How a powerful weapon helped fuel some whales’ near-total destruction.
In the 1800s, a whaling industry had developed in North America and northern Europe, made most famous in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Huge ships would set sail from New Bedford, London, or Amsterdam for years at a time, following the great whales’ migration patterns from the tropics to the Arctic. Everything about whales and whaling seems superlative: the voyages were dangerous, the work itself a nightmarish vision of blood-slicked ship decks, and the waters boiled with scavenging sharks. All in the pursuit of some of the largest creatures ever to have lived on the planet.
The bodies of the great whales – sperm whales, blue whales, bowheads, humpbacks, and right whales, some of which can grow up to 30 metres in length—were sought after for two main “products”: their baleen (also known as whalebone), great curtains of flexible material that hang from a whale’s mouth so it can sift out fish and krill from the water; and their oil, extractable by boiling down their thick wraparound blubber and, in the case of the sperm whale, by cracking open its outsize head. These oils were converted into fuel to light streetlamps and lubricate machinery in the budding Industrial Revolution, as well as being an ingredient in margarine, and baleen was used in a variety of products, from women’s corsets to umbrellas. Whales became essential to the functioning of cities and industries, and whaling was so important it was even subsidised during World War I by some governments.
The human-whale relationship was characterised by one-sided extraction, exploitation, and violence. The whaling industry might not have had such colossal reach if it weren’t for some particular innovations, beginning in the late 19th century. One of those was the exploding harpoon. Developed by Norwegian sealing captain Svend Foyn in the 1860s-70s, it had a penetrating spike and was designed to explode inside the whale’s body upon impact, embedding itself in the whale’s flesh. It supplanted the whaler’s strong arm and brought in a degree of power and ferocity unmatched at the time. Death for the whales came more swiftly, but still brutally. The exploding harpoon was particularly used in the Arctic, where whales needed to be prevented from diving under the ice to escape. This was a “relentlessly efficient technology”, according to Norway’s Whaling Museum in Sandefjord.
At the same time, new steam-powered ships of enormous tonnage enabled pelagic (at-sea) “processing” of whales, meaning sailors could complete the entire operation aboard and need not return to shore after a catch. “By the 1920s, a single large whale could be flensed in under an hour,” Rebecca Giggs writes in her book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (2020: 59). No corner of the planet was left untouched. “By 1913, there were twenty-one factory ships— huge, mobile slaughterhouses—in Antarctica,” Giggs notes (58). Later, planes were enlisted to spot whales from above, and new sonar technology allowed hunters to locate them more easily. The famous crow’s nest that sits atop some ships’ masts was developed to help whalers spot whales more easily, with a successful sighting being accompanied by the cry: “there she blows!” More and more countries joined in the bloody quest, in a rush for resources that closely paralleled the expansion of colonial industries (Huggan 2018). Even the swiftest rorqual whales—blues, fins, seis—didn’t stand a chance.
As many people know, many whale species were almost decimated from this point forth. Such an “intentional erasure of a specific configuration of animal life”, what Robert Geroux suggests we might call a zoocide (2019: 4), in the case of the blue whales reduced their numbers by up to 99.6 per cent. Gene pools and whale families shrank beyond repair. Some species in the Southern Ocean were brought down from hundreds of thousands to a few hundred individuals (Giggs 58). Finally, a desperate moratorium on whaling was agreed and then implemented in the 1980s, and has led to good recovery among some species, such as humpbacks.
The march of technological innovation—such as Svend Foyn’s harpoon—made an enormous contribution to the near-destruction of many whale species. What “saved” them is a more complex picture. Richard York (2017), in his excellent article “Petroleum did not Save the Whales”, explains why technology does not automatically lead to the decline of damaging industries: “Since fossil fuels provide potential substitutes for the main products of whaling—whale oil most notably— rising petroleum production could have ended whaling. However, to the contrary, fossil fuels allowed for the development of modern whaling technologies, which greatly expanded the capacity to kill whales” (10-11). Instead, many species had to be brought almost to extinction for the large-scale industrial hunt to end. In what many now call the Anthropocene, what new kinds of human-whale relations are taking its place?
Works cited
Geroux, Robert. 2019. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Decolonizing Human-Animal Studies.” Humanimalia 10:2, 1—9.
Giggs, Rebecca. 2020. Fathoms: The World in the Whale. London: Scribe.
Huggan, Graham. 2018. “Preface.” In Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet, vii–xviii. Environmental Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Accessed February 6, 2023. http://www.bloomsburycollections.com/colonialism-culture-whales-the-cetacean-quartet/preface.
Melville, Herman. 2001. Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale. London: Penguin Books.
“Whales And Hunting | New Bedford Whaling Museum”. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2021, https://www.whalingmuseum.org/learn/research-topics/overview-of-north-american-whaling/whales-hunting. Accessed 11 Jan 2021.
York, Richard. 2017. “Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217.
Image: Slottsfjellsmuseet Museum, Tønsberg, Norway. Whaling harpoon cannon used by Svend Foyn in the 1870s. Via Wikimedia Commons.
