Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...last century the childlike Eskimos of Alaska, fascinated by the white man's guns, began shooting walrus and caribou with more enthusiasm than discretion. That, plus annual fluctuations in the whale catch, caused recurrent famine years. So in 1892, a notable famine year, a Presbyterian missionary named Sheldon Jackson, backed by Quaker funds, undertook an experiment in practical ecology, which is the science that relates living organisms to their environment. Reindeer were imported from Siberia into Alaska for the Eskimos' benefit. Unlike its close relative the caribou of Alaska, the Siberian reindeer is easily domesticated. It was figured...
Herr Hitler also still got some 390,000 tons of Dutch oil, 3.000 tons of tin, large stocks of vegetable oils, whale oil, condensed milk. He appointed his Austrian yes man, Arthur Seyss Inquart, to govern the new prize. He gloated over the new springboard he had for a feat never accomplished, even by Napoleon, since William the Conqueror performed it in 1066: the invasion of Great Britain...
With Pinocchio comes a host of new sketches for the Disney gallery. Well out in front, striding along with a jaunty step, is Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio's "official conscience." A worldly-wise fellow with a good heart, he nurtures his puppet-ward watchfully but without sentimentality. Montro the Whale is living proof that a glob of blubber covering the screen, with an eye in the middle, can with a sneeze inspire both terror and laughter. J. Mortimer Foulfellow, who is a hair-brushed and Oxford-accented Big Bad Fox, is not only a contemptible villain, but a social satire...
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...
...Whale oil, unfortunately for whales, is especially valuable in war. It is a cheap source of fats for soap and margarine, and baleen whales yield glycerin for explosives. In World War I, up to 1917, Britain bought 660,000 bbl. of baleen oil for $185 a ton (normal: $120-125 a ton). At that time blockaded Germany was paying $1,500 a ton for such oil as she could get. This time, Britain contracted to take all the Norwegian oil for margarine. Next autumn, whether Norway is German-dominated or not, her great fleet of whaling ships will...