MONEY IN WHALES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18690, 22 April 1924, Page 9

MONEY IN WHALES.

NEW "DISCOVERY" VENTURE. CAPTAIN SCOTT'S OLD SHIP. DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRY i [FROM OCR OWN CORRESPONDENT.] LONDON. Msr. 6. In a lecture on whaling research at the Art Workers' Guildhall. Sir Sidney Harmer referred to the new Discovery expedition in the Antarctic.

The average catch of whales for a season, he said, was from 10.000 to 11.000, with a value of about one million sterling. Britain's control of the whaling areas during the war had been most valuable, owing to the use made of whale oil in the manufacture of explosives. The question of the extermination of the whales in South Georgia and the South Shetlands was causing anxiety to the Government of the Falkland Islands and the Colonial Office, and Scott's old ship, the Discovery, was being fitted, to sail to those seas and to make the closest investigations, and report as to the best means of averting the tragedy of the extermination of the whales in those areas.

Dealing with the history of whaling in general, the lecturer said that at the beginning of the present century any ordinary well-instructed person, if asked about whaling, wou'd have said that the period when people hunted whales' had come to a definite end, that the greater number of whales to be found in the oceans had been caught, and that what remained were not worth troubling about. The Swedish Antarctic expedition had, however, opened up an entirely new field as regards whale fishing since the beginning of the present century. The crew of this expedition had to abandon their ship, the Antarctic, but the captain was struck with the number of whales he saw in the Far South, and, being a shrewd man, he founded a company at Buenos Aires, which got to work in 1904 to hunt the whales.

The marked success of this company was followed by the formation of other companies in the neighbourhood, and at the present time there was a large and flourishing whaling industry conducting its operations on a scale which had never before been approached in the history of whaling. The two localities where these operations were cai-ried out were South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands, and the South Shetlands. Mr. J. Middleton. Governor of the Falkland Islands, expressed the gratitude of his Government to Sir Sidney Harmer for the interest he had taken in the whaling industrv, and the deep study he had made of the subject for 15 years. The studies of Sir Sidney, he said, had led to the appointment of. a committee, which during the war assumed a very great importance, for it was from the whales that an enormous amount of glycerine was obtained for munitions. The British taxpayer, he added, was not to be taxed for the Discovery expedition, "because the whales were paying for it themselves." (Laughter.) The Discovery would be a better vessel than she was 20 years ago, and would be the finest' vessel of the kind which had ever left these shores.