The Decree and the Factory Ships
In 1978 the King of Tonga banned whaling by decree, and Tongan harpoons went into sheds. The whales they had been taking in ones and twos had already been destroyed on a different scale entirely, by fleets that reported one set of numbers and killed another.
Between roughly July and October, humpback whales fill the sheltered water inside the Vava'u group to calve. The industry that has grown up around them is unusually specific: Tonga is one of a very small number of countries that licenses people to get into the sea with them, and the terms are narrow. A licensed operator, one boat with a whale at a time, four swimmers and a guide in the water, no touching, no manoeuvring between a mother and her calf, and the guide alone decides when everybody comes out. A day costs somewhere around two hundred euros a head, the season is four months long, and it is the reason Neiafu has a working economy in the dry half of the year.
None of that existed fifty years ago, when the same water was hunted. Tongan crews took humpbacks from open boats with hand harpoons, and in 1978 King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV ended the practice by royal decree. It is usually told as a conservation parable, and it is one — but not the one people assume. The whales Tonga stopped killing had already been reduced to a remnant by something Tongan boats had no part in and no knowledge of, and the scale of it did not become public for another sixteen years.
The men who hunted them from open boats
Tongan whaling was not ancient. It arrived in the late nineteenth century, when Tongan men who had crewed on American and Australian whaleships came home with the method and applied it to animals that swam past their villages every winter. The boats were small, the harpoons were thrown by hand, and the whole operation was conducted within sight of shore in Ha'apai and Vava'u. A successful hunt meant meat distributed through a village, and a season might account for a handful of animals. By the 1970s the returns were falling and Tongans said so — the whales were not coming back in the numbers older men remembered. The 1978 decree closed the hunt, and by any reasonable measure Tonga was ahead of the argument: the International Whaling Commission would not agree a global moratorium until 1982, and it did not take effect until the 1985–86 season.
The fleet that did not report what it took
What had actually happened to the whales was being done from factory ships operating on the feeding grounds, thousands of kilometres to the south. From the 1946–47 season the Soviet Union ran pelagic whaling fleets in the Southern Ocean, and from the beginning it submitted falsified catch returns to the body responsible for counting. The reconstruction of the real figures began after the Soviet collapse, when the biologist Alexey Yablokov made the fraud public in 1994 and Soviet whaling scientists — chief among them Alfred Berzin, who had spent his career on those ships — published the records they had kept. Soviet fleets killed on the order of 48,000 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere while reporting fewer than 3,000. Two seasons at the turn of the 1960s account for the great bulk of it. The humpbacks that breed in Tonga, Fiji, Samoa and the Cooks feed off Antarctica, and the population that migrates through this part of the Pacific was reduced from tens of thousands to what may have been a few hundred animals.
A king in Nuku'alofa banned a hunt that was taking whales in ones and twos. The fleets that had emptied the ocean those whales came from reported one set of numbers to the organisation that was supposed to be counting and killed another, and no decree anywhere reached them.
What a swim permit is for
Whale watching started in Vava'u in the mid-1990s, informally and with very little regulating it, and by the 2000s the fleet had grown fast enough that the question of pressure on the animals became a domestic argument rather than an external one. Tonga legislated it: the Whale Watching and Swimming Act 2008 and the regulations made under it put the activity behind a licence, capped the number of permits, and wrote down the operating rules — approach distances, one vessel in contact at a time, the four-plus-one limit in the water, time limits on how long a boat may stay with a group, and a defined season. The case for all of it is fiscal rather than sentimental: a dead humpback fed a village once, whereas a living one is worked by a licensed fleet for four months a year and brings back a calf that will do the same, and in Vava'u that underwrites guesthouses, boat crews, fuel sales and the whole Neiafu waterfront through the season. Enforcement is the honest weakness. The ministry responsible is small, the group is a maze of islands, and what mostly keeps operators in line is that they work in front of each other in a harbour where everybody knows whose boat is whose.
The other end of the migration
It is worth understanding what the four swimmers are looking at. A humpback that calves in Tongan water in August has come roughly six thousand kilometres from the Southern Ocean and is not feeding while it is here — the mother lives on her own reserves and converts them into milk. The calf has to gain enough weight to make the return crossing before the water cools. Everything the regulations concentrate on is a mother-and-calf pair, because that is the pairing the tourists want and it is also the pairing with no margin: energy spent avoiding a boat is energy that does not go into a calf that has an Antarctic crossing ahead of it. The thing being sold and the thing being protected are the same animal at the same moment, which is a harder design problem than it looks.
What recovery is measured against
The Oceania humpback population is growing. It is also still assessed as endangered, separately from the species as a whole, because the baseline it is recovering towards is not the 1970s — it is the ocean before industrial whaling, and it will be decades before the difference stops being visible in the survey numbers. Tonga cannot do anything about that. Its own contribution to the depletion was marginal, its ban was symbolic in tonnage, and the fleets that did the damage answered to a state that no longer exists.
What Tonga does control is who gets into the water and how often, and it has taken that seriously for longer than most places with a comparable industry. Two seasons were lost anyway during the pandemic — the border shut in March 2020 and did not reopen to visitors until August 2022 — and a third was disrupted by the Hunga Tonga eruption in January 2022, which cut the country's single undersea cable and stopped bookings dead. The whales came all three years regardless. That is the useful thing to hold on to on a boat off Neiafu at seven in the morning: the animals were not saved by the decree of 1978, and they are not being saved by a permit system now. They are recovering from something that was done elsewhere, and Tonga's job is the comparatively modest one of not adding to it while making a living from the fact.