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From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre*. How We Learned to Love the Whales

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From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre*. How We Learned to Love the Whales From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre*. How We Learned to Love the Whales Frank Zelko History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland In October 1954, Time magazine, with no apparent disapproval, described how a group of American soldiers enthusiastically slaughtered a pack of 100 killer whales off the coast of Iceland. The Icelandic government considered the whales — which Time described as “savage sea cannibals up to 30 ft. long and with teeth like bayonets” — a menace to the local fishing industry and appealed to the US soldiers stationed at a lonely NATO airbase on the subarctic island. Seventy-nine bored GIs responded with enthusiasm, firing thousands of machine gun rounds at the whales until “the sea was red with blood”. “It was all very tough on the whales”, the report concluded, “but very good for American-Icelandic relations”.1 Though the incident was particularly bloody, it was hardly unique. Throughout the 1950s, the US Navy routinely used whales for target practice, pretending that they were Soviet submarines.2 Meanwhile, the Norwegian whaling industry, hoping to tap into a potentially huge market, attempted to inculcate Americans with a taste for whale meat. Bemused housewives, however, were rarely tempted by “Capt. Seth’s Frozen Tenderloin Norwegian Whale Steak” and similar cetacean delights.3 But nor were they, or any other Americans, outraged by the product. Yet, within less than two decades, the American public’s attitude to whales would change completely. By the mid-1970s, as the first whale-watching tours began off the coast of Massachusetts, the idea of torpedoing whales would have been seen by most Americans as nothing short of barbaric.4 Instead of enthusiastically machine- gunning whales, some Americans were now willing to climb into small boats and place themselves between a fleeing whale and a pursuing harpoon boat, an action which met with widespread approval and admiration. How did the American public’s attitude to whales and whaling change so dramatically in such a short time? This article traces the shift in attitudes towards whaling throughout the twentieth century. Throughout history, people had generally treated whales as though they were little more than particularly large fish.5 Europeans have been hunting them since at 1 Time, 4 October, 1954. 2 Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 59. 3 Nancy Shoemaker, “Whale Meat in American History”, Environmental History, Vol. 10, 2 (April 2005), pp. 281-282. 4 Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 460 5 The ancient Greeks, apparently, understood that the whales were not fish, but the Romans thought otherwise. It was not until the seventeenth century that people began to question this assumption. The issue was settled in 1766 when the father of modem taxonomy, Carl von Linné, separated the whales from the fish in his monumental work, Systema Naturae. See Karl-Erik Fichtelius and Sverre Sjölander, Smarter than Man? Intelligence in Whales, Dolphins, and Humans (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 147. 34 Frank Zelko least the ninth century AD, but did not even bother to describe them until the eighteenth century.6 Whales have furnished humans with an astonishing variety of useful, and, one could argue, frivolous products: meat and fat for hungry populations; oil for burning lamps and lubricating machinery; bones and teeth for grinding into fertilizer or carving into works of art (scrimshaw); and baleen for the painful, constricting corsets that were popular among bourgeois European women in the nineteenth century. Until the nineteenth century, whaling did not, on the whole, endanger the world’s whale population, though there were examples of a few localized coastal species being hunted almost to extinction.7 In 1865, however, a Norwegian whaler, Svend Foyn, invented a device that suddenly, and radically, gave whale hunters an enormous advantage over their pelagic quariy. Foyn developed a barbed harpoon that could be fired from a shipboard cannon and which, on impact, would detonate an explosive charge inside the whale. The primitive and dangerous practice of hunting whales with hand-thrown spears was quickly replaced by the deadly, high tech harpoon, completely shifting the odds in the whaler’s favor. From this point on, the life of the whaler, though hardly enviable, ceased to conform to the Moby Dzc^-inspired image of the courageous hunter dueling with the monster from the deep. The whales, in short, no longer stood a chance.8 The Norwegians continued to be at the forefront of whaling technology. In the 1920s, they brought the assembly line to the high seas with the development of enormous factory ships. Giant stem slipways enabled whales to be dragged aboard, where they could be