← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Whaling
00:52:52
The devastating ecological impact and the rich human story to give us a fuller understanding of the history of whaling.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:42]
Helen Belfort
To tell you, I was just looking.
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That hologram trading card.
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Dan Snow
One of the rarest.
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The last one I needed for my set.
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Helen Belfort
Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it and now everyone's asking.
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Gibbie Fraser
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Helen Belfort
Millions of finds, each with a story.
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Jane Pearce
EBay things people love.
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Dan Snow
I remember very vividly the first time I encountered a whale out at sea, probably about halfway between Bermuda and the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic. And it was dead calm and the boat wasn't moving. It was just lolling around on the flat sea and I was lying in my bunk and I was wondering whether I should turn the engine on. I Was worried about using up the fuel. And then a giant spout. It felt like it was right next to the hull of the boat. And I think my whole body hit the bulkhead above. More recently, later in life with my family, I went whale watching. And you first see the fluke of its tail and then you wait in anticipation for it to come back to the surface. And sure enough, a few minutes later, you see its broad back breaching the surface of the water. It was thrilling, its size, its nature. But I think it's also thrilling because my generation came to think that whales were gone. If we persist in destroying animals that ask nothing more than to be left alone to reproduce. Growing up in the 1980s, they were a battlefield in the culture wars. Save the whale was the shout at the time. And I think we've all come to understand the commonality we share with these creatures. They yearn to build connections. They have the most extraordinary communication systems. They have a profound bond with their young. That is what drives whales to migrate thousands of miles to feeding grounds and back again. They understand our earth in ways that despite all our technology, we just haven't come close to understanding ourselves. They are the original ocean going voyagers. And having said all that, it might come as a bit of a surprise that this episode is all about whaling. It can be easy to see we're going to talk about an evil practice that pushed these incredible creatures to near extinction in kind of black and white. But actually it's much more complicated than that. We also have a drive to survive, to keep our families going, to provide for our young. That's true of the humans, the whalers who traverse the world's most dangerous oceans, further than they'd ever dreamed they'd go, facing enormous waves, floating icebergs, savage weather. They too were hunting to provide for their families, to enable their communities back home to survive. So I don't want to ignore the human history of whaling. I'm fascinated by that social history, the communities these whalers came from, the world that whaling emerged from and the world that it created. The best place for us to explore that story, at least the European aspect of that story, is from the Scottish port of Dundee. It was once Britain's leading whaling port. It was famous for its hardy ships and its hardier men. You're listening to Dan Snow's history, and this is the history of whaling. For anyone listening to this pod for a few years now, you might remember that in early 2022, I came here to the east coast of Scotland. I came Dundee, to announce to launch that expedition down to the Antarctic to find Shackleton's lost endurance shipwreck. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to tell you that story yet again of how Shackleton and his were left stranded on the Antarctic ice after their ship sank. And then furthermore, how Shackleton led the most astonishing open boat journey of all time, 800 miles on a little tiny wooden boat to South Georgia where they'd begun their expedition well over a year earlier. I'm not going to tell that story, but I'm going to talk about the reason that Shackleton went to South Georgia, and that's because he knew it was inhabited. It was inhabited because there were whaling stations there. There were little ports, little communities with factories, there were little pinpicks of settlement and otherwise empty, well, certain as far as humans were concerned, empty stretches of the South Atlantic. One of those whaling stations was called Gritviken and it was established by a Norwegian sea captain at the turn of the 20th century. It was the first and longest operating shore based whaling station in the Antarctic. A place where Antarctic whales were processed in vast numbers over six decades to serve an industry that changed the world. And one of the amazing things about Gritviken is it really relied on the expertise, on the resources, on the people power from places like Dundee to operate. This city had been a hub for whaling. Expeditions were sent from here in northeast Scotland all the way down to the southern oceans. And this city built some of the most advanced whaling vessels of the time. And by 1890 it was the only UK whaling port left and it was serving, if you like, it was sort of supporting satellite locations in the South Atlantic like Gripvik and keeping them going. I've come here today to explore the complicated, but also the fascinating history of whaling. Because now as I'm recording this, there is a weekend events being held here by the South Georgia Heritage Trust. It's celebrating the historical connections between Dundee and South Georgia. There's a new interactive time capsule that's called the Whaler's Memory bank and it's preserving the testimonies of whalers and their communities for future generations. And while I'm here, I'm going to be speaking to some of Scotland's last living whalers to discover more about what life was really like. But I'm also talking to some historians and meeting scientists looking into the modern threats whales still face today. For better or for worse, commercial whaling has shaped the modern world in so many stark and revolutionary ways. Whaling oiled the cogs of the Industrial Revolution. It gave US illuminated nights and it gave us Victorian fashions. I'm talking there about whaling in the 19th century. Industrial whaling. That's the image we might have of men in wooden boats launching their harpoons into roiling seas and then dragging the mortally wounded whales alongside the hull of the whaling vessel. But the practice actually goes back thousands of years. Indigenous communities around the world have hunted whales to sustain themselves for generations. And their version of whaling was inevitably a bit more symbiotic and a bit more sustainable. It was a balance between man and nature. This is Jane Pearce, she's curator of the South Georgia Heritage Trust. And a heads up, it's worth saying this episode does contain descriptions of practices that listeners may find grisly and upsetting.
