The Yankee whalemen of the 19th Century scarcely paused to reflect on the damage they might be doing to the world’s population of great whales. They acted in the Victorian certainty that all the creatures of the earth existed solely to serve man in one fashion or another. And in their single-minded pursuit of the whales, they visited calamity on some species in some of the world’s whaling grounds.
In the North Atlantic, for example, the once-large herds of right whales, a slow and vulnerable species, were reduced to uneconomic proportions by the early 1800s. The whalemen next concentrated on the sperm whale, taking great numbers of this huge animal until it, too, was hard to find in the Atlantic. The whale hunters then moved into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, where they discovered so many sperm, right, humpback and, later, bowhead whales that no Yankee whaleman could imagine the stocks ever being exhausted.
There were more than a million other whales that the early whalemen could not hunt at all. Most of the rorqual group—among them the enormous blue whale, the fin whale and the sei whale—were too big and too fast for men with hand-held harpoons to attack successfully. And on those infrequent occasions when rorquals were killed, they almost always lost their buoyancy and quickly sank—to the whalemen’s rage and frustration.
But the advent of modern European whaling changed all that. With advanced technology—cannon-fired explosive harpoons, fast steam-powered hunter boats that pumped compressed air into whale carcasses to keep them afloat, enormous factory vessels that could, by 1975, process the oil and flesh of dozens of whales each day — the assault on the whales reached unbelievable intensity.
Between 1842 and 1846, at the pin
Nacle of their success. New England whalemen returned home with the oil of some 20,000 sperm whales in their holds. Between 1960 and 1964, whaling fleets—mostly Japanese and Russian—killed 127,000 sperm whales.
What is more, 20th Century whalemen were not limited to the traditional quarry: with their sophisticated weapons they could kill any whale that swam. The rorquals became easy prey.
The huge blue whale, greatest of them all—it was called the “cream” whale because one carcass produced two to six times the oil and flesh of any other whale—was hunted so assiduously that almost 30,000 were taken in the year 1931 alone. Between 1910 and 1967 a total of 330,000 were killed and their bodies processed into cosmetics, lubricants, auto transmission fluid, pet food, cattle feed, fertilizer and margarine: and a considerable amount of whale meat was consumed by humans. By 1967, out of a population of blue whales believed to have once numbered between 400,000 and 500,000, only about 14,000 remained.
In the same way the fin whale, once thought to have numbered 400,000, was reduced by some estimates to one-fifth that total: the sei whale was killed off to the point where only half of the original 220,000 existed.
By careful estimates a grand total of more than 1.5 million whales of all types were killed in the half century ending in 1975. In the 1930s the right, bowhead and gray whales were belatedly accorded full protection by the International Whaling Commission, as later were the blue and the humpback. Other species, such as the fin, sei and sperm whales, were placed under a protective quota system. Nevertheless, as late as 1975, in excess of 17,000 sperm whales were being killed annually, four times more than the old Yankee whalemen took in 1846, the greatest year in their history.
World History
