As a young Merchant Naval College student in Cape Town, South Africa, a favorite pastime for me was to wonder around the waterfront docklands of this big southern port at the tip of the African continent, looking at ships and thinking of all the exotic places they came from and went to around the world.
Some of these behemoths of the deep were in transit to ports in the far east, taking on fuel and supplies for the long voyage across the Indian Ocean. Some were simply voyaging to Northern ports on the East Coast of Africa and some, had reached their southern destination and were unloading, only to reload with local goods to return to home ports in northern latitudes.
In a corner of those docklands in earlier times, was a large mooring area where two fleets of strange looking vessels spent the off season of the Whaling industry, tied up to each other – side by side. They were the killer ships of that vibrant industry, as it used to be, and I was always curious and fascinated by them because of their strange unusual front-end shape.
During the summer months when ice flows are much further south in the Antarctic ocean, all those ships, including large fleets from other parts of the world, converged on Cape Town over several weeks to fuel up for the long voyage into the deep hostile seas of the southern oceans, well below 60 degrees of latitude, where seas frequently boil with fury, where the waves are not gentle swells but rolling mountains of water with white caps exposed to 70 and 90 knot howling winds that fall off into dark deep troughs, that often buried those little ships.
The fatalities every year were significant in that wet cold watery hell during the whaling season ……………… but these were the regions of the Antarctic Ocean where the great sperm and blue whales were abundant and where large fleets of killer ships accompanied by gigantic factory ships spent 4 or 5 months of the year inflicting their destruction on the large pods of these great creatures …… and why you might ask, why did they destroy these gentle giants …………… for their oil, It was all about the fine oil they produce, that was used to make the finest perfumes and cosmetics, for lubricating the finest machines, and in earlier times, before electricity, simply to light the lamps of London, Paris and New York.
The 60’s was the tail end of the worldwide whaling industry and in the late 60’s, the remains of the Canadian Whaling industry were still evident up and down the Coast of British Columbia.
An international moratorium on Whaling was agreed to in 1986, but never became international law and several countries continue to practice, citing numerous cultural and scientific reasons for continuing.
In reality there is no finer lubricant than Whale Oil! Nasa and the Aerospace industry are silent consumers and supposedly the most precise Telescopes for exploring the heavens use it because of its unique stability and physical properties as a lubricant. The powers that be in the world will probably never support an outright ban.
Before I continue this woeful tail of Whales, I must confess that I had a significant effect on the consumption of Whales in a previous life, when the only place I could afford to eat, that was conducive to the depth of my pockets and convenient to where I lived, served deep fried whale meat every night. It was my staple diet and I relished it … washed down with a hot shot of the finest street workers Saki .
Neither would this story be complete without painting a mindful picture of these little ships that had such a profound effect on the devastation of the global whale population in the 20th century. They still do, to this day in some regions of the world.
Like modern oil exploration, which has evolved significantly over the last 100 years for the purpose of harvesting oil, these ships also evolved from the early technology used by Captain Ahab in his pursuit of Moby Dick for exactly the same purpose. They were distinctive little ships with a raised prow, with a gangway that extended from the wheelhouse amidships, directly to the ship’s forecastle, so the captain could make a dash from the wheelhouse to the great powerful gun that was mounted on the ships head, that could fire a Harpoon several hundred meters with deadly accuracy deep into a whale’s torso. It might not have taken too much skill to aim a deadly shot in a calm sea but in a heaving ocean in a little ship…. pitching and rolling…it did!!
Most of those little ships were coal fired and steam driven, their engines wide open, exposing the rotating crankshaft and three reciprocating piston rods, turning round and round and up and down at 125 revolutions per minute, that were deep down in the depths of the ship. ‘Up and Downers’ they were fondly called by the old salts of the sea… with only a handrail to hold onto, as the ship pitched and rolled in the heavy seas, the massive parts of the engine, solid steel rods going up and down, up and down driving the crank shaft that turned the ships propeller hour after hour, day after day. The engines sounded like a dinosaur after a long chase to catch its prey, its crankshaft like a massive grinder that could reduce someone to pulp if they lost their footing, but not in an instance, it would have been an oily painful end falling into that rotating mass of iron and only the handrail and a sure foot kept you out.