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Jane Pearce
So on a global scale, there's evidence for whaling that goes back to 300 BC in archaeological evidence. There's obviously subsistence farming. So very small communities hunting fish, hunting bigger fish, hunting whales. And then we get to a point now in more recent times where we're doing it on an industrial scale. So a huge range of types of whaling across the globe.
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Dan Snow
Explain to everyone why you want to kill a whale. I mean, are they good eating? Is it raw materials? What's going on?
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Jane Pearce
When I first went to South Georgia, I didn't know anything about whaling when I was younger. I was aware of Save the Whale, the Greenpeace movement, but I didn't really appreciate how important the product from a whale was. So actually it's a misconception that we would hunt whales for big slabs of steak and we'd all sit around eating these huge steaks. The big push to kill a whale was for the whale oil. And that's something that's very different from those early days that we have from archaeological evidence where people would hunt whales for meat and for bone. So there's evidence going back into 12th, 13th, 14th centuries of using oil for lamps and for illumination. And actually the reason why industrial whaling happened was for this amazing oil that was used right across the globe.
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Dan Snow
And we should say the whale oil, it's a flammable fluid, It's a flammable liquid so you can dip like a wick of a candle in it and it will keep burning all night. And it's always useful to have something that you can set on fire reliably.
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Jane Pearce
So I think that was the initial idea. And actually in the uk, for example, a lot of whaling happened around ports like Hull. And I believe that Hull had the first street lamps in the country in the late 1700s. And London, for example, in I think it was around that it had over 5,000 street lamps. And that was just the first time across the globe that a city was illuminated, its streets, by whale oil.
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Dan Snow
Just in one city alone, 5,000 streetlights burning all night, just with people pouring in this oil. And that's all coming from whales?
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Jane Pearce
Yeah, that's all coming from whales. And why whale oil? Well, in our bodies, we have fats. We have these things called triglycerides, and they are important to a mammal species such as ourselves for providing energy. They're an energy source. And whales have these in a abundance, and they have it in their meat, their muscles, their bones. Every part of the whale has these fats, if you like. So someone discovered at some point that if you boil down the skin of a whale, it releases this oil, these fats. And they discovered that this wonderful oil was clean. So unlike, let's say, a cow, cows were rendered down for their fats, and they were used as tallow for making candles. But it was smelly, it was lumpy, it was greasy, it was disgusting. But they found that their whale oil was this beautiful, clean oil that burnt without smoke. So it became this sort of wonder fuel. And we have to remember again that this was before the discovery of petroleum. So this whale oil was like a miracle product. It became a commodity, and that's what drove whaling more and more and more. So it wasn't about eating meat, it was about this oil.
- [12:07]
Dan Snow
Do we know when, I guess, of commercial whaling as we might understand it developing, you know, where crews of men would get on ships, sail out to the deep sea and harpoon and hunt whales deliberately? Do we know when that begins in Europe?
