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17. Tønnesen & Johnsen: op. cit., 1982, p. 750.
18. Tønnesen & Johnsen: op. cit., 1982, p. 750.
19. K. Mulvaney & C. Taylor: The Economics of Japanese
Whaling. A Collapsing Industry burdens Taxpayers. Interna-
tional Fund for Animal Welfare, Yarmouth Port, MA 2013, p. 7.
20. Fra hjemmesiden ”Thor-Glimt”:
net/skip/skipstekst/1948_thorshovdi.htm (30. januar 2014).
21. Tønnesen & Johnsen: op. cit., 1982, p. 751.
22. Tønnesen & Johnsen: op. cit., 1982, p. 614.
23. Interview med Hakon Mielche, Jyllands-Posten 31. ok-
tober 1979.
24. Hakon Mielche: Hval i sigte. København 1951.
25. Hjemmesiden fortæller hi-
storien om Christian ”Fut” Jensens film, som forsvandt. Op-
tagelser og fraklip, som ikke blev anvendt i filmen til den
norske reder, dukkede ifølge hjemmesiden op i Jensens pri-
vate arkiv efter hans død i 1983 og dannede baggrund for en
TV-coproduktion i 1999/2000 mellem det danske produkti-
onsselskab Channel 6 og Danmarks Radio.
26. Opslag på (30. januar 2014).
Summary
From October 1964 to May 1965, a young Dane, Kristian
Thomsen, worked in the Norwegian whaling industry on
board the factory ship the M/S Thorshøvdi of Sandefjord in
Norway. Thomsen donated a number of effects from the ex-
pedition to the Fisheries and Maritime Museum in autumn
2013, and the museum was able to document his fascinating
story. His report and photos form the basis for the article
in a look back at the whaling industry which, viewed with
modern eyes, appears strange and almost unreal in its enor-
mous scope. Norway and other whaling nations’ activities in
the South Seas took place from around 1904 to the 1960s, and
the efficient whaling ships and floating boiling plants almost
succeeded in clearing the southern hemisphere of the big
whales – blue whales, finbacks, sei whales and sperm whales.
The Thorshøvdi was built in 1948 at B&W in Copen-
hagen and went whaling in the Southern Ocean for 17 sea-
sons, the 1964/65 season being the last. Together with six
whaling ships and two transport vessels, the factory ship was
one of three Norwegian whaling expeditions in the Southern
Ocean in this season. The expedition had a total crew of over
500 men, 320 of whom were employed on the factory ship,
where the dead whales were cut up and processed into whale
oil, meat extract and meat and bone meal for the food indus-
try. Thomsen experienced both the catching and the killing
of the big whales and the efficient handling of the animals on
board the factory ship’s different decks at the closest possible
quarters. The Thorshøvdi expedition managed to catch 1,851
whales in the 1964/65 season, 1,292 sei whales, 231 finbacks
and 328 sperm whales. These numbers were equivalent to
around five percent of the total catches in this year by the
whale-catching nations Norway, Japan and the Soviet Union.
For the Thorshøvdi it was a decrease relative to the previous
seasons, where an average of 2,500-3,000 whales were killed
by the ship’s whaling boats. The blue whale was protected in
1964, and the most profitable animal was thereby no longer
available to the whaling industry. Neither the whale popu-
lations nor the shipowners’ finances could continue to bear
the costs of a commercial exploitation of the falling popula-
tions, and the last Norwegian expedition was to the Southern
Ocean in 1966/67. Russian and Japanese whalers continued
their activities, but to a significantly reduced extent com-
pared with the period before 1962.
In the years from the First World War to and including
the 1960s, the whalers killed a total of 1.4 million whales
in the Antarctic, of which 331,000 were blue whales and
692,000 were finbacks, the two biggest species. By com-
parison, the population of blue whales was estimated in the
mid-1960s to be at most 1,000 remaining individuals in the
Southern Ocean. Norway accounted for over half the total
catches in whaling’s more profitable period in the 1930s, and
in 1960, Norway and Japan were still the biggest whaling
nations. Kristian Thomsen’s report on the expedition in the
Thorshøvdi provides an insight into a special world which
generated a high income for the local community in San-
defjord and the Norwegian economy before and after the
Second World War, and which made its indelible mark on
both the people who sailed to the Southern Ocean and the
natural resource on which it was based.
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