So I embarked on this project to understand everything I could about whaling. I wanted to know why burning whale fat in lamps was the best way to light cities for about 50 years. I wanted to know how profitable whaling was, what the hunters were paid, and how many whaleships were lost at sea. I wanted to know why the classical image of whaling was associated with America and what other countries have whaling legacies. I wanted to know if the whaling industry wiped out the whales and if they can recover.
This essay is the result. It is over 30,000 words long, a new record for my blogging. It’s broken into seven parts linked here:
Part I – Economic Value of a Whale
- Breakdown of the parts of a whale which have been harvested and commercially traded throughout history
- Description and valuations of whale oil, meat, baleen, and other resources
- Attempts at estimating quantities of resources extracted from a single whale
- Breakdown of the whale hunting methods throughout history
- Shore hunting, ocean hunting, and technological evolutions in hunting
- The many ways whale hunting can go wrong
- Overview of the origins of whaling
- Estimated value of a beached whale
- The commercial success of Basque whaling
- Tracking the ascendancy of British whaling based on subsidies, tariffs, and military dominance
- Tracking the challenge of early American whaling based on innovation
- Explanation of why American whaling triumphed
- Examination of the high point of global whaling, when whaling was one of the most important industries on earth
- Most in depth description of the economics and experience of whaling – 50% labor desertion rate, highly inconsistent payout matrix, 6% of voyages never returned, etc.
- Golden Age whaling did not have a significant impact on global whaling populations
- Fall of US dominance, rise of Norway and then European competition
- Overview of early attempts to restrict whaling for environmental purposes, and why they failed
- Collapse of whaling population, estimated species populations before and after industrial whaling
- Present state of whaling legality and population impacts
- Norway and Japan continue to hunt whales for opaque cultural reasons
- Commercial whaling can return, but I’m not sure if it should
by Matt Lakeman | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Excellent (and packed with all kinds of whale-related minutiae and pictures). Here are a couple excerpts, selected randomly:]"The stereotypical whaler crewman was uneducated, illiterate or barely literate, and had no hope for work beyond manual labor. He joined a whaling venture either because he was highly risk-tolerant, ignorant of the payout matrix, in debt to the whaling company, or was literally tricked into signing up. He may have purposefully been targeted by a whaling agent because he was too dumb to understand the lay system and how bad of a deal he was getting. He was very likely malnourished, missing teeth, an alcoholic by modern standards, and there was a good chance he had a venereal disease. He was a nominal Christian, but never prayed unless he was in a storm at sea. He had close to a 50% chance of deserting the voyage before it finished." (....)
The Norweigan Revival
Norway is a country of 5 million people sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world. Their annoyingly efficient oil-backed sovereign wealth fund currently holds over $1 trillion in assets, or $195,000 per Norwegian citizen. Norwegians love oil.
That appreciation for black goopy stuff started in the late 1880s when its whaling industry kicked off. They had whaled before then, but on a small scale. The problem wasn’t a lack of willingness or experienced crewmen, but a matter of speed. The Norwegian coastline was teeming with rorquals, a group of baleen whales which includes blues, minkes, and fins. While sperm whales lumber along at an average of 4 knots/hour (4.6 mph), minkes swim about 3X faster, which makes tracking their surfacing “sporadic” and “hard to follow.” The old 19th century whaleships were barely faster than sperm whales, and had no hope of pursuing rorquals, let alone successfully harpooning one. Blues and fins were occasionally caught, but only if they were sick or by sheer monumental luck.
By the turn of the 20th century, technology had leveled the playing field. As explained in Part II, ships were significantly faster, and hand-thrown harpoons were replaced by harpoon cannons tipped with explosives. Experimental forms of these weapons were developed in the mid-1800s, but largely ignored by a stalwart and declining American whaling industry. For reasons not clear to me, they became more popular in Europe despite the apparent downside of rendering unsalvageable a far higher number of whales.
Norway had all the factors for a whaling revival. It had a large (relative to its population) and experienced fishing industry with highly skilled laborers used to working in the frigid and harsh seas that whales frequented. Being poor at the time, Norway could harvest home-grown whale oil more cheaply than it could import petroleum from the crowded European market, plus whale oil derivatives were becoming an increasingly viable crop fertilizer. And though Norway has famously beautiful terrain, it is also infamously unsuited to farming and raising livestock, hence its large fishing industry, and hence whales emerging as a new and highly-valued source of meat."
Norway is a country of 5 million people sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world. Their annoyingly efficient oil-backed sovereign wealth fund currently holds over $1 trillion in assets, or $195,000 per Norwegian citizen. Norwegians love oil.
That appreciation for black goopy stuff started in the late 1880s when its whaling industry kicked off. They had whaled before then, but on a small scale. The problem wasn’t a lack of willingness or experienced crewmen, but a matter of speed. The Norwegian coastline was teeming with rorquals, a group of baleen whales which includes blues, minkes, and fins. While sperm whales lumber along at an average of 4 knots/hour (4.6 mph), minkes swim about 3X faster, which makes tracking their surfacing “sporadic” and “hard to follow.” The old 19th century whaleships were barely faster than sperm whales, and had no hope of pursuing rorquals, let alone successfully harpooning one. Blues and fins were occasionally caught, but only if they were sick or by sheer monumental luck.
By the turn of the 20th century, technology had leveled the playing field. As explained in Part II, ships were significantly faster, and hand-thrown harpoons were replaced by harpoon cannons tipped with explosives. Experimental forms of these weapons were developed in the mid-1800s, but largely ignored by a stalwart and declining American whaling industry. For reasons not clear to me, they became more popular in Europe despite the apparent downside of rendering unsalvageable a far higher number of whales.
Norway had all the factors for a whaling revival. It had a large (relative to its population) and experienced fishing industry with highly skilled laborers used to working in the frigid and harsh seas that whales frequented. Being poor at the time, Norway could harvest home-grown whale oil more cheaply than it could import petroleum from the crowded European market, plus whale oil derivatives were becoming an increasingly viable crop fertilizer. And though Norway has famously beautiful terrain, it is also infamously unsuited to farming and raising livestock, hence its large fishing industry, and hence whales emerging as a new and highly-valued source of meat."
