The Rise Britain's Whale Hunters: The Untold Story

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

A few hundred years ago, the oceans were home to millions of whales,

but then we discovered that they were incredibly useful animals.

Every single minute of people's days

would have been surrounded by whale products.

Whales were seen as commodities, to produce benefits for people.

Mention whaling today and most of us think of Moby Dick

or menacing Japanese factory ships.

But it's an important part of British history...

..carried on right up to the 1960s.

We did it to produce something for this country.

When we worked out that whales could be used to make soap and food,

a vast industry emerged on the edge of the world.

When industrial whaling took on the whales of the Antarctic Ocean,

the centre of the business was on a British island.

Here, on South Georgia,

there are the extraordinary ruins of a complete whaling town.

Look at the scale of this!

Knowing that the whales were decimated,

it's hard to imagine the mindset that would want to kill them.

I wouldn't like to do it now and I wouldn't do it now.

But if I'm going to understand this important industry,

I have to put our environmental guilt to one side.

With the help of the last of the many Scottish whalers,

I examine it through the eyes of its own time.

It was a way of life. And it was a respected way of life.

You went away as a boy and you came back a man.

Why do people embark on this difficult and dangerous thing?

What were the gains? What were they after? What were the dangers?

What was it actually like to be a whale hunter?

Nowadays, I'm one of the youngest whalers alive.

There won't be many of us left to tell the story about whaling.

I think it should be done...

..before it's too late.

This is the west coast of Scotland

and I've been coming here since I was a boy.

Nowhere in Britain is more alive than this place.

It's absolutely throbbing with the natural world.

And the thing that they've relied on for their lives here

has been the sea.

I've always known they've eaten limpets and obviously fish

and shellfish, sea birds,

but what I hadn't realised is that they also hunted the whale.

Until just a few hundred years ago, large numbers of whales

of many different species inhabited these waters.

It's the realisation that today's lack of whales

must be the result of a long and sustained effort

that has prompted me to find out more about British whaling.

It's a history that's almost been lost, but luckily, many whalers

recorded their industry and some are still alive to tell their story.

It was part of our heritage.

I mean, whaling had gone on since, erm...God knows when.

People had always done opportunistic whaling -

eating, cutting up whales that washed up on the shore,

but what I hadn't realised is that, about a thousand years ago,

the Vikings arrived

and began a completely different way of doing this -

of actively chasing and hunting whales.

I'm sailing to a place where the Viking approach to catching small

whales was still being practised less than 200 years ago.

This is Stornoway harbour, in Lewis, in the Hebrides

and I'm just coming into the harbour now.

I've read an extraordinary account in this book by Osgood Mackenzie -

a 19th century account of a pilot whale hunt,

and what's fascinating is that they're doing exactly

what the Vikings have been doing all over the North Atlantic

for the last thousand years.

So, out here, there would have been one line of boats

outside the pilot whales, with everyone in them throwing stones

into the water, shouting, and so slowly, slowly

they drove them into this narrowing head of this loch here,

with the idea that when they get to the head of the loch,

in the shallows there, they could jump into the water

and slaughter them.

The oil from these pilot whales was invaluable to the people

living here, providing lighting and oiling machinery,

while the cured meat would help feed them through the winter.

This is where it all ended up,

right at the head of Stornoway harbour, in the shallows here.

The whole of Stornoway was out here with knives, broad swords,

roasting spits,

stabbing away at these things,

and the blood was horrific.

It's rather weird to think of all this killing going on

in a town in Scotland, but in fact, it was part of something

that was going on all over the North Atlantic, the Viking North Atlantic.

This was a civilisation dependent on what the sea could give it

and the sea could give nothing better than the whale.

From the late 17th century,

a more commercial form of whaling developed,

to supply Britain's growing cities.

That shift to a refined urban life created an ever-expanding market

for whale products.

I've come to Spitalfields, in London, to a merchant's house

that has been restored to how it was in the 18th and 19th centuries.

And I am interested to find out how much of what is in here

was made of the whale.

-Callum.

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you, too.

Professor Callum Roberts is a marine biologist, with a special

interest in how our seas have been exploited over the centuries.

-Wow, that is a room, isn't it?

-It certainly is.

It's just like the inhabitants have just walked out the door.

There is a classic, classic whale product in here, isn't there?

That's right, the corset,

which was supported by these stays inside the material...

-Can you feel them? Yes, you can.