- [12:20]
Jane Pearce
So there's this sort of transitionary period where you've got almost like two eras of whaling. You've got this almost romanticized part of whaling where we think of stories like Moby Dick, where it's the battle of the man versus the whale, and it's one to one, and it's like an equal battle. And then we moved to these wooden sailing ships that could go further into the ocean. So they weren't just working from the coast, they were going further out to sea and catching these whales. And again, it seems sort of almost like a romantic era. You've got paintings and stories about humans catching these whales, and some they won, some they lost. But there was this very distinctive turning point where catching whales was no longer equal. A Norwegian called Svenvoing, in the late 1800s, he invented the exploding harpoon. So we've moved from wooden harpoons Steel harpoons that were hand thrown from a ship to that were being jettisoned out of a cannon into a whale. So it's an exploding harpoon. It was mechanical, it was efficient, it was deadly. We also moved from slow moving wooden boats. The same chap, Sven Voin, he also was responsible for inventing a purpose built whale catcher. It was steam powered by coal, it was fast, it was efficient. And again, people could go further and further out to sea and they were starting to get faster and faster. So they were getting faster and able to keep up with these whales. And that was a really key, critical turning point. So you've moved from this sort of slightly more organic, slow moving ships to these fast, efficient machines. And it turned whaling into something that had moderate costs but with high profits. They could catch more, they could process more. And once those technological advance had happened, Norway suddenly became a key player in whaling. And once they kept going and multiplying, they spread further around the northern hemisphere, pushing whales further and further out to sea, pushing the stocks and pushing the supplies. And then there became this economic balance that the catching of whales was efficient, economical process, but the biological natural processes couldn't keep up. So there's suddenly this imbalance between humans catching whales and whales breeding.
- [14:47]
Dan Snow
The European whaling industry, as we understand that kind of modern sense, ran from the early 17th century to the mid 20th century. In the middle of the period, we have the industrial revolution in Britain. And it didn't take long for people to realize that whale oil could be used for much more than just fueling lamps.
- [15:04]
Jane Pearce
It was the perfect product for lubricating this high tech machinery. And also fashions were evolving. People had more money. We were starting to think more about hygiene. So for example, things like soaps, it uses a fat, mostly animal fats, which is combined and boiled up with alkalines and it gives this product which is soap. And so before again we were using things like cows and sheep fats, and again they were a bit smelly, a bit greasy. And then obviously this wonder product, whale oil, came along and they discovered making soap with whale oil. And when you make soap, a byproduct of soap is something called glycerol. And we discovered that glycerol was a very key, important player in a whole nother product. And that was product for creating ammunitions. So as we've moved from that idea of sort of industrial revolution, we've got oil being used for soaps and for lighting. But also a byproduct of slaughtering whales was the baleen. These baleen whales feed on krill by filter feeding and they have this material baleen, that's in their mouths. And actually that was really useful for fashion corsets, umbrellas, it was used in hat making and it was something that was used, which we would probably now use plastic in its place.
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Dan Snow
So there were decades when the whole of sort of civilised culture was being decked out in, lit by, protected from the weather by products coming from Wales.
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Jane Pearce
Yes. And I think one of the interesting things for myself when I first started my job, I had no concept that Britain was a key player in all of this. I didn't really appreciate that Britain was a huge consumer of whale oil and I didn't appreciate that Britain was a key player in harvesting Wales. And it's something that I always thought was done somewhere else. So it's really interesting.
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Dan Snow
In fact, whaling was a huge industry in Britain. At its peak in the late 18th century and the early 19th centuries, Britain had dozens of whaling towns. There was Hull, Whitby, London, Milford Haven in Wales, and of course the Scottish ports of Leith and Dundee. These were centres of industry, not just the docks, but factories and workshops across the city to sustain the industry. There would have been ironworks and sailmakers and coopers and chandlers and rope makers and insurers and all the administration that goes with that. It was a time when that industry provided work for people right across the spectrum of society in places that today we recognize as struggling with unemployment, depopulation. In post industrial Britain, one successful whaling voyage in 1800, say, could bring the equivalent of millions of pounds in today's money into a local economy. And whaling wasn't just profitable and beneficial for local communities, it was strategically important for the country at large. It reduced reliance on foreign oil. It supplied the Royal Navy with a trained, hardened maritime workforce. But it's easy when we talk about whaling in these socioeconomic terms, to forget these benefits came at a terrible price for beings as emotional and intelligent as us, perhaps more so. This is Richard Sabin, principal curator for mammals at the Natural History Museum.
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Richard Sabin
Cetaceans, whales, dolphins and porpoises have very complex social structures. In many cases, they have the ability to communicate really quite complex messaging in their calls, in their songs, that they are individuals, that they in many species, actually pass on behavior through cultural learning, through observation. That's the older generation passes on what they've learned about where's good to feed and other aspects of life to their offspring. And that the individuality, the sense of individuality can't be understated. Primarily with the toothed whales and dolphins, you tend to find that the females are the matriarchs, they are the lead within the populations. And there are some instances. We know, for example, that orca and pilot whales, when the females of those species reach a certain age, they actually go through a menopause, like human females, so they no longer reproduce, but they then pass on their accumulated knowledge to the offspring within the broader pond.
- [19:26]
Dan Snow
And these incredible animals have an astonishing intrinsic connection with the Earth, the way they navigate around it. We believe they use magnetic fields, not dissimilar to birds, and the way they facilitate life beyond themselves. They're instrumental for health and well being of entire ecosystems in the oceans.
