Neil J. Beck, a radio operator on board the whaling factory ship the ULYSSES for the 1938-1939 season documented the voyage photographically and the resulting photos comprise the ULYSSES collection. Beck also likely personally inscribed the backs of many of the photographs.
During the 1938-1939 season the ULYSSES killed and processed 1,106 whales according to the transcriptions on the photographs. The Western Operating Corporation Ltd. was registered as an American whaling company in December 1936. The corporation converted the tanker ULYSSES, a tanker built in Baltimore in 1915, to a whaling factory ship. The ULYSSES operated in the Antarctic, off the coast of Western Australia, with a Norwegian crew and a fleet of Norwegian catcher boats. Whale oil from the ULYSSES was loaded into smaller tankers mid-cruise and sent to American and European markets. While many assume American Whaling ended at the turn of the 20th century, this set of photographs documents American Whaling well into the 20th. The ULYSSES was also one of the last American Whaling Factory ships.1
According to logbook data during the 1938-1939 season, the ULYSSES traveled from:
Robins Dry Dock in Brooklyn, New York
Sandefjord, Norway
Gothenburg Sweden
Curaçao (an island Territory in the Caribbean that is now a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Walvis Bay, Namibia
The Antarctic Whaling Grounds
Walvis Bay, Namibia
Sandefjord, Norway
Newport News, VA
Gothenburg Sweden
Sandefjord, Norway
Curaçao (an island Territory in the Caribbean that is now a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Walvis Bay, Namibia
Durban, South Africa
The Antarctic Whaling Grounds
1 “Inventory for Manuscript Collection PMM 25 Clifford N. Carver Whaling Records 1933 - 1959.” Penobscot Marine Museum, 2006.