-..which were made of whalebone.

And it was a wonderful plastic material -

it was flexible and bendy, but it was very, very strong.

Now, what about this? Oh, look at that.

And that is the whalebone.

-And carved to this incredibly precise millimetre thing.

-How fascinating.

Look at that. Now, that is intriguing.

Is that whale oil that is burning in there?

It would have been at the time, because it became completely

standard for people to light their rooms and houses

with this kind of fuel.

And out in the streets, by about 1740,

London had 5,000 streetlamps that were fuelled by whale oil alone.

And that's why there was such a surge in demand for whales.

-Was there any feeling that somehow this wasn't quite right?

-Not at all.

Whales were simply seen as commodities that could be hunted

to produce benefits for people.

Ships from London, Hall, Whitby

and Dundee flocked to the Arctic in search of whales.

In 1788 alone,

247 British ships set sail for the ice.

There, they chased down whales in light rowing boats with

hand-held harpoons.

The most famous of all the whalers who went up to the Arctic was

a man called William Scoresby from Whitby.

And he wrote this account of whaling in the Arctic regions.

"Those employed in the occupation of killing whales,"

he says, "when actually engaged are exposed to danger

"from three sources - from the ice,

"from the climate and from the whales themselves.

"And of the three,

"it was the whales that were the really dangerous things -

"boats, together with their crews and apparatus,

"projected into the air."

Christ!

Some of them must have been terrified.

Maybe they had been capsized before or something like that,

you don't live long in either Arctic or Antarctic waters,

you only have a few minutes.

In the old days, it was wooden ships and iron men.

Now it is iron ships and wooden men.

Well, there must've been iron men in these days

to go out in open boats and harpoon whales.

So, what effect did this huge demand for whale product

have on the whales themselves?

The particular whales they were after then were things called right whales.

The reason they were the right whales is cos they moved slowly,

they were quite docile and they had a big layer of blubber,

which meant that, after they had been killed, they floated.

And that was important, because when you have got something as heavy

as a whale on the end of a line, then,

if it sank, you'd be in trouble.

And being so valuable meant that they were pursued relentlessly,

so that, after a couple of hundred years of exploitation,

they essentially were driven extinct in the North Atlantic.

And this is the wrong kind of whale. This was the blue whale.

These were also abundant in those waters,

but they weren't hunted, and the reason was that they were too

fast - they couldn't be approached by rowboats or in sailboats.

But there was another important reason.

If you were to harpoon one, it would sink,

and that would be a major liability.

-OK, so the blue whales were uncatchable.

-There were.

So, would we have seen these species around our coasts?

We would certainly have seen many.

Not the Greenland right whale,

but all of the others were common sightings from just...

You could see them from the cliffs of Dover, for example.

-And not a single one now.

-No.

As the easily-caught right whales in the Arctic were brought

close to extinction in the mid-19th century,

British whaling went into steep decline.

The centre of the whaling world shifted to South Norway,

where there was a drive to find a way of hunting the species

that was still plentiful.

Small towns, like this one in Vestfold,

became centres of innovation and engineering excellence.

The question is, how did they do it

when the rest of the industry was dying on its feet?

The answer lies in this man's famed find - the inventor

of modern whaling, who became the richest man in Norway, as a result.

Look at him. He is a great, fat, substantial, no-nonsense figure.

But can one man really have transformed an entire industry?

I've been invited to Norway to join a group of Scottish whalers.

They're on their annual visit to meet their old Norwegian friends

from the industry.

It's still quite mobile, isn't it?

They've brought me to a restored whale-catching ship,

that illustrates Svend Foyn's technological revolution.

So, what were the big changes that Svend Foyn made to whaling?

He invented the whale catcher.

He invented a new type of whaling gun, which he made bigger.

It is a harpoon, with an explosive head on it.

-And the system he invented lasted?

-Yeah, it still does.

Foyn's bold idea was to harness steam power

and modern explosives, to allow him to catch the wrong whales -

the blue and fin whales that swam fast

and sank, once they had been killed.

Generally, I think that whales were mostly spotted

from the barrel about 70 feet above the deck.

When you were going up to the barrel,

as the ship was rolling to one side,

you'd just hang on.

Once you got in there,

you had binoculars and you started looking for whales.

If I'm up in the barrel and I saw a whale,

you just blew the whistle, then you started pointing.

Of course, as soon as you shouted, the catcher went full ahead.

