REVIEW

Charting whaling’s B=

colourful B.C. past

WHALERS NO MORE: A History of
Whaling on the West Coast. By W. A.
Hagelund. Harbour Publishing, cloth
$24.95. Available at People’s Co-op Book-
store.

Whaling off the B.C. coast ended in 1967,
five years before the Canadian government
acceded to growing protest and banned all
whaling operations. Since then, a new gen-
eration has grown up which, though it may
know little of what since 1904 had been a
profitable industry, would be outraged by
any suggestion of its resumption.

In his new book, Whalers No More,
Hagelund concedes that as whale products
Were superseded by mineral substitutes,
_ “whaling became more difficult to justify,
~ both economically and morally.” But in its

heyday, it “had the effect of bringing out
both the best and the worst in those who
pursued it. Courage, tenacity, and feats of
seamanship were virtues unstintingly accre-
dited the whalers, but they were also guilty
of greed and waste.”

The first whalers on the B.C. coast were
the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island,
the only native people to hunt whales in
their superbly crafted canoes. But in 1792,
the same year that Juan Perez, the Spanish
explorer, sighted Nootka Sound, American
whalers rounded Cape Horn to begin more
than a century and a half of whaling on the
North Pacific coast that decimated whale
stocks as ever more efficient means of hunt-
ing them were devised and brought about
the decline of successive companies formed
to exploit them.

rn

Sa

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Visitors have their picture taken on the belly of a large Blue whale, Kyuquot

1922.

Hagelund, who started fishing with his
Norwegian immigrant father when he was
14 and got his first job aboard a whaler
when he was 17, has accomplished his
stated purpose of recapturing the colour
and hardships of the industry by combining
the reminiscensces of its aging veterans with
his own experiences.

In the course of his research he has lifted
from historical obscurity the fact that the
Nanaimo coal miners, in their lockout-
strike of 1912, were not the only victims of
Mackenzie and Mann’s financial manipula-
tions to build their railroad empire. So were
the whalers of Canadian North Pacific
Fisheries, owned by Mackenzie and Mann,
when the trust company called in the bonds
and placed it in receivership.”

For all its merits, Whalers No More has
one serious flaw. In relating the final joint
venture between Western Canada Whaling
Company, B.C. Packers subsidiary, and
Taiyo Gyogo Fishing Company to supply
whale meat to Japan, Hagelund refers to
the United Fishermen and Allied Workers
Union, but not by name.

Yet it was the UFAWU which org
the whaling crews and shoreworkers
whaling resumed in 1948 and was inst
mental in improving wages and work
conditions at the Coal Harbour station’
Vancouver Island. There was a lot more tt
the company’s two-year shutdown of the
industry in 1960-61 than “unjustifiable
increases” demanded by the union, includ
ing such issues as job security and crew
complements. In fact, the company Was
demanding pay cuts of $65-$125 a month,
to be offset by an increased bonus in the
second year of a two-year contract that the
union considered unlikely to maintain eatml-
ings at the 1959 level, when a postwar
record 869 whales were taken.

Hagelund would have rectified the short
comings in his otherwise meticulous
research had he extended his interviews t0
include union veterans, whose recollectio!
of Coal Harbour would differ considerably
from those of company managers. i

— Hal Griffin

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30 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 16, 1987

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