Short answers, pulled from the story.
Whaling is the hunting of whales for products such as meat and blubber. Blubber can be turned into oil, sometimes called train oil, which was important during the Industrial Revolution. Modern whaling is done mainly for food and for carvings of tusks, teeth and vertebrae.
The earliest documentation of a well-established whaling industry dates to the year 1026, from the Basque coastal regions of Spain and France. The Basques were the first to catch whales commercially and dominated the trade for five centuries. Subsistence whaling on small cetaceans dates back to at least 3000 BC.
The International Whaling Commission voted on the 23rd of July 1982, to establish a five-year moratorium on commercial whaling of great whales because of extreme depletion of most whale stocks, beginning in the 1985-86 season. Though intended as temporary, the moratorium has been extended indefinitely to this day.
Iceland, Japan and Norway still engage in commercial whaling. Aboriginal subsistence hunting continues among North American indigenous peoples, Bequia, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Lamalera in Indonesia. Norway and Iceland conduct commercial hunts under national quotas after objecting to the moratorium.
Japan announced on the 26th of December 2018 that it would withdraw from the International Whaling Commission because, in its view, the Commission had failed to promote sustainable hunting and had moved toward an anti-whaling, pro-conservation agenda. Japan resumed commercial whaling in its own waters from July 2019 while ceasing it in the Antarctic.
It was revealed in 1994 that the Soviet Union had systematically undercounted its catch. From 1948 to 1973 it caught 48,477 humpback whales rather than the 2,710 it officially reported to the International Whaling Commission. Its total harvest exceeded 534,000 whales between the 1930s and the 1980s.
Small whales are long-lived predators whose tissues build up methylmercury from their prey, reaching levels hazardous to humans who eat too much too often. In the Caribbean, people are advised not to exceed one serving every three weeks. High levels have been found in pilot whales from the Faroe Islands and in dolphins and small whales from Japan.