The telegraph goes.

I answer the telegraph

-and then open up the valve, to full.

-For full-on.

Because you were going, then, you were on a chase.

You could tell you were on a chase.

You could see everything shaking, the whole barrel

and everything was shaking.

You need your gun loaded up, so I get down...

Christ, that is...

So, seas are coming over you at this point, are they?

I feel the boat is going down again, right? Uff! Grab on!

Slow up again, right?

What I have to do, coil it properly, because if this

went in a kink when he fired the gun, it could be dangerous.

If you had spotted a whale, it might last for an hour.

The excitement would mount.

I'll tell you something,

there's nothing more exciting than being on a catcher, chasing.

When the whale goes down...

..you're all on your toes, looking all over the place.

It's just exciting.

Once you got coming up to the whales, maybe about...

..maybe 100 yards ahead of you,

the gunner would leave the bridge and go to the gun.

When I fire, I don't want to close my eyes, cos I want to see

the trajectory of the harpoon.

Going at full speed, the gunner really had very little time,

maybe a couple of seconds, to make up his mind whether to shoot or not.

You did... Well, I did...

You know, when a whale was harpooned, you couldn't help

wincing when that harpoon went in, because that was a living animal.

It had feeling, just the same as we do,

as far as pain is concerned.

Yeah, that's...

It was a brutal way of life. There is no getting away from the fact.

They seem so friendly.

And they'd make a noise and...

Like, when you hit them,

they cried really.

And that... I felt that.

The grenade tip of Foyn's harpoon was designed to deliver

a fatal explosion after impact.

But if the whale was just injured, another innovation was needed

to play it on a long, spring-loaded line.

After the gun has been fired, when you start to reel the fish

back in, the line starts to come down here.

-Right. So the other end of that is attached to the harpoon?

-Yes.

Yeah. And what length of line would you be having in here?

Must be near a mile, I would think.

It could be dangerous, yes, if the whale wasn't shot properly

and took out a lot of line and there was a lot of strain

and that line was really stretching.

There was one young chap, he fell when he tried to get out,

a kink went in this line and he lost the foot off his leg.

The second mate's job was to put on the brakes.

And he also had to keep an eye on how far down the mast this block came.

So, when the whale is putting tension on the harpoon line,

this, kind of, like, the spring of a fishing rod, takes that tension up

-and releases it slowly, with no jerks.

-That's correct.

Is this one of the inventions made by the Norwegians

-in the 19th century?

-It is, yes.

-Svend Foyn.

-Svend Foyn was responsible for this one.

We, then, had to pump air into the whale,

because a whale could...sink.

The mess boy's job was to take a long, wooden pole

and a hose, with something resembling a huge hypodermic needle,

and then pump air into it.

Then, we had to flag the whale, because, throughout the day,

we might be chasing for the next eight, ten, 12 hours.

So coming back, we wanted to make our job a little easier

to find them again.

-You were a whaler for 30 years.

-Yes.

And you became a gunner? You were a gunner in the end?

I became a gunner when I was 25.

And do you know how many whales you shot in your career?

-Well, plus or minus 6,000.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-That is quite a body of whales.

-Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

And the thing was to catch as many whales as you could.

That is what we were there for, that is what we concentrated on.

It takes being on a catcher like this to see just how good

Svend Foyn's changes were - how incredibly effective they were.

It changed everything.

The second thing is what extraordinary teamwork

is going on here.

Everything has to be incredibly finely tuned, in this very,

very hostile, dynamic, dangerous environment.

But there is some mismatch between that skill in the service

of something that isn't entirely good.

There is something that doesn't quite fit there.

With Foyn's new whale-catching ships,

the blue and fin whales along the coasts of northwest Europe

could now be caught and towed ashore for processing.

Modern whaling quickly spread from the waters of northern Norway

to Iceland, the Faroes and Scotland.

The new catching technology coincided with

a lull in demand for whaling products.

Coal, gas and, then, electricity had taken the place of whale oil

for lighting and no-one wanted whalebone corsets any more.

There was some demand for whale oil,

but the prices were so low that the enterprise would only work

where the whales were really densely concentrated.

It was then that whaling entrepreneurs remembered

old explorers' reports of abundant whales

at the other end of the world - the Antarctic Ocean.

I went whaling at the age of 16.

Coming off a croft in Shetland, you went down to Aberdeen

and you saw your first double-decker bus and your first train.

