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Whaling

Whaling is the hunting of whales for their usable products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that was important in the Industrial Revolution. Whaling was practiced as an organized industry as early as 875 AD. By the 16th century, it had become the principal industry in the Basque coastal regions of Spain and France. The whaling industry spread throughout the world and became very profitable in terms of trade and resources. Some regions of the world's oceans, along the animals' migration routes, had a particularly dense whale population and became targets for large concentrations of whaling ships, and the industry continued to grow well into the 20th century. The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969 and to an international cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s.

For other uses, see Whaling (disambiguation).

Archaeological evidence suggests the earliest known forms of whaling date to at least 3000 BC, practiced by the Inuit and other peoples in the North Atlantic and North Pacific.[1] Coastal communities around the world have long histories of subsistence use of cetaceans, by dolphin drive hunting and by harvesting drift whales. Widespread commercial whaling emerged with organized fleets of whaling ships in the 17th century; competitive national whaling industries in the 18th and 19th centuries; and the introduction of factory ships and explosive harpoons along with the concept of whale harvesting in the first half of the 20th century. By the late 1930s, more than 50,000 whales were killed annually.[2] In 1982, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) decided that there should be a pause on commercial whaling on all whale species from 1986 onwards because of the extreme depletion of most of the whale stocks.[3]


Contemporary whaling for whale meat is subject to intense debate. Canada, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Russia, South Korea, the United States and the Danish dependencies of the Faroe Islands and Greenland continue to hunt in the 21st century. Countries that support commercial whaling—notably Iceland, Japan, and Norway—wish to lift the IWC moratorium on certain whale stocks for hunting.[4] Anti-whaling countries and environmental activists oppose lifting the ban. Under the terms of the IWC moratorium, aboriginal whaling is allowed to continue on a subsistence basis.[5] Over the past few decades, whale watching has become a significant industry in many parts of the world; in some countries it has replaced whaling, but in a few others the two business models exist in an uneasy tension. The live capture of cetaceans for display in aquaria (e.g., captive killer whales) continues.

Harpoon

processing of caught whales

Flensing

Sperm whaling

Dolphin drive hunting

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018)

Jakobina Arch

The Sounding of the Whale (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

D. Graham Burnett

Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World's Migratory Species (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), Chapter 3 The Antarctic Whale Massacre, pp. 104–147

"National Sovereignty, the International Whaling Commission, and the Save the Whales Movement," in Nation-States and the Global Environment. New Approaches to International Environmental History, Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 43–61

Kurkpatrick Dorsey

Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014)

Kurkpatrick Dorsey

Charlotte Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)

Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz: Umweltdiplomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen, 1920–1950 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011), Chapter 6 Der Reichtum der Meere, pp. 171–245

Frank Zelko, Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chapters 7–9, pp. 161–231

Lyubomir Ivanov and Nusha Ivanova. Whaling period. In: Generis Publishing, 2022. pp. 91–94. ISBN 979-8-88676-403-1

The World of Antarctica.

-The history and narratives of Purrington and Russell's Grand Panorama.

Digital version of The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World

Archived 2017-02-13 at the Wayback Machine — An American Experience Documentary

Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World

Popular Mechanics, November 1930

"Old Whaling Days"

"The Cruise of the Cachalot" by Frank T. Bullen is a book published in 1899 which gives a good background to whaling of the times.

Archived 2020-12-17 at the Wayback Machine – Online museum exhibition on maritime history from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History

On the Water: Fishing for a Living

Archived 2020-02-13 at the Wayback Machine – Australian Marine Conservation Society Whaling

Whaling

Whaling depicted in ship logbooks' art