The End of Big Blubber

Day after day, Industrialist Anders Jahre, 77, padded about his red brick mansion on a hill above the Norwegian town of Sandefjord and brooded over a decision he had to make. As he gazed down at the harbor of Norway's biggest whaling port, Jahre knew that there was only one way his decision could go. Finally, and sadly, Norway's last active whaling-fleet owner passed the word.

After 40 years of expeditions to the Ant arctic, Jahre's Kosmos Co. was going out of the whaling business.

Since Norway's six other major whaling firms had previously made the same decision, the announcement put the country itself out of a proud and profitable business. It left the Antarctic to the Japanese and Russians.

Small Catch, Slim Prices. Jahre made his choice on economic grounds. To outfit and dispatch the factory ship and catcher boats that make up a whaling expedition costs about $3,000,000 a season. In a good year, the catch of whales can return many times that amount in meat and oil. But despite the efforts of an international whaling commission, whalers have so depleted the Antarctic that catches today are uneconomically small. Ten years ago, factory ships sent to sea by Norwegian owners processed 905,000 barrels of oil from 31,000 whales in one season. Last year the country's ships were able to bring back only 80,500 barrels from 15,000 whales, which now run quite a bit smaller than they used to.

In Norway, where whale oil has been used as an ingredient in margarine, the price has fallen largely because of heavy competition from fish oil; whale oil is now $163 a ton, one-third less than it was a decade ago. One way to overcome the price drop might be to follow the Japanese example and process every part of a whale, from tooth to tail fluke. But this means a considerable extra investment in factory-ship equipment that the Norwegians are no longer willing to make, especially since their government, while urging them to continue whaling, has offered no subsidy to make it profitable. When Jahre tied up his factory ship Kosmos IV, it marked the end of an enterprise that made millionaires out of owners and national heroes out of the top gunners who manned the harpoons.

A Special Breed of Men. Norwegian whalers first sailed into the Antarctic in 1904; for years after that, their voyages sounded like something out of Herman Melville. The trip to the whaling grounds took a tedious four weeks. The seas were awesome and the food terrible. Even seasoned sailors were sick much of the time. Once the hunt began, they had to face not only danger from harpooned whales but also the nauseating stench of whale processing. The returns, though, made it all worthwhile. In a good year, Sandefjord's seamen earned more in six months than a landlubber could in a year. The other six months they spent working their gardens and painting their houses, until Sandefjord (pop. 6,000) gained a reputation as one of Scandinavia's prettiest towns.

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