I'd never been off the island before.

I went to Leeds and joined the Southern Harvester in South Shields.

And headed down to the ice.

With a history of whaling and a reputation as seafarers,

Scotsmen became a part of the industry Norway pioneered

and joined them in the south.

When I left, I was a bit seasick and also a bit homesick, as well.

But I soon overcame that.

I chose whaling because it was an adventure.

It was folklore here

and whalers were famous.

When they came home,

everybody had a new car

or a new motorbike

and...or a new boat.

So I thought, "I fancy a bit of this myself."

For me, two months at sea is reduced to a comfortable 16-hour flight

to the Falkland Islands.

Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands,

was the British colonial outpost nearest to the new whaling grounds.

There is no doubt that I am getting close to the heart of the matter.

Wow!

This... I mean, all you can think is just - really, really big.

These are two sets of the lower jaw,

just this bit, of two blue whales.

You could... You know, you could comfortably drive a really big truck

through here.

They're the biggest animals that have ever lived.

Bigger than any dinosaur.

And you have to imagine, of course, that this is just the head here.

And the rest of the body is going on down underground another 80,

90 feet.

You know, the Leviathan, the Colossus of the ocean.

The new southern centre of the whaling industry

developed on another British island

900 miles across the stormy Southern Ocean - South Georgia.

To get there, I am hitching a ride on a ship

taking 120 tourists on an Antarctic expedition.

There are fantastic albatrosses out here. Look at that.

Oh, my God, that's a beautiful thing!

Oh!

Whoa!

That is one of most beautiful things I've ever seen.

It would be fantastic to see a whale.

All my life, I had wanted to see the Antarctic.

I suppose this was my way of doing this.

The reason I wanted to go to South Georgia, Antarctica,

was that I had read from the age of ten about Shackleton and Scott,

and that fascinated me, as a youngster.

In 1892, a full ten years before Scott

and Shackleton first set foot on Antarctica,

two whaling expeditions from Norway and Scotland were already

exploring this last frontier of the known world.

They reported back that there were thousands upon thousands of blue,

fin and humpback whales.

We're just crossing the Antarctic Convergence, which is

the point where quite warm - relatively warm - Atlantic water

comes down and meets very much colder Antarctic water.

As those two water bodies meet, there is incredible turbulence

and upwelling in the ocean and so, it becomes very, very fertile.

We get a lot of birds and also whales.

If you were a whale hunter, this is where you'd come hunt them.

This is it. This is whale central.

But there isn't a single one here.

The first time I seen South Georgia, I just... The most beautiful,

still, calm, frosty morning,

and I thought it was the beautifulest scenery

that I was ever seeing, anywhere at all.

It was absolutely unbelievable.

South Georgia is an absolutely spectacular place.

It really is mind-blowing.

And that is an impression that has lasted with me all my life,

actually.

So, we have arrived. This is South Georgia.

And it is, honestly, one of the most dramatic places

I have ever seen in my life.

Out there, the wild Southern Ocean,

the wind howling through these gaps here.

These fantastic, sort of, sheared Alpine faces of these mountains

disappearing into the clouds. The beaches over there,

with these giant elephant seals. Albatrosses nesting all over there.

God knows what is going on down there.

This is, kind of, you know, the Earth as excitement, isn't it?

Look at it. It's just...

I don't think I've ever arrived in a place that feels

sort of... Rarrr! ..like this.

It's just pumping!

Lying outside the pack ice,

South Georgia was better known than the Antarctic mainland.

The first person to land here was Captain Cook, in 1775.

He named it after George III

and thought, at first, he had found the great southern continent itself.

So, here, already, what is it?

Six young, male elephant seals, just lying out there on their own.

But the really extraordinary thing is up here...

Crowds and crowds and crowds of penguins.

Isn't that fantastic?

All the grown-ups in the foreground and there, behind,

are hundreds and hundreds of little brown babies.

It is like an army of hot water bottles standing to attention.

Within ten years of Cook having found the place,

there were people down here going for the seals.

It was fur seals to start with and, within about 20 years,

they'd effectively wiped them out.

The only ones that were left were these great big elephant seals.

And here are some of the pots in which they boiled up the blubber.

So there would have been a, kind of, seal blubber processing plant here.

There is another building there. Bits of timber from the floor.

And another place over there.

I mean, this was, incredibly, an inhabited place.

A lot of other seal species you can't get too close to.