Just as well most of those little ships were replaced by oil tankers, but not all. Modern killer ships are diesel powered and conform to higher safety standards. Also, the world became more compassionate towards the mass destruction, the murder of the gentle giants of the sea, that we now value from a completely different perspective.
But perspectives change too, don’t they?? The tankers then in the 60’s were less than 50,000 tons. A manageable size in terms of an oil spill. I worked on several that were a mere 45,000 tons and remember quite vividly voyaging down the Red Sea that was like a ship’s superhighway accompanied by much smaller tankers that dotted the seascape from horizon to horizon, all racing to the Persian Gulf to fill up with the black gold, or returning from it.
By the end of the 60’s the first 100,000-ton ships were being built. Now they are even bigger.
At a protest meeting in Parksville, on Vancouver Island, recorded on a local radio station, some years ago, a lady representing her community said how apposed they were to oil pipelines coming into B.C., or for that matter any oil tankers voyaging up and down the coast and thru our inland waters. How much it would spoil the pristine environment of our BC coastline if ever there was a disaster.
The lady confessed that she owned two cars & lived some distance out of Parksville. She depended on a car to commute every day to her office in Nanaimo but was passionately opposed to the transit of fuel to Vancouver Island. It had not occurred to her that the disruption of that transit might affect her life more dramatically than she realized. She took it for granted that her local gas station would always have fuel. It seemed she had not considered the fuel at the gas station, had to come from somewhere.
How would you propose to bring fuel onto the island, asked the host on the radio station. Certainly, we would not want to run a pipeline across the water between the mainland and Vancouver Island – he said, but already and for many years, we have been trucking, barging and ferrying oil onto this Island.
Trucked, ferried, barged. What would you prefer because these methods are more susceptible to a disaster than any oil pipeline running all the way from the oil sands of Alberta to the coast of BC.
An alternative might be to transport it by rail in a rail tanker …someone said…. by rail… said another…. in a country that has more freight train accidents and disasters than anywhere else in the world, that the media is completely oblivious to.
Imagine a rail tanker full of thick black oil falling down one of the numerous passes on our beautiful scenic railway that extend through several parts of British Columbia, that people from all over the world come to experience and to marvel at the scenic beauty of the province.
As much as we treasure the mountainous beauty and forests of British Columbia, the Deserts of the Sahara and Middle East, the Jungles of South America and Southeast Asia, and the vast Savannah’s of Africa, not to mention the diversity and richness of our Oceans —— oil in our world is a fact of life!
Although its demand as an energy source will diminish in time to fuel our cars and much of our transportation system, its demand as a lubricant is unlikely to be replaced, let alone its countless applications in every industry that contribute to our modern lifestyles.
We need Oil to mine the iron ore, to make the steel, to make machine tools that make the machines that mass produce the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the plastic we produce….and Plastic!!!! Did you know that plastic is now the most manufactured commodity we consume to sustain our modern lifestyles. Cut off this oil or make it disappear!! Do we then revert back to the very first source of commercial oil………….. …………….. whales??
Whale oil was the only commercial source long before it was discovered that kerosene could be made from coal or that petroleum oil occurred deep underground. We only discovered that late in the 19th century.
Mother nature has a way of looking after itself. Perhaps there will be another age 3 million years hence which, like the age of the dinosaur will be called the age of the Humansaur. When ‘somekind’ will dig up our fossils, wonder about our origins, but perhaps not before they themselves have evolved enough, just like our ancestors, from sailing on the vast waters in ships driven by the wind that carry little boats that are rowed by 5 beings, that by hand throw harpoons into gentle giants just to get to the oil that they produce.
MAD
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