FEATURE - Iceland's Ahab prepares to bring home the blubber
Date: 20-May-03
Country: ICELAND
Author: Stephen Brown
But there may soon be fresh meat on the menu, and blubber to serve soured in milk in February's traditional food festival, if Iceland goes ahead with plans to resume whaling despite protests from environmentalists and a booming tourist industry.
"It keeps very well," said Kristjan Loftsson, whose whaling fleet's last catch in 1989 was vacuum-packed and frozen to keep restaurants supplied. His four black-hulled ships sit patiently in port alongside boats offering whale-spotting excursions.
With seven of the 13 great whale species endangered, the International Whaling Commission outlawed commercial hunting of the world's largest mammal in 1986. Iceland stopped in 1989 but boycotted the IWC until rejoining last October.
Norway has defied the ban and whaled commercially since 1993. Japan uses a loophole permitting "scientific" catches - the same loophole Iceland now wants to use to hunt 250 Fin and Sei whales a year, both species considered endangered.
WHALES EAT OUR FISH
Loftsson, who began as mess-boy on his father's ships half a century ago, goes down to the engine room of the Hvalur ("whale" in Icelandic) to show off a heavy iron harpoon tipped with a grenade and barbs that spring open inside the whale.
"You shoot the whale, that is how you do it," he said, sounding eerily like the narrator of "Moby Dick", the whaling classic by Herman Melville that Loftsson has read and re-read.
Described by one local journalist as "Iceland's Ahab", the novel's protagonist, Loftsson said whaling was a "good business" worth keeping his vessels in port for 14 years.
Polls suggest that 75 percent of Icelanders support whaling, despite environmentalists' condemnation of their country's proposal to resume limited "scientific" catches, to be discussed at the IWC's annual meeting in June.
"I can't see anything wrong with it. The whales eat up our fish," said law student Sigurjon at an open-air rock concert in Reykjavik, which has become a trendy tourist destination.
The ancient rivalry with the whale is in stark contrast to Iceland's modernity.
Reminders are everywhere that the island of lava fields, glaciers and lakes settled by Vikings has always owed its living to the sea. There are fish on the coins and Hallgrimur Helgason in his cult novel "101 Reykjavik" complains of endless fish reports on Icelandic TV: "And the sea this and the sea that".
HOLY WHALES
Gudni Valberg, a 23-year-old selling jeans, said Iceland "could get more money from showing the whales than from killing them". Like many younger Icelanders, he has never eaten whale meat but has been whale-watching.
Asbjorn Bjorgvinsson, pioneer of a thriving whale-watching industry that took out 62,050 tourists last year from just 2,200 in 1995, said Icelanders supported whaling out of a mistaken sense of national pride and "not letting anybody tell us what do do".
He says the argument that whales must be culled to preserve fish stocks "goes down very well with Icelanders, Norwegians and Japanese, but nowhere else in the world dependent on fisheries".
Manager of the Husavik Whale Centre on Iceland's east coast, he sees the bad press hurting tourism, Iceland's second industry after fishing, whose exports he warns will risk being hit by a foreign boycott.
But to pragmatic people who have carved one of Europe's highest income levels out of their largely barren island, foreign "sentimentalism" about whales carries little weight.
"We don't buy the argument that these are holy animals that should be treated like pets," said Finance Minister Geir Haarte.
Although whaling would officially be scientific, he said it would resume only "provided we have a market. Japan has traditionally been the buyer and we hope they would be willing to buy again."
Whale-watchers are hopeful that Japanese gourmets will be put off by research from Norway showing that whale meat and blubber contains toxic mercury and chemicals known as PCBs.
Loftsson, d