They'll flee and they'll go away, so this is pretty wonderful.

It's a great time to be here.

Brent Stewart has been studying the changes in the elephant seal

population for the last 20 years.

Do you think they are beautiful?

I wouldn't say they're not beautiful, in all ways.

They're some of the smelliest animals I've ever been around.

They're pretty obnoxious.

Seal blubber oil was put to the same uses as whale oil.

And regulated hunting carried on through the whaling years,

until the 1960s.

It was a harvest, a managed harvest, and pretty well managed.

So, the population then was not declining.

So, at the end, they hadn't hammered the elephant seal...

No, cos they were doing it sustainably.

You know, it was an accessory to the whaling industry for that oil.

And it...

When the whaling stopped, the sealing stopped, because it

really wasn't commercially viable to just have elephant seal sealing.

Could you now have sustainable seal sealing here?

Um...

I... It would be possible.

The question is whether humans could ever do that.

I think, theoretically, you could probably have some sustained sealing,

at a small level, but whether we'd actually do that is unclear.

And it is not needed. There is no reason for it.

We've got the oil replacements.

My lift on the cruise ship is over.

-See ya, bye! See you.

-Bye-bye.

-Take care.

-Good luck.

-Thank you.

Take care, good luck.

I need to transfer to a new base, so I can start exploring

the remains of the whaling industry on the island.

Our other ship is over there. That is the Farus,

which is the South Georgia Fishery Protection vessel,

where we are going to be spending the next few days,

exploring this amazing island.

In 1904, the captain of the Norwegian recce a decade earlier,

CA Larsen, came back to the desolate island

of South Georgia and set up a prefab processing station.

He found so many whales that his catchers never had to leave

the bay and could rely mainly on the inquisitive,

easy-to-shoot, humpback whale.

His gamble to find a densely-populated hunting ground

immediately began to pay off.

The British Colonial Office was surprised to hear

of this new venture, set up without their permission.

But spotting a source of tax in this wilderness, they first charged

him for a belated licence and, then, offered further licences to others.

I've woken up this morning in this incredibly beautiful bay.

It is a marvellous Alpine scene -

sort of, three Matterhorns on the horizon.

And it has these other bays off it.

And I know that, somewhere in there, at the head of those bays

are some of the whaling stations that we're going to explore.

So, what I'm hoping for

is whaler life in a, kind of, capsule over there.

I'm getting a ride ashore to the largest of the stations

with a team who are surveying it for the government of this

British Overseas Territory.

This is Leith Harbour,

one of the biggest whaling stations here on South Georgia.

And it was made by a man called Salvesen,

who was living in Edinburgh, and he had set up whaling stations

in Shetland, in Iceland and even over in the Falklands.

But none of them were quite in the heartland of the whale.

And that was South Georgia.

When I think of the number of lives that are soaked into this place...

Imagine what it was like arriving here, as a young guy from Scotland.

Extraordinary! I mean, this is extraordinary!

Very excited. You wondered what was going to happen.

You know, what job you would get? How would you cope with it?

We were just young boys.

You had no idea what the future might bring for you.

Impressed by Larsen's catches a few miles down the coast,

the Salvesen family were quick to apply for a licence

for this bay and started building in 1909.

Leith Harbour, named after Salvesen's homeport in Edinburgh,

was to run until 1965 and became

the year-round hub of the company's entire Antarctic operation.

Leith Harbour was a very, very busy place.

And I was absolutely astounded with the number of vessels

that were berthed there, ready to take part in the whaling industry.

So, "Landing prohibited."

It is an offence to use any jetty, to land here, to approach within 200

metres of the station, all because of unsafe structures and asbestos.

And that is by order of the Government of South Georgia.

Well, the only reason that I can be here today is that we've got special

dispensation from the government,

but under certain, quite carefully, controlled conditions.

So, I have to wear this suit.

And if ever I enter a particularly sensitive and asbestos-rich

building, no hat and I have to put on the hood

and I've got a mask, which I would also wear,

just so I won't die.

Well, the whole place is just littered with junk.

There is a forklift truck there. This is a giant lathe.

Some, kind of, other machine-making tools there.

When you left that area and walked up,

there was a little... The street was called Pig Street.

I don't know why I've just remembered about that.

So, this is the piggery here.

Quite a nice, big,

handsome building for the pigs.

Very, very collapsed.

Pig Street led you up through, past all the workshops.

