Introduction

Ship of fools. Death ship, ark, ghost ship, slave ship, clipper, warship. Factory ship, trawler, galley, hulk. Lighter and collier and tug, aircraft carrier and tanker, container ship and banana boat. Dhow, pinnace, trireme, felucca, knar. Galleon, dugout, tramp steamer, raft. Argo, Dawn Treader, Flying Dutchman, Pequod, Kon-Tiki...

Chr. Christensen and C. A. Larsen: A comparative analysis of two whaling entrepreneurs

Chr. Christensen and C. A. Larsen are usually considered among the most important pioneers in the transfer of whaling to Antarctic waters in the early twentieth century. After a period of close cooperation during the 1890s, they took different courses and built up their Antarctic enterprises independently of each other. While Larsen initiated the foundation of shore station whaling at South Georgia, Christensen sent a floating factory ship to the South Shetland Islands. The main aim of the paper is to make a systematic comparison of the two entrepreneurs and their companies, and focus explicitly on the considerations and decisions they made when whaling was transferred from north to south. They obviously chose different strategies, but we will ask how different they really were in their thinking about how southern whaling was going to develop. Both entrepreneurs brought along their experiences from how whaling had been undertaken in the northern waters. It was not obvious what organizational patterns would work in the south, and we shall study how familiar and new ways of organizing the industry were combined – as is often the case in entrepreneurial innovations.

The first Antarctic whaling season of Admiralen (1905–1906): the diary of Alexander Lange

ABSTRACTThe first factory ship of the so-called modern era of Antarctic whaling was Admiralen, arriving together with two smaller catcher boats in the South Shetland Islands in January 1906, after a period of whaling in the Falkland Islands. The expedition leader was Alexander Lange, a Norwegian whaler with a long experience from whaling in northern Norway and Spitsbergen. He kept a diary for a considerable period and this covered several whaling voyages. The one dealing with the pioneer Antarctic season of 1905–1906 has been translated from Norwegian into English and is presented here with an introduction that places the expedition into its wider context.

Pioneer whalers in the Ross Sea, 1923–33

On Christmas Eve 1923, the whaling factory ship Sir James Clark Ross, commanded by Captain Carl Anton Larsen and accompanied by five catchers, reached the front of the Ross Ice Shelf; these were the first whaling vessels to operate in the Ross Sea. They had been dispatched by the Norwegian whaling company Hvalfangeraktienselskapet Rosshavet, which had obtained a licence from the British government. For most of the 1923–24 season, Sir James Clark Ross occupied an uneasy anchorage in the deep waters of Discovery Inlet, a narrow embayment in the front of the Ross Ice Shelf, while her catchers pursued whales widely in the Ross Sea. During that first season they killed and processed 221 whales (211 blue whales and 10 fin whales), which yielded 17,300 barrels of oil. During the next decade, with the exception of the 1931–32 season, Sir James Clark Ross and two other factory ships operated by Rosshavet, C.A. Larsen and Sir James Clark Ross II, operated in the Ross Sea. From the 1926–27 season onwards these ships were joined by up to three other factory ships and their catchers, operated by other companies. During the decade 1923–33 the Rosshavet ships killed and processed 9122 whales in the Ross Sea sector, mainly in the open waters of the Ross Sea south of the pack-ice belt. Total harvest for all factory ships from the Ross Sea sector for the period was 18,238 whales (mainly blue whales) producing 1,490,948 barrels of oil. From 1924 onwards the Rosshavet catchers wintered in Paterson Inlet on Stewart Island, New Zealand, and from 1925 onwards a well-equipped shipyard, Kaipipi Shipyard, operated on Price Peninsula in Paterson Inlet to service the Rosshavet ships.

A record of some parasitic worms from whales in the Ross Sea area

The material examined in the present investigation was given to the writer by Mr W. Ross Cockrill, F.R.C.V.S., Veterinary Officer, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Carmarthen. The specimens were collected by Mr Ross Cockrill on the whale factory ship Balaena when he accompanied the Antarctic Whaling Expedition in the winter of 1951–2 for the purpose of making investigations into the pathology of whales. The whales were caught in the Ross Sea area roughly between 67° 51′ S. and 71° 13′ S., and the parasitic worms recovered from them include cestodes, nematodes and Acanthocephala. The worms were fixed at the time of collecting, the cestodes in 5% formalin and the nematodes and Acanthocephala in hot 70% alcohol. When only one or a few specimens were found they were all fixed, but if the infestation was heavy a sample was collected. In addition, portions of infested kidney and lesions from other parts of the body thought to be associated with parasitic infestation were included in the collection. The writer is greatly indebted to Mr Ross Cockrill for the gift of this material.