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.