So...

Well, look at this.

This is a complete, preserved world in here.

How amazing.

OK, so this is obviously the forge,

the hot forge, where they could make pieces of new iron, steel equipment.

The challenges of building an entire industrial complex

in such a remote and hostile location were huge.

The early whalers had to be completely self-sufficient,

with the materials

and skills for everything, from engineering to animal husbandry.

I think, maybe, this is the powerhouse here. This one.

That was my place of work.

On top of the power station, there was an outside stair

and that was the electrical workshop.

These must be the stairs that John was talking about.

This must be the workshop.

This is where he must have worked, exactly here.

It's almost 50 years since the whalers left and visiting

naval ships and fishermen have ransacked many of the buildings.

So, here are all the different voltages and wattages of bulbs.

Hundreds and hundreds of them stacked up here.

"Osram - the wonderful lamp."

It is very like a, kind of, Tutankhamen experience, this.

The grave robbers have been in and have left the chaos

and anarchy on the floor.

But still, there is so much kit.

An absolutely perfect time capsule.

Oh, hang on a second.

I've seen exactly this view.

I think, exactly this view.

Somewhere, I've got this...a photo.

There it is. That is exactly it.

That's extraordinary!

That is as close as you could get to time disappearing.

Amazing.

The harsh weather here has also taken its toll.

Before the buildings fall down any further,

the South Georgia Government has commissioned a highly-accurate

3-D survey of each of the stations.

-Is it doing it now?

-Yeah, so you can see, if you look over here...

-OK.

OK, there it is. Oh, I see, OK.

Russell Gibb and his team are using laser scanners,

to record the whole of Leith Harbour.

You're going to end up with a total snapshot of the whole place,

-the whole settlement, at this one moment?

-Yep.

So, essentially, what we are doing is we are creating an archive,

a three-dimensional archive, of the station, as it stands today.

-It's a melancholy place, though.

-It is, very much so, yeah.

You do feel lives are, in a way, soaked into the place.

A lot of people's experiences and struggles and triumphs,

they are all here, aren't they?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you have got the graffiti...

You probably haven't been down to the plant to see the graffiti yet.

They're is wonderful graffiti with... where people who have been working

here have left their names and the dates.

-It's bloody noisy in here, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Is it always like this, when the wind...?

-Yeah.

As soon as the wind is up - loose iron everywhere,

just bang, bang, bang, clatter, clatter.

For the whaling companies, the gamble of investing

in South Georgia coincided with the recovery in their market.

Europe's growing industrial population needed

ever-increasing quantities of hard fats, for soap and food.

And the supply from the American meat industry couldn't keep up.

When a new invention called hydrogenation

promised that cheaper liquid oil could be turned into hard fat,

the demand for whale oil immediately started to rise.

So, this is it. This is the heart of the whole operation here.

This is what they call the flensing plan,

the place where they drag the whales in and chop them up.

Now, this is not somewhere designed for some little cottage industry.

I mean, look at the scale of this! You could fit...

You could fit ten whales on here.

Well, this is where the business begins, right at the sea edge.

They would have caught the whales out there -

the Southern Ocean is just past those headlands -

pulled them in. Probably, if they caught a lot

of whales, they would keep them on buoys out there

and then, tug boats, like these that are up here, on the plan,

would pull them into this shoreline.

The big winches in that low shed there would have cables drawn

all the way out here, to the sea edge, hooked onto the whales.

They would haul them up this shallow slope onto the flensing plan.

Flensing is the process of peeling away

the whale's outer blubber layer.

As it's being heaved up,

the flenser just stands there

and lets the winch do the work, really.

He stands there, with a knife in the blubber.

They were fantastic butchers, really.

There's three cutters.

One walks up the top and two cutting along the side of it.

They put toggles, wires and toggles, really, in through the holes.

The skin was peeled back, just like peeling a banana.

There might be four or five whales being cut up here, at one time.

Now, one whale, they analysed exactly what it was made of,

and it was 89-feet long and lay here, ten-feet high,

its body standing higher than I can reach.

And the weights. The weights.

There is 26 tonnes of blubber, 56 tonnes of meat,

22 tonnes of bone.

The tongue, alone, weighed three tonnes.

In that whole body, the blood weighed eight tonnes.

And this, I know, is the blubber processing plant.

And somewhere, they brought it inside, to be chopped up

into little pieces.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to find that. I mean...

