Word: harpooning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most people think of the Moby Dick era as the heyday of whaling, but whaling did not actually reach slaughterhouse efficiency with floating factories and motor launch harpoon-gunning until the 20th Century. In the three centuries from 1620 to 1920 the average whale catch was about 3,000 a year. In the 1937-38 season 54,664 whales (yielding 615,500 tons of oil) were taken, the greatest number in history. Writing in Science recently, Dr. Murphy observed that during the 1938-39 season a record kill may again have been perpetrated, but there were so many ships...