The concern throughout the world in 1988 for those three whales that were locked in the Arctic ice was dramatic proof that whales, several species of which face extinction, have become subjects of considerable sympathy. These are the recorded voices of whales. These monstrous creatures have been trumpeting their songs, one to another, in the world's oceans since the dawn of time, while overhead, great empires and civilizations have come and gone. Now, their time of decline has come. It began a long time ago. Four-thousand-year-old rock carvings show that the people who lived in what is now Norway were probably the first to seek out and kill whales in the sea. By around 890 AD, 3,000 years later, the practice had spread to the Basque people of France and Spain, who hunted whales from boats in the Bay of Biscay. In the centuries that followed, whaling became an important industry in Denmark, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and, finally, in what would become America. Whaling went into dramatic decline, beginning around 1900. Today, whales are hunted commercially only by Norway, Iceland and Japan. The world's fascination with them, however, is at an all-time high, because so few of them are left, given their tragic history. Richard Ellis writes about whales, takes pictures of whales in the open sea, and sketches whales stranded on the beach. He says it's a 20-year obsession that began in the mid-1960s, when he designed a model of a great blue for the Museum of Natural History in New York. 'As I began to do the research. I realized that nobody knew anything about whales. And I couldn't really find any pictures of what they looked like: all I could find was pictures of dead whales. And I became very excited at the prospect of doing what seemed to be original research on something that was so peculiar, which was the largest animal that has ever lived on earth. ' So large, he discovered, that the largest dinosaur weighed only half as much as the female blue whale. As he continued his research he boarded scientific vessels. Dove with whales in the Pacific, and even watched whales die at the hands of modern, explosive-tipped harpoons. His sketches appeared in magazines and encyclopedias and at the center of what was then the beginning of a movement to save the whales. 'I was one of those people who used to stand on street corners and ask for people to sign petitions, which at that time were directed towards the Japanese and the Soviets. Because in that period of time—late 60s, early 70s—the Japanese and the Soviets were killing tens of thousands of sperm particularly in the North Pacific, And we thought that getting the world's opinion on paper would make them say, 'Oh look, all these people don't like what we are doing. We will stop. ' Well, of course, they didn't stop. ' Not at first, commercial whaling peaked in the mid-1960s, with more than 60,000 whales killed each year. The International Whaling Commission, a group of member nations aimed at regulating the industry, began to make recommendations to end commercial whaling entirely. Why kill whales for soap, or fuel or paints and vernishes, even margarine, if we had substitutes for all those products? The seemingly senseless slaughter focused the world's attention on the whale and consequently the International Whaling Commission or IWC. 'And since it's said nowhere in the constitution of the IWC that you had to be whaling nation to join, you have countries like Kenya and the Seychelles. Switzerland is a member of the IWC, a country not known for its whaling history. Countries joined because they felt that this was something that needed to be done. ' By 1986, the Commission had passed a moratorium on commercial whaling. But since the organization had no enforcement powers, it could and can not impose sanctions on violators. Only a f