Well, maybe here.

Maybe here. There is a hole here.

Oh, yeah, with a chute going down there.

So, they slid the blubber down through there.

Yeah, that is the blubber chute.

Ah-ha.

So, the blubber would've come in here, down underground there,

and then, there is this big elevator here, which then rises up

through the building.

You can imagine that just sloppily full of minced blubber.

So, it is a very intense process.

Steam is bring driven into these boilers under high pressure.

And that steam blows the oil out of it. And it's...

It's not a, kind of, gentle, careful bubbling.

This is, "Give me the oil!"

In the 1907-8 season, the three companies

already on South Georgia caught 2,300 whales, mostly humpbacks.

The oil in the blubber layer was easiest to extract

and so, when they were faced with such abundance,

the whalers simply left the rest of the carcass to float away.

So, I think this is a film

taken in the '50s.

I'm interested in what Russell and his team think

about the activities of the station they have spent weeks surveying.

Do you recognise that, you guys? Do you recognise that?

It's actually lovely to see these films of the stations, as they were,

compared to what we see them as now, when they are just, you know,

sort of, tragic ruins.

-Look at the volume of the meat down there.

-There's flesh everywhere.

It's unreal.

Had you not thought it was like that?

I thought it might have been more streamlined

and animals pulled up and it's cut up and not...

I didn't, sort of, think there would be flesh lying everywhere.

You know what it was used for, but it's not until you actually see it

in action that you go, "Oh, my God!"

-It's brutal, though. That's the thing. It's so brutal.

-It's a sin.

It's seems like a sin. Such a beautiful animal

and we're doing that.

Man is doing that, you know.

By the 1910-11 season,

Salvesen's operation at Leith Harbour had become

the largest whaling concern in the world,

sending home over 8,000 tonnes of oil

and paying their shareholders 100% dividend on their investment.

These are the huge tanks that the whale oil was stored in,

these vast great cylinders. And even more over there.

I mean, it's an industrial technology and it takes a minute

to realise that what's in here is not an industrial product,

but whale oil.

In a way, it's an extraordinary triumph, to be able to gather

this quantity of oil from the sea and that triumph is, itself, tragic.

It's terrible to gather that much oil from the sea.

So, this is...

This is really everything that Leith Harbour adds up to.

Incredibly well done and incredibly sad.

In 1912, the same year that Scott reached the South Pole, there were

seven whaling companies up and running on South Georgia. An island

entirely uninhabited eight years earlier was now home to 1,200 men.

It was a piece of cake, really, you know.

The only thing you missed is a woman.

Look at these lovely girls. Fantastic.

We've got the real thing here. There's a lovely one.

HE LAUGHS

La Parisienne.

This reminds me of something I've got here,

which is a letter from Tam, to his wife.

Probably one of the least-diplomatic letters

ever sent from South Georgia.

He writes on the back of it, "Here I am sitting on Danny's bunk.

"Hope you like the pin-ups. Best love, my dear, from your Tam."

HE LAUGHS

I'd say the camaraderie was terrific and that's where you learn to do it.

You've got to make a joke in life to survive things like that.

Of course, we used to distil our own booze,

which I shouldn't be telling you, should I?

If you were ever catched with any of that in your cabin or anything,

that was your bag. You'd never be back at the whaling again.

Every chance you were sent home on the first transport that called.

That was the punishment if you got caught.

Alcohol was a very, very prized commodity,

I'll tell you that for nothing.

A night's booze like that usually took away a lot of tension.

It kept them going for another long while.

I've got a photo that exactly matches this.

They're making illegal hooch out of all this equipment.

The girls on their lockers exactly like that.

Isn't that fantastic?!

I think that is what this hooch business is all about -

having a laugh. Come in from the blood and guts out there

and, at least, in here, you can have a few girls on the wall,

have a drink, have a good time, have a joke, have a smoke.

Getting a brew on, is what they called it.

You'd do anything for a tin of yeast.

Yeast was the main ingredient.

Look at that. Best for baking, eh?

You didn't tell people where you hid that.

It was pretty secretive stuff.

My God, what about in there? There we go.

This is the remains of a still in here.

In here, under this bed, is something even better.

That's the party scoop there.

That's what you welcome your guests with.

By 1914, South Georgia was such a well-supplied

outpost of the industrial world, that Ernest Shackleton stopped here

to restock, at the start of his Endurance expedition.