flensed, boiled, rendered, and packed into barrels. No longer reliant on shore-based processing plants, whalers could now roam the high seas for months at a time, a development that allowed the previously under-exploited Antarctic whale populations to be hunted on a massive scale. By this time, many of the products which had previously been manufactured with whale oil — such as lighting fuel or lubricating oil — had been made redundant by the development of electricity or petroleum-based products. Far from signalling the end of whaling, however, the petroleum era merely provided whalers with faster and more efficient means of pursuing their quarry. Ingenious chemists and entrepreneurs continued to find uses for the whale byproducts in margarine, perfume, pet food and a variety of other commodities. In the meantime, the number of great whales, particularly blues, humpbacks and fins, began to decline precipitously.9 By the 1930s, whaling was a case of a “tragedy of the commons” par excellence. Whalers from Europe, Britain, Japan, the U.S., Australia, and South Africa plied the oceans and hunted whales at will. Despite a massive increase in the number of whales taken, and a dramatic population collapse that was obvious to virtually everyone involved, it made little sense for any individual whaling firm or nation to curb its practices. Every time a whale was killed, the cost, in terms of a reduction 6 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. vii 7 The Basque whalers of the tenth and eleventh centuries are a notable example. Considered to be the first people to have conducted whaling in a deliberate and organized manner, the Basques decimated the Bay of Biscay’s whale population to the point where whaling was no longer an economically viable activity in the region. See ibid., pp. 42-44. 8 Ibid., pp. 255-265. 9Ibid.,??. 351-363. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 35 in the whale population, was borne by all, while the benefit, in terms of monetary profit, accrued to the individual whaler or to a single corporation.10 By this time, whaling had become a multi-national industry, fuelled by US, British, and Scandinavian capital. It also reflected the geo-political tensions of the era, as German and Japanese whalers tried to muscle in on an Anglo-American and Scandinavian dominated industry. Amid such developments, and with the belated recognition that the previously common right whale had been hunted to the brink of extinction, the whaling nations finally decided to think about adopting some conservation measures. In 1937, they convened an international conference in London aimed at introducing some form of regulation into an industry that, hitherto, had been rampantly laissez faire. The conference was a breakthrough in the sense that it finally gathered the world’s major whaling interests under one roof. As far as conservation was concerned, however, it was a major disappointment. After calculating how many whales they had killed the previous year, the whaling interests decided to increase their take by 11,000 whales in the following season. This seemed far less like conservation than merely a more rational method of dividing up the spoils.11 The leading conservationist voice of the era was Remington Kellogg, a marine biologist at the United States National Museum. In the late 1930s, Kellogg was largely responsible for getting the whaling nations to agree to a series of measures that would introduce a semblance of conservation to the industry, as well as setting up a regulatory procedure that would form the basis for post-Second World War conservation efforts.12 Just as importantly, perhaps, he also played a vital role in educating ordinary Americans about whales. In a lengthy and lushly illustrated National Geographic article, he attempted to alert the world to the plight of the great whales and to create a sympathetic atmosphere among the general public. “Whales once roamed by the millions in the oceans of the world”, he warned, “but today they may be heading toward the same fate that pursued the once-vast herds of American buffalo [...] The rapidity with which whales have been killed since 1900 is appalling.” Kellogg also foreshadowed the anthropomorphism that would characterize later anti-whaling efforts, telling readers that “many female whales seem almost human in their affection for, and defence of, their calves”.13 The Second World War offered whales a brief respite, with most of the hunting and factory ships being commandeered for naval purposes. According to Farley Mowat, however, there is little doubt that tens of thousands of great whales were torpedoed when they were mistaken for submarines on ships radar.14 After the war, 10 For an elaboration of the concept, see Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162(13 December, 1968), pp. 1244-1249. 11 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 387. 12 J.N Tonnes sen. and A.O. Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling, translated from the Norwegian by R.I Christophersen (London and Canberra: C.
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