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Richard Sabin
We're looking at animals that are marine ecosystem engineers. Effectively, they're at the top of the food web, the marine food web. The fact that they dive down to depth, they feed on krill and other organisms, they ingest them and then come up to the surface, and then they defecate and they release all of the nutrients from the animals from depth into the upper layer of the ocean, where all of the things that photosynthesize can then benefit. And everything basically feeds on the fecal matter from the whales. It's called the whale pump, believe it or not, moving these nutrients through the ocean. And also when the animals die, when a large whale dies, its body sinks to the bottom of the ocean. So the ocean floor becomes what we call whale fall, and is then food for marine organisms that scavenge from carcasses like that on the ocean bottom. Not just for decades, but for centuries. So the fact that we were taking these animals out of the ecosystems created an imbalance, and we're still trying to understand what those imbalances were.
- [20:44]
Dan Snow
By the turn of the 20th century, whales had been pushed to the brink of extinction. In the Arctic, the Norwegians who hunted off the Finnmark coast on the northern coastline of their country, pushed further south. And when stocks depleted, they got to the Faroe Islands and the Shetlands. Each time, they experienced the same pattern. There was abundance. There was plentiful hunting. Happy times. And then depletion. As whales became hard to find, it became more expensive to search for what few were left. In the 1890s, there was a push to find new whaling grounds much, much, much further afield. In the southern hemisphere, at the edge of Antarctica, expeditions were launched. The most significant led by a leading man in the industry called Karl Anton Larsen.
- [21:29]
Jane Pearce
And one of these expeditions was on a ship called Jason. And its captain was a Norwegian who was an ex whaler and a very experienced sailor and I guess you could call him an explorer pioneer. He went on the Jason expedition south and its primary goal was to search for whales. So they didn't catch any, they didn't make any profits, but they did a lot of exploring. And one of these places that they discovered was South Georgia. So they circumnavigated South Georgia. Around South Georgia was all these wonderful stocks of whales.
- [22:05]
Dan Snow
That's because in the Southern Ocean, 10 species of whale can be found at various points in the year. From the smaller minke to the giants like the humpbacks and the blue whales. For roughly six months, this patch, stretching across 50 million square kilometers, becomes the Earth's largest feeding ground for marine mammals. As a summer cocktail of oxygen rich water, 24 hour sunlight and powerful currents provokes a flurry of life. And whales swim thousands of miles to partake in the banquet on offer. When I was in the Antarctica, I watched spellbounders. Whales used the fact that we were breaking through the ice. They used that clear water behind us, the little patch, to come up and grab a breath of air so we could stand on that stern deck and just watch whale after whale surfacing, breathing and then disappearing down into the depths. And that's also where Larsen saw a gold mine.
- [23:03]
Jane Pearce
He also noted around the north coast that was lots of quiet bays. So he went back to Norway and tried to gather funding to go back to South Georgia and set up a whaling station. He doesn't find funding in Norway, but he eventually spreads his wings and he finds funding from Argentina. So in 1904, he heads back south to South Georgia to this bay, to this site he called Gritviken. And he set up a shore whaling station.
- [23:36]
Dan Snow
This is Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up.
- [23:51]
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- [25:06]
Jane Pearce
And there it was.
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That hologram trading card.
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Dan Snow
One of the rarest.
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The last one I needed for my set.
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Helen Belfort
Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it and now everyone's asking.
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Millions of finds, each with a story.
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- [27:24]
Dan Snow
The British were keeping a close eye on this and quickly followed suit, often using Norwegian innovation in their own endeavors in the South. I went to South Georgia. I went to Grytviken. It's just an abandoned, rusted ghost town. It's decaying. And you can see still where all the machinery is, all the processing plants, the hard where the captains which took the load hauling those whales out of the water, the old station master's offices, the processing factories. It was a haunting relic and a very difficult chapter in our relationship with the natural world. I want you to give me an overview of the drama and, I guess the horror as well, of whaling.
