Whaling will doubtless be carried on from San Francisco in a small way
as long as there is any demand for whalebone, and from New Bedford
and Provincetown while there is any market for sperm and whale oil.
Most of the Pacific steam whalers are now provided with a harpoon gun
invented by Svend Foyn, a Norwegian. This gun is placed in the bow, and
to the harpoon is attached a rope with which to play the whale, as one
does a fish with a rod and reel, but there is little romance in this
method of whaling.
In modern whaling the flesh is made into guano and the bones and blood
into fertilizer, and even the water in which the blubber has been
“tried out” is used in making glue. The meat is to-day sold to Japan,
and, if the weather is very cold and the supply of fish is limited, a
whale might bring there as much as four thousand dollars by utilizing
all the by-products as well as the meat, which is sometimes canned. In
America a whale is now valued at about two hundred dollars, but, if the
entire carcass is utilized, it might bring one thousand dollars.
From the _Whalemen’s Shipping List_, still published in New Bedford,
it can be figured that the total whaling fleet in America last year
(1913) consisted of thirty-four vessels, twenty hailing from New
Bedford, eleven from San Francisco, two from Provincetown, and one from
Stamford, Conn. The Atlantic fleet, however, reported a total catch of
over twenty thousand barrels of sperm oil and one thousand pounds of
whalebone during the year 1913, which is a considerably larger amount
than for the year previous.
Whaling in stout wooden ships on the far seas of the East and the West
is no longer carried on, for the glory and the profit of the industry
have gone never to return. Substitute products have come in, and to-day
the little whaling that is still done is along the coasts of the
Antarctic and Arctic Oceans, off the shores of Western Africa, Northern
Japan, New Zealand, California, and South America, and in the main it
is carried on in stout iron steamers. Ere long the last whaleship will
disappear from the sea and only the romance of a great industry will
remain.
[Illustration: _Corpora dum gaudent immania tollere Cętæ_
_Sic varijs telis, varijs feriuntur aristis_