Before he left London,

prominent scientists were voicing concerns that

the depletion of whales in the north was now being repeated down south.

Keen to encourage a long-lived whaling industry, the government

set up an inter-departmental committee to investigate.

The committee asked Shackleton if he could take a scientist with him

to study what was happening to the whales down here.

A young biologist called Robert Clark joined the expedition

and came here to talk to the whalers.

From their figures, it appeared that the humpback, in particular,

was in steep decline. From something like 5,000 whales in 1910,

it had dropped to 474 only three years later.

The committee suggested a ban on the taking of humpbacks,

but the stations had already moved on to blue and fin whales

to make up their catch.

Broader regulations stipulated that the whole carcass

of the whale must now be used.

This tallied with Salvesen's thrifty ideals

and, unlike the earlier Norwegian-owned stations

that took just the blubber, Leith Harbour installed plants

to process the meat and the bone.

The meat came over here and the way they did it was to haul it

over to these giant bucket slides here.

My job was to take the guts out of the whale.

It was not a bad job if you had a fresh whale,

because you could warm your hands in the warm blood.

But it wasn't a nice job when a whale was a week old.

For the work it was, it was bloody. Bloody and hard work.

And if you go up to the plant - I can still picture it -

there is a winch there, a steam winch, and a green door.

A-ha! He said, "Look for the green door."

Inside there, there is this big cylinder

which is covered with asbestos.

This is the great big cooker that Jimmy was talking about.

When there was a break in the whale, we used to get underneath

the cylinder, with our whaling boots on and all the gear, and sleep!

This is where Jimmy used to have a kip. Under there.

Can you imagine that?

When the First World War broke out,

whale oil was in even more demand for the manufacture

of nitro-glycerine in explosives and all regulation was dropped.

The Norwegian company found it difficult to operate

during the war and, seeing an opportunity to steal

a march on their rivals, Salvesen's invested further in Leith Harbour.

Everything was used. There was nothing wasted.

You'd cut the jawbone off, cut the ribs out,

cut the backbone out and that's heaved onto the bone loft.

There is a bone management area here. This is exactly it.

Here's the saw. Oh, my God! Look at that!

What a monstrous object that is.

This is whale spine-cutting machinery.

The bone sawman, he'd have two boys working with him -

one chap for dragging out the hook,

and the other chap for holding the saw, so it didn't whip

back and forward too much.

It was "Doomp! Doomp! Doomp!"

Steam-powered, jiggering its way through the bones

and cutting them into two three-foot, lengths which they could

then dump down into these pots here.

Once the bone was in there, then the last of the whale was gone.

When I went to Leith Harbour and seen my first whale up on the plant,

I thought, "Good God, what a size of an animal! Massive."

Within about 20 minutes, there was nothing of the poor thing left.

It was all chopped up into cookers.

After the First World War,

catches from South Georgia stations continued to climb,

reaching their peak of nearly 8,000 whales a year by 1925.

They processed whales like Ford made cars. This is what this is about.

Just an absolutely unbroken route, from ocean to oil tank.

At the time, it was a job

for me and I was making more money than my father was making.

Everybody had... a bonus on the production,

so it was in your best interests to keep things going.

You looked at every whale that came up - it became a number of pounds!

In my mind now, there is a real difference between

the young guys, the whalers who came down here and did the work,

and the people who were organising the enterprise.

This is a big, highly-capitalised business. Extremely well-run,

very efficiently run, very well funded.

There is a difference between those business decisions

and the experience of the lads who came here.

Salvesen's profits were, by now, over £300,000 a year,

equivalent to £100 million today.

The gamble of establishing a complete industrial town

on a desolate Antarctic island had turned out to be a very shrewd move.

This is the industrial world brought south

and the only reason it's here is that, out there, are some

of the most productive and nutrient-rich seas in the world.

That's what this pile of corrugated iron was all about.

It's about parasitising on the riches of the ocean.

It is just a "Give me your juices and I'll sell them."

Why was a place making such huge profits

simply walked away from and left to rust just 40 years later?

And why was Britain

still in the 1960s doing something that we now feel is so wrong?

Imagine the number of whales needed to fill this.

And nearly all of that oil going back to Europe to make margarine.

A major innovation at sea produces a gigantic leap in scale,

while an epic tussle between big business and science

pushes the whales to the brink.

I think we all knew that time was up.

Well, the whales were gone, weren't they? They'd gone.