Over exploitation:
The history of commercial whaling has been a history of relentless over-exploitation. The first known organised commercial whale hunt was conducted by the Basques, who from the eleventh century hunted right whales in the Bay of Biscay - and, from the fifteenth century, off Newfoundland and Labrador. They were so adept at their craft that the species has all but disappeared from both regions. Whalers from several nations, but particularly the British and the Dutch, all but exterminated the bowhead whale from the Atlantic Arctic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Bering, Beaufort, and Chukchi Seas, commercial hunting by primarily American fleets almost brought the same fate to the bowhead population there. The Atlantic grey whale has been long extinct, and the Western Pacific grey whale seems doomed to follow; the Eastern Pacific grey whale was for a long time also thought to have been hunted to the edge of extinction, but has fortunately made an impressive recovery in the last century.

But the greatest destruction visited on whale populations came in the twentieth century, in the Antarctic. The first whale killed by an Antarctic commercial whaling operation, a humpback, was shot off South Georgia Island in 1904.

The relentless erosion of whale populations by the whaling industry in the first half of the 20th century led to the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1946. Its founders were clearly aware of the problem, and recognised it in the preamble to the IWC's Convention:

"Considering that the history of whaling has seen over-fishing of one area after another and of one species after another to such a degree that it is essential to protect all species of whales from further over-fishing."

But despite the clearly recognised lessons of the past, the IWC was unable to regulate whaling, and the pattern of over-exploitation continued.

Under the IWC's attempts to carry out scientific management, the blue whales of the Antarctic were pushed to the edge of extinction. Catching blue whales was banned in 1965, but their population shows little sign of recovery. Next, the industry switched its effort to the smaller fin whales, which lost 95% of their biomass and were protected in 1976. The next largest Antarctic whales, the sei whales, were then targeted and by 1978 they too needed protection.

The scale of this devastation is staggering. For instance, it is estimated that there were approximately a quarter of a million Antarctic blue whales before the advent of commercial whaling; now there are believed to be only around a thousand left. Fin whales, once thought to number half a million in the Southern Hemisphere, were reduced to about 20,000.

Cheating:
There was also widespread cheating under IWC management. In 1961-62, for example, the factory ship Sovetskya Rossiya killed 1,568 humpbacks, although the entire Soviet fleet reported just 270. Between World War II and 1972, the Soviets killed almost 48,500 humpbacks, of which they reported only 2,700. They also killed 3,212 right whales; they admitted to killing just one.

Just this year, Mr. Kondo, a former executive of Nihon Hogei K.K. (Japan Whaling Co. Ltd), published his memoirs which detailed the various methods used by the Japanese coastal whaling stations, right up until the moratorium, to manipulate catch data.

As well as failing to report whales caught, these methods included converting the catches of undersized sperm whales to fewer large whales, stretching the bodies of undersized whales and intentionally mis-reporting the sex of female sperm whales. Other ruses were also employed, such as taking inspectors out to dinner while these illegal activities took place.

Finally, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) agreed to a moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into effect in 1986.

Today, only two countries continue whaling commercially in defiance of the ban - Norway and Japan.