuttered.
An international ban on commercial
whaling wasn’t imposed until 1986,in response to pressure from Green-
peace and indigenous activist groups
to halt the last holdouts.
By 1959, twelve nations had signed
the historic Antarctic Treaty, which
set aside the continent for “peaceful”
use, protecting its flora and fauna and
the access of scientists, as well as spe-
cifically prohibiting the testing of
nuclear bombs. Fifty-four nations now
abide by it. Yet perhaps the only ani-
mal wholly protected by the treaty is
the continent’s single native insect, aflightless midge that can survive par-
tial freezing—an antipodal analogue
of the Arctic’s woolly bear moth. This
is because, as Sylvia Earle says wryly
in The Last Ocean, a 2012 documen-
tary about the Antarctic biologists
who successfully lobbied to make a
marine reserve in the Ross Sea, “half
a century ago, nations were wise
enough to come to an agreement to
forestall exploiting the land around
Antarctica, and weren’t wise enough
to do the same thing for the ocean.”
The management of the ocean was
left to the Commission for the Con-
servation of Antarctic Marine Liv-
ing Resources (CCAMLR), a body ofPhotograph of a blue whale and whalers in Grytviken, South Georgia,
by Frank Hurley, circa 1914–17. Courtesy the National Library of Australia, Canberra