SEA HISTORY fer
kids
Wiili Do We Need to l<now Abo1At Wh~.lin9? You may have heard a lot about whaling in the news recently. People who want the killing of whales to stop are fighting against the ones who still hunt them for their livelihoods. Whaling is not an activity that was only practiced many years ago in history, it is still legal today. Native peoples are permitted, in many cases, to kill limited numbers of whales each year so that they can preserve their cultural traditions and ski lls surrounding the hunt. It also is legal to hunt some species of whales in specific parts of the world on a larger scale, and this sort of business is what upsets so many people today. Even if you find the idea of killing whales disturbing, whaling was a very important part of our history and one that is linked to the development of cities, commerce, and transportation, as well as many of our cultural traditions. by Michael P. Dyer, Librarian and Maritime Historian, New Bedford Whaling Museum
People in Asia were hunting whales from boats way back in the Neolithic Age, or "New Stone" Age. We know about this because they carved scenes of the hunt into stone, and these depictions have been found along sites on the Korean coast. In 1558, natural philosopher Conrad Gesner published a woodcut illustration in his book, Historia Animalium, of a bagpipe player serenading a team of Faroe Islanders on ladders, hacking up a whale with axes and stowing the blubber in casks. In 1675 Germany's Friedrich Martens published a book that described in great detail the manner of commercial whaling in the bays of Spitzbergen Island and the east coast of Greenland. Around the same time, an anonymous Japanese artist and author made a sketchbook entitled Nankai Tokugei Zuroku, which means, "Views ofWhaling in the South Sea," showing whaleboats, tools, and various edible species of whale. A century later, the Danish missionary Hans Eggede published an etching of Greenland Eskimo peoples hunting bowhead whales for food from large umiaks (boats made from skins stretched across wooden frames) in his 1763 book, Description of the Natural History of Greenland. People around the world have been hunting whales, both for their own use and as a business, for thousands of years.
7
The Whaleship Chili, Cutting-in a ' Bowhead Whale, ca. 1850s
By 1847 Americans owned more than 700 whaling ships, and they pursued whales for oil in all of the oceans of the globe. After each successful hunt, the American whaling captain tallied up the number of barrels of oil his crew got from each whale and dutifully recorded them in his logbook. His was a culture of maritime industry, which came from the importance of seafaring in the absence of fertile farmland in the rocky terrain of New England. k soon
36
as other commercial opportunities came about, Americans, being an eminently practical business-oriented people, dropped the expensive and risky practice of whal ing and moved on to other things. On the other hand, the 224-foot-long Kos 55, a diesel-equipped catcher boat, mounting a 90mm harpoon cannon that fires a 200-lb. grenade-tipped projectile, ploughed the
Floatingfactory at full cook, ca. 1950. iceberg-studded seas of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica as late as the 1960s. The Kos was built in Japan in 1964 and was one of a Beet of such boats attached to the Norwegian B.oatingfactory Kosmos V. The Kos 55 and hundreds of vessels like her could capture and process the whale products into foodstuffs, fertilizer, and other bulk commodities that had never been pursued commercially beforehand. Whalers continued the ancient tradition of whaling into the 20th century. With the use of modern high-tech equipment, however, rhe impact on whale populations was far more drastic than almost any hunt in history. Exceptions were the 19th-century Western European and American whalers who hunted species, like bowhead whales and gray whales, which followed predictab le migratory paths. When the hunters figured out where these paths were, they could concentrate their efforts in smaller areas and take many whales in a short time. While there is little doubt that technological innovations made whaling more efficient, and thus have resulted in depleting the world's whale populations, whatle hunting itself was and remains a human activity with a vfery long tradition indeed. ,!,