- [28:00]
Jane Pearce
So when Carl Anton Larsen went down to south Georgia in 1904, he had a big bark and it was full of supplies. We have to remember South Georgia. It had fresh water, but it had no food. It's a mountainous island, it's snowy, it's icy, it's got an ice cap year round. It's quite harsh conditions. And even in the summer season, you couldn't grow anything. There's hardly any vegetation there. So he had to bring down all the supplies to build a factory. He had to bring all his food stocks and he had to bring his own fuel, which was coal. So he had this huge ship which was like his supply ship. And then he had two whale catchers. And with these two whale catchers, he had an exploding harpoon. So we've moved from men throwing a harpoon to an explosive gun. So when the harpoon is launched at the whale, it was more efficient, it was faster, it was harder, it was penetrated the blubber. It got to the point where grenades were invented. So the harpoon would not just be a spear, it would have a grenade at the end. So the idea is the gun would fire. The harpoon would be launched still tied to a rope. So to connect the harpoon to the ship. And as the harpoon impacted the whale, a grenade would go off and we hope, killed the whale instantly from, like an internal explosion. I mean, absolutely awful, brutal for the whale, but hopefully an instant kill. Originally, the whale would have been butchered, if you like, on the side of the ship. They were too big. They couldn't be brought onto the ship to be processed. They were butchered on the side of the ship. So it would have been happening in all weathers. So normally a ship would move into a quieter bay and process the whale. So to start with, the blubber was taken. So the skin of the whale, the blubber, it was fat, rich, so it was full of whale oil. When they bore down, it's believed it's between 50 and 80% of that blubber was fats. So in the beginning only the blubber was rendered down and boiled to release the oil. But towards the end of the whaling industry they discovered that meat and the bones also contained this oil. So essentially we originally talking about baleen being used for corsets and fashion in the streets of London. That actually became the only thing that was left of the whale that was not interesting and not needed. We weren't interested. After a while it became all about the bones and the meat and the blubber. So the whales would be brought on to the shore station and there's a term called flensing a whale, which is essentially cutting the whale up. It's a Norwegian word. So I talked about, you know, in Norway all of these advances were happening in the technology of whaling. And so a lot of whaling terminology comes from Norwegian words. So that the whale be brought up onto the shore, it would be flensed, which essentially means that the whale was cut up like a banana. It was stripped of its blubber and they had these special tools called flensing knives. And the guys that were flensers were really very skilled at doing what they were doing. They were just very skilled butchers. So this blubber would be peeled off and it would be moved into a very industrial sized, efficient pressure boiler. So next the meat would be cut off and this was done by a team of called Lemmers, again butchers, different type of butcher. So that was the next stage of the factory process. And the third stage was the bone would be left over the spine of the whale and the bone then got cut up by these mechanical bone saws. So we'd have a team of bone soarers and those bones would go into a different pressure cooker because it took longer to process. But again, everything came out with this whale oil. And after all of those processes happened, the whale oil will be separated out into the boiler. It would left to settle. So the oil would float to the top and then you would get this residue that came down to the bottom, which was a mixture of solids and something they called glue water, which was a sort of gloopy horrible mix of residue left over. And as humans being efficient as always. So not only were they extracting this beautiful whale oil, they decided what can we do with this solid and this glue water? And we eventually processed that as well. So in the 40s, 50s and 60s, that residue was dried, mashed up and then it was sold as fertilizer and as cattle feed. And we pushed it even further. So towards the end, in the 50s and 60s, they were even processing some of that material as meat extract for products like Bovril. So the whale was efficiently processed.
- [32:55]
Dan Snow
The whaling station at Gripvecken in South Georgia operated for an astonishing 60 years, all the way to the mid-1960s. Which is very weird because I think many of us just imagine that whaling was something that took place at slightly longer range. We think of Moby Dick, we think of men versus beasts in the wooden boats and sailing ships of centuries ago. But Grypviken had its heyday well into the living memory for many people listening to this podcast. Every summer that station be manned by 450 men, all working, living alongside each other, the only group of humans for well, many, many hundreds of miles. And they knew that the survival of their families back home relied on the treacherous journey they made each whaling season. 8,000 miles to the far reaches of the Southern ocean. Helen Belfort is the assistant curator of the South Georgia Museum. And each summer she makes that same journey to man the museum that now stands in Grypiken to help teach the tourists who visit the story of the island. But she is not the first member of her family to do that. Making that long and difficult journey is in her blood.
- [34:02]
Helen Belfort
Both my granddads were at the whelm and also my great grandfather was at the Whellum and we know that he went in the late 20s to South Georgia for the first time. And yeah, both my granddads were there in the 50s.
- [34:16]
Dan Snow
So what are these whaling stations like in South Georgia, particularly in that period? Are they sort of towns?
