Antarctic Ocean Whaling Photo Album : Cataloguing And Preservation Of A Japanese Album

The Antarctic Ocean whaling photo album is an album published during the 1940's by a Japanese marine product company. The album contains 52 gelatin silver prints of a whaling expedition to the Antarctic Ocean and is a fascinating visual record of the Japanese whaling industry. Using this album as a case study, this thesis project is a study of the cataloguing process and preservation of a photographic album. The goal of this project is to make the album more accessible to researchers through translation, cataloguing and digitization, as well as to provide a preservation strategy through condition assessments. This paper summarizes the research conducted on the album, outlines the cataloguing process, the condition assessment of the album and provides a treatment proposal and a handling guideline for the album. The paper also includes a Romanization chart and a translation table of the album texts as aids for further research.

Antarctic Ocean Whaling Photo Album : Cataloguing And Preservation Of A Japanese Album

The Antarctic Ocean whaling photo album is an album published during the 1940's by a Japanese marine product company. The album contains 52 gelatin silver prints of a whaling expedition to the Antarctic Ocean and is a fascinating visual record of the Japanese whaling industry. Using this album as a case study, this thesis project is a study of the cataloguing process and preservation of a photographic album. The goal of this project is to make the album more accessible to researchers through translation, cataloguing and digitization, as well as to provide a preservation strategy through condition assessments. This paper summarizes the research conducted on the album, outlines the cataloguing process, the condition assessment of the album and provides a treatment proposal and a handling guideline for the album. The paper also includes a Romanization chart and a translation table of the album texts as aids for further research.

The nineteenth-century US whaling industry: Where is the risk premium? New materials facilitate updated view

Materials that were born digital, and printed materials that have been digitized, have aided an updated examination of nineteenth-century US whaling voyages’ financial returns. Items included the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset from whalinghistory.org , The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, a congressman’s speech and a state’s census reports. These works and others, with analysis, showed that for the 11,257 analysable voyages ending in the 1800s, the mean return was 4.7% and 4.6% for whaling and US government bonds, respectively. Ideally, this work will place the nineteenth-century US whaling industry returns in context of other investments.

Three Cheers for the Essay Film: How Chris Marker’s Vive la baleine Epitomizes Timothy Corrigan’s Model

Chris Marker’s Vive la baleine (1972) is widely hailed as a quintessential essay film. This article examines how the film adheres to essayistic characteristics using film scholar Timothy Corrigan’s definition of the essay film mode. In particular, the article highlights the film’s following traits: the three-pronged and gendered approach to narration, the intentional aesthetic and stylistic inconsistency, the underlying critique of the whaling industry, the explicit adoration expressed toward the whale, and the film’s self-reflexivity.

Vladimir Arsen’ev and Whales in Russia’s Revolutionary Far East

This article examines the contributions the famous Far Eastern writer Vladimir Arsen’ev made to the development of the Russian/Soviet whaling industry in the 1920s. During that time Arsen’ev worked as a “specialist for marine mammal hunting” for Dal’rybokhota. He studied the whales of the Russian Far East and helped craft the Far Eastern Republic’s policy toward its subjects who wanted to start whaling. As someone with a deep knowledge of imperial-era environmental destruction and conservation, Arsen’ev helped develop measures designed to protect the region’s Indigenous people and fur-bearing animals while strengthening Russian sovereignty. He also advocated the wholesale slaughter of killer whales and ultimately failed to restrain destructive commercial whaling. However, in addition to adding a new chapter to Arsen’ev’s biography, his ideas about whales and whaling help us better understand the Far East’s environment history and especially the way imperial-era ideas around conservation survived into the Soviet period.

Georgian Liverpool’s northern whaling trade reconsidered: Ranking, significance and geography

This article re-appraises Liverpool’s involvement in the northern whaling trade c.1750-1823. It shows that the town ranked second amongst England’s whaling ports at different times during the 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, and again in 1794. This is much earlier and frequent than previously thought, and therefore has implications for our understanding of the geography of the nation’s whaling industry. Gordon Jackson famously asserted that all the major whaling ports were on the east coast. Whilst this article does not contest the broad thrust of Jackson’s thesis, it does suggest a slight modification. The ability of west coast Liverpool to achieve ‘second’ rank, even if this was for only brief periods, shows that the dominance of the east coast in whaling, though clearly strong, was not absolute.

War of the Whales: Climate Change, Weather and Arctic Conflict in the Early Seventeenth Century

Beginning in 1580, average annual temperatures across the Arctic cooled amid the regional onset of the 'Grindelwald Fluctuation', a particularly cold but volatile period in the Little Ice Age. By contributing to socioeconomic trends that raised the cost of vegetable oils, climatic cooling encouraged European merchants to establish rival whaling operations around the frigid archipelago of Svalbard, roughly halfway between Norway and the North Pole. From 1611 until 1619, European whalers depended on temporary encampments set up along the shores of bays in the islands of Svalbard, and eventually the nearby island of Jan Mayen. When regional sea ice registered the climatic trends of the Grindelwald Fluctuation by besetting these bays, whalers from different European nations and companies coped by cooperating with one another. Yet when the volatility of the Grindelwald Fluctuation in the already variable climate of Svalbard and Jan Mayen drew ice away from the bays, violence often broke out between rival whalers and their escorting warships. Shifting environmental circumstances therefore played a previously ignored role in inciting and mitigating violence in the first decade of the Spitsbergen whaling industry. These relationships can offer new perspectives on the future of geopolitical competition in a warming Arctic.

The importance of a seasonal ice zone and krill density in the historical abundance of humpback whale catches in the Southern Ocean

Humpback whale populations in the Southern Hemisphere were dramatically reduced by the whaling industry. A comprehensive whaling dataset was used in an analysis of circumpolar abundance of humpback whale catches relative to contemporary densities of its preferred prey, Antarctic krill, and to a major dynamic feature of the marine ecosystem, the summer seasonal ice zone (SSIZ) derived from southernmost whaling locations. The circumpolar abundance of catches derived only from pelagic data, i.e. about 30% of the total humpback whale catches in the Southern hemisphere, was found to be only marginally related to krill density. However, the total abundance of catches – from pelagic operations and land stations, from high and low latitudes – was found to be more related to SSIZ than to krill density, especially when excluding the highly dynamic west Atlantic region where the circulation probably drives the ecosystem. A large SSIZ is likely to provide a favourable feeding ground for humpback whales, given their high energy requirements and because of its predictability and the prey aggregation processes occurring there.

The way to the Antarctic Treaty: System of rules in times of global conflict

In 1940, a PhD was published in Germany about the claiming behaviour of several countries and the whaling industry in Antarctica. It shows already at this time that a need for regulation on that issue was required. The intertwined relationships between the claiming nations demanded an overarching framework where these complex issues could be managed. This paper elaborates on the state of the claiming parties before the 1940s and will demonstrate that the development for a comprehensive regulation was the only way to avoid a global conflict. The doctoral thesis from 1940 will be the focal point of the discussion.