Whaling

Introduction

The hunting of whales for food and oil, whaling was once conducted around the world by seafaring nations in pursuit of the giant animals that seemed as limitless as the oceans in which they swam. However, since the mid-20th century, when whale populations began to drop catastrophically, whaling has been conducted on a very limited scale. It is now the subject of great scrutiny, both by formal regulatory bodies and by nongovernmental organizations.

Whaling has been documented in many sources—from Neolithic cave art to present-day annual reports of the International Whaling Commission—but there is no firm proof as to what people first engaged in the practice. Prehistoric inhabitants of far northern coastal regions, lacking adequate agriculture, developed successful whaling techniques using Stone Age weapons. By the time the Inuit (Eskimo) of eastern and western North America were first encountered by Europeans, they had already mastered whale hunting, and many Inuit methods were used as recently as 1900. For the Inuit, a captured whale supplied food, fuel, and light; sinews provided cordage, and bones were used for tools and construction. Not until the 20th century, when floating factory ships came into use, did other civilizations succeed in the same efficient use of the whole carcass. Elsewhere, from the first intensive hunting of whales in the early 17th century to the early 20th century, little more than blubber and baleen was used, and the remainder of the animal was discarded. Each successive discovery of new whaling grounds resulted in the near disappearance of a particular species. The efficiency of modern hunting methods hastened this trend to the point that the industry has all but taken its place in history, leaving only a few enterprises to carry on in a limited fashion.

The History of Whaling

International whaling developed in stages that were determined by changing demand, diminishing stocks, and advancing technology. A lengthy primitive stage eventually led to commercial whaling; new markets and technical and chemical advances then produced modern whaling, which led to virtual extinction of the quarry and a return to a primitive stage. The commercial stages were dominated overwhelmingly by northern Europeans and Americans—first the Dutch, then the British and Americans, and finally the Norwegians and British. Only at the very end, when Europeans no longer found the trade profitable, did they surrender the remaining whales to the Russians and Japanese.

Primitive whaling
Archaeological evidence suggests that primitive whaling was practiced by the Inuit and others in the North Atlantic and North Pacific by 3000 BC, and it continues in a number of remote cultures to the present. The quarry has always been small, easily beached whales, such as belugas and narwhals, or larger species that would come close to shore to breed in sheltered bays. The Japanese used nets, and the Aleuts used poisoned spears. The Inuit successfully hunted large whales from skin boats, employing toggle-head harpoons attached by hide ropes to inflated sealskin floats. A number of harpoons were darted into a whale, impeding its escape until a safe kill could be made with a lance. In Europe, Nordic people hunted small whales, and in Iceland laws addressed whaling in the 13th century.

The forerunners of commercial whaling were the Basques, who caught northern right whales as they gathered to breed in the Bay of Biscay. Docile, slow-moving, and sleeping on the surface, the whales were chased by rowboat, struck by harpoon, “played” like fish, and then lanced. Their bodies, which floated after death, were towed to shore for stripping and boiling of the thick blubber and processing of the baleen. When seaworthy oceangoing ships were built, Basques set off in search of other whaling bays and found them—perhaps as early as the 14th century and certainly by the 16th—across the Atlantic off the coast of southern Labrador.

Early commercial whaling
While the Basques acquired experience, northern Europeans developed more capital and better markets. Drafting Basque whalemen for Arctic explorations, the English Muscovy Company initiated the exploitation of whaling bays around the island of Spitsbergen in 1610. The Dutch followed immediately and, with a combination of violence and better business organization, broke the English monopoly, which had already stifled competition. Smeerenburg (“Blubbertown”) was built on Spitsbergen after 1619. In its heyday during the 1630s and '40s, Smeerenburg had 150 men servicing whalers that hunted the Greenland right, or bowhead, whale in the surrounding Arctic Ocean.

The demise of Arctic bay whaling in the mid-1650s owed less to overfishing than to a miniature ice age that lasted for the rest of the 17th century. Smeerenburg shut down in the 1660s, although Dutch and German whalers navigated the open-sea ice. Whales were flensed (stripped) alongside the vessels, and their blubber, preserved to some extent by the cold, was taken home in barrels. This Greenland phase of whaling extended into the Davis Strait after 1719 and was dominated by the Dutch and Germans until the 1780s, when Britain forged ahead in order to service its industrial revolution.

Since the 1690s the British had pursued extensive “fishing” from bay stations in the North American colonies, and Cape Cod, Long Island, and Rhode Island became new centres of activity. There a new type of whaling was inaugurated in 1712, when a Nantucket vessel caught the first sperm whale, whose waxy oil and spermaceti were worth far more than right whale oil. Sperm whales are smaller than right whales and are pelagic, living in the open ocean. Sperm whaling lured expeditions into warmer waters, where rapid putrefaction of blubber was overcome in midcentury by the introduction of onboard rendering. Henceforth, voyages were limited only by the whaler's capacity and the crew's endurance. Hunts extended into the whale-rich seas of the Pacific, and four-year cruises became common, often mixing pelagic whaling with sealing and bay whaling for right whales. This vanguard incidentally opened the Pacific to British and American explorations and annexations.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, whaling vessels were chiefly merchant ships (occasionally barks) transporting equipment, crews, and catch. They were double-hulled and reinforced with beams against sea ice and were heavily armed against attack. Displacing 250–350 tons, these vessels were two or three times the tonnage of the average merchant ship for the sake of cargo capacity. Three tiers of barrels could be crammed below deck, while crews berthed on the half deck. American whaling ships were initially smaller than British vessels and were painted to look like warships. During the 19th century purpose-built barks measuring 30–45 metres (100–150 feet) and displacing 300–400 tons became more common, and in the 1850s clipper ships gained favour.

Throughout this period, catching was by hand-thrown harpoon from double-ended boats carrying five to seven men. The boats usually measured seven to nine metres long, and in America they were made of half-inch cedar planks. European Arctic boats were stronger, carver-built craft with oak frames and three-quarter-inch fir planking. Harpooners and boatsteerers were the key men when the strike was made. After the harpoon hit its mark, the whale was “played” at the end of ropes and killed by lance when exhausted. The catch was then towed to the whaler, where blubber and baleen were cut away by men either working from fragile platforms or walking with spiked boots directly upon the carcass. Finally, what was left of the animal was winched on deck for cutting, casking, and carrying home. (For a contemporaneous description of the methods used by 18th-century whalemen, see the Britannica Classic: Whale Fishery.) From about 1760 onward, sperm whales were rendered in “try-works”—a pair of very large cast-iron pots (try-pots) on a water-filled brick structure approximately two by three metres situated near the forward hatch. The only other technical innovation of this period—the harpoon gun—was introduced around 1800 but proved to be a failure.

Both northern and southern whaling entered the doldrums about 1860. The U.S. fleet of over 700 vessels (New Bedford alone registered 429 in 1857) declined rapidly, owing principally to the discovery in Pennsylvania of petroleum (1859), which replaced sperm oil and spermaceti candles. The British Arctic fleet was devastated in the 1830s and '40s by overfishing and frozen seas. The introduction of whale-product substitutes, such as vegetable oil, steel-boned corsets, and gas lamps, was partially offset by rising industrial demand. Residual whaling activity continued in the South Pacific and the Davis Strait until about 1914, and the taking of North Pacific right whales from San Francisco continued into the 1920s.