- [34:22]
Helen Belfort
Yeah, it would have been like a town, I suppose. And it just seemed so busy from everybody's descriptions. I think people kind of forget that how many different jobs were going on on the whaling stations because you not only needed people in the mess, but you needed people in the laundry. And most people were doing 12 hours. So there was a day shift and a night shift. So it would have been very busy, like around the clock. There was people working on the processing. There were people who were blacksmiths, carpenters, electricians, radio operators. It was a huge operation, I guess around that time as well. Then there would have been about a thousand people living on South Georgia at that time during the summer.
- [35:02]
Dan Snow
And are they all going home? Is it all packing up shop in the winter?
- [35:06]
Helen Belfort
Yeah, I suppose there would have been like a bit of a closed down, but it wouldn't have been packed up completely because people stayed over the winter to do repairs. Yeah, they would be doing repairs on the whaling station and on the whalen captures as well. They wouldn't have been taking them all the way back to the northern hemisphere.
- [35:23]
Dan Snow
So nearly all men then?
- [35:25]
Helen Belfort
Yes. Yeah. As far as I remember, the records show that there was the most women in South Georgia sometime in the middle 50s and there was 12 women. So that would have been women and children. But anyone who was a normal kind of whaler, they wouldn't have been able to take their wives or their children with them. That was reserved only for the management and administrative people.
- [35:45]
Dan Snow
And there have been, as you say, shifts around the clock and energy there so that everyone's making money. Everyone's just wants to work as hard as they can for that season.
- [35:53]
Helen Belfort
Yeah. Well, I guess then if you're traveling so far away for your work, you want to make sure that if there is a chance for doing overtime, then you would have taken that chance. Some of them were even doing like 20 hour days. So it's incredible. Yeah, really hard work. But as well then people spent time just getting to know each other and just kind of chilling out in their bunks and catching up and making friends. And it seems like it was a very sociable experience as well.
- [36:18]
Dan Snow
And no tv. I mean wireless, I suppose.
- [36:22]
Richard Sabin
Yeah.
- [36:22]
Helen Belfort
I think there was. You could get like the one World Service, BBC World Service.
- [36:26]
Dan Snow
But apart from that it was hang out, play cards.
- [36:30]
Helen Belfort
Yeah. Maybe play music if you had any instruments. There were some people that had recorders with them and they would record things and then play it to people or in there for themselves as well. And as well, I suppose they had a lot of ingenuity in their crafts and they would take the time to maybe make something to take home for people. You could have as many sperm whale teeth as you wanted. It seems like whale eardrums as well. You could take them home with you. So you could use that to make scrimshaw, either engraving it or painting it.
- [37:02]
Dan Snow
Speaking of the community, the community back home, all the people whose men went down for this intense period of time.
- [37:09]
Helen Belfort
Yeah, it would have been really difficult. That's a big change. Especially if you have more than one whaler in your family that's gone away. That might have been your dad or your brother or whoever. So it kind of alters the family dynamics at home. And it would have been quite a shock, especially for younger children once their family members return after six or nine months away. But some of them, if they did overwinter, they would be away for six months. During the summer and then the Antarctic summer, winter and then another summer. So that would be 18 months away from home and sometimes they would come home to children that they'd never seen before. So it's an incredibly hard experience for the people that were left behind in the communities. And yeah, big cause for celebration when people got back and there was whalers dances that happened all over Shetland and people would kind of be playing their music and getting together and there had been a lot of fun.
- [38:03]
Gibbie Fraser
I think we're all born was at least one foot in the sea. Yeah, and in my case I love being in the sea.
- [38:10]
Dan Snow
This is Gibbie Fraser, now in his mid-80s. He was among the hundreds of Scots who joined the whaling boats along with largely Norwegian crews in the post war years when work at home was difficult to come by. Many like him had grown up in small coastal communities on Shetland. Others came from place on the mainland, like Leith. Gibby worked for the Edinburgh based firm Christian Salveson, who operated whale processing ports in the aptly named Leith Harbour in Stromness Bay in South Georgia, just along the coast from Gritviken. Gibby signed up as a teenager in the late 1950s as a way to make some money to buy a motorbike. Like his friends, he was employed as a deck mess boy.
- [38:50]
Gibbie Fraser
It was a great adventure and the first thing I noticed was when we joined down the ferry coming down to Aberdeen and all the whalers were there, there were hundreds of them board. I'd never seen so much alcohol consumed in my life. And as we went down then, there was all kinds of stories you had and then you wondered what you were letting yourself in for.
- [39:14]
Dan Snow
Oh, the stories must. You had to.
- [39:16]
Gibbie Fraser
You had to go to Salv's office and you had to identify yourself and they took down all your particulars next to kin and that sort of thing. And yeah, we sailed down south and then somebody now and then would tell horrendous stories about catchers. But we hung in there. I was very lucky. I got placed on one of the top catchers.
- [39:39]
Dan Snow
A catcher is one of the small, fast and powerful ships that searches for the whale at sea. It's equipped with one or more harpoon guns now. I crossed the same ocean. It was bad enough crossing an enormous modern ice breaking ship. The waves were enormous. They were smashing across the weather decks. There was concern about equipment failure. People were violently seasick. It was brutal. The thought of doing it in a small ship with technology from a few generations back, it makes me feel queasy thinking about it. And I love the Southern Ocean, but you would not find me on a ship like that.
- [40:11]
Gibbie Fraser
We had a terrible storm in the 40s. We always had a rough time getting through there, but this was worse. The sea was absolutely white and they were mountains. I remember poor old Catcher hanging on there and we saw this big wave coming and there's nothing you could do. She went over the wave in front and then it just descended on her. And all you saw, forehead, was quite broken water on the mast and the rigging. And I looked aft and it was just always touching the lifeboats as it went past. And then she started to kind of do a little bit of a shake. And you said, where's this going to end? But then she gradually cleared. But the white and water had stove in the doors to our accommodation in Farad. We took 60 buckets of water out of our cabin and our bunks were wet and bedding was wet and quite a lot of our good clothes was damaged with all the bunks and that. But we all came through.
- [41:17]
Dan Snow
Wow. I don't understand. In those big seas, how do you find whales? Talk me through the process.
- [41:22]
Gibbie Fraser
If the weather was good enough, then there was always a man up in the barrel, up in the mast. The gunner was always on the bridge. I don't know when that man slept. And the mate was always scanning with binoculars. And sometimes a catcher, maybe a few miles away would find whales and report them and then you would go hell for lair to get there and get in amongst it.
- [41:46]
Dan Snow
Were there lots of whales at times?
- [41:50]
Gibbie Fraser
At times there were. And there were days that you went. You might go three or four days and never see anything. And then you'd be in amongst them and there just seemed to be whales popping up all over the place.
- [42:01]
Dan Snow
Do you remember your first sighting? Your first?
- [42:04]
Jane Pearce
Yes.
- [42:05]
Dan Snow
Tell me about that sperm whale.
- [42:07]
Gibbie Fraser
We did three weeks sperm whale fishing when we went hammering on for it. And we saw the gunner going down to the gun platform, so we knew it wasn't far away. And both myself and the Norwegian galley boy was with us. We had to see this. And it was coming near meal time and the cook was going mad. We should have been in the messroom setting table, but there was nobody in the mess room. Everybody was getting ready to deal with this whale and just slid off alongside. And what did surprise me was the speed that the harpoon flew and just buried. It was a big long thing about that size, and it just buried itself in the body of the whale.
- [42:50]
Dan Snow
Just looked like a big spear, did it?
- [42:51]
Gibbie Fraser
Or that sort of thing. Yeah.
- [42:54]
Dan Snow
Shot out of a gun.
- [42:55]
Jane Pearce
Yeah.
- [42:55]
Gibbie Fraser
The tip of the harpoon was screwed on and there was explosives in there. After the impact, you had three seconds and then you could see the whale's body go like that when this part shattered inside it. It's not easy to kill a whale. And the hope was that parts of it would find a vital organ and hasten the ends. Didn't all of us work? Sperm whales were very, very of things.
- [43:22]
Dan Snow
How do you get them onto the ship?
- [43:24]
Gibbie Fraser
We didn't. We had to inflate them. There was a piece of galvanized pipe cut at an end like a syringe and a rubber hose on it. And you put it down on a long pole and jammed this in the body of the whale and then inflated it. And then you put in maybe one or two long bamboo poles, plunge that into the. One of that bamboo poles would have a flag on it with the number of the catcher on it. So that catcher got paid for that whale for the amount of oil and products that came out of it and not any other catcher.
- [44:02]
Dan Snow
Wait, you inflated it and then a ship would come by and scoop it up. Another ship's collecting them all together, dragging them back to a factory ship where they're being processed.
- [44:13]
Gibbie Fraser
Yeah. Wow.
- [44:14]
Dan Snow
And the factory ships must be enormous.
- [44:17]
Gibbie Fraser
Very wide. Not pretty ships at all. Just made by the MYR and saw enough, no shape to it. And a huge square pole in the Star with a ramp where the whales were hauled up on deck. The factory ship was really a bit of a mystery to me.
- [44:35]
Dan Snow
Your job was to find them.
- [44:36]
Gibbie Fraser
I was a catcher man, yeah.
- [44:37]
Dan Snow
So you're working around the clock.
- [44:39]
Gibbie Fraser
Yeah. Mid summer daylight all the time around the deck. Crowd be falling asleep in their dinner plates. Then they'd get a week of hellish weather and they couldn't move.
- [44:50]
Dan Snow
Okay, so 30. It wasn't 35 hour weeks then?
- [44:53]
Gibbie Fraser
Oh, no, no, no. And I think the health and safety man would probably jumped overboard what he'd seen.
- [44:59]
Dan Snow
So actually you quite like a big gale because you got to stick in your bunk for a while and get some sleep.
- [45:03]
Gibbie Fraser
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always looked forward to that. You might spend two days sheltered from a storm and everybody sort of got over it and started looking for whales again.
- [45:12]
Dan Snow
And did you get paid by the whale or were you on a flat wage?
- [45:15]
Gibbie Fraser
You had a flat wage but you were paid by the whale by the production as well. That was your bonus.
- [45:23]
Dan Snow
Did you ever feel sorry for them? Did you get fond of the whales?
- [45:27]
Gibbie Fraser
Well, whale was a warm blooded animal. And you knew could feel pain. So you did hope it would be a quick death. But yeah, I suppose in some way you felt sorry. But it was money. Y We were there for money.
- [45:44]
Dan Snow
This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this.
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Store today and we'll give you a.
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Consumer mobile bill in the name of.
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And there it was, that hologram trading card. One of the rarest.
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- [47:05]
Dan Snow
Gibby did three seasons in the Southern Ocean before a motorcycle accident put an end to his career on the whaling ships. But in truth, by that time, it was the early 60s and whaling was in serious decline. Whales in the Southern Ocean have been hunted almost to extinction. Jane Pearce again curator of the South Georgia Museum.
- [47:22]
Jane Pearce
Petroleum was discovered in the late 1800s. We got better at extracting petroleum out the ground, and we also got better at the chemistry of making products out of petroleum. So there's this discussion that maybe petroleum served the whale, but actually, I don't think it was as simple as that. It was quite complicated. And it was a series of events that came together. They were harder and harder to find. They caught them. There was less produce, and therefore the economics just didn't stack up. This all coincided at the same sort of time. You know, it was the 60s and 70s when people were more aware of what we were doing to our planet. The environmental movement were happening. Greenpeace had a huge successful campaign in the 70s. The Save the Whale campaign. And that brought a lot of these issues to the masses, to the people who had no idea that whaling was going on and what we were doing. And so there are some awful numbers out there. If we think about the Southern Hemisphere and this whole industrial whaling just taking from the early 1900s. Let's start with Carl Anton Larsen, starting in 1904. And that's our starting point in the Southern Ocean. So around Antarctica and South Georgia there estimates that we slaughtered 1.6 million whales, which is just phenomenal. And South Georgia alone, because South Georgia was licensed, there was very good records taken. That was over 175,000 whales were taken on South Georgia alone. Huge, huge numbers. And they think now that the blue whale, for example, there's probably only about 2, 2.5% of blue whales in the ocean now that they think were before those industrial times, that was the end.
- [49:09]
Gibbie Fraser
Of whaling, that whales were just not there. And we were taking a species of whales that formerly we would never have looked at. Whales called SCI whales. They were similar to fin but much smaller. And I think you needed about three or four of them to make up for the production of one fin whale. And of course the blue whales were the largest whales, but they were very, very scarce, Very, very scarce.
- [49:34]
Dan Snow
And then what it was, the industry was stopped at that point.
- [49:37]
Gibbie Fraser
Or yes. There was another British company, the Balena company, they actually stopped a year before us.
- [49:42]
Dan Snow
Right.
- [49:43]
Gibbie Fraser
Then we stopped. But the Norwegians carried on for a while. It just wasn't economical. It couldn't go.
- [49:49]
Dan Snow
That's interesting. So it wasn't the politics of it necessarily. It wasn't that everyone just decided to.
- [49:54]
Gibbie Fraser
No, no.
- [49:54]
Dan Snow
It was more that the whales were running out.
- [49:56]
Gibbie Fraser
Yeah. We were sorry to lose our job, but we saw that it couldn't go on. And I think you'd ask any whale of the day that they were glad we pulled out when we did, because it was humanly possible to bring some of these species to extinction. Like the humpback whales. They'd been massively hunted for many years and we were confined to a four day season. Four days, four consecutive days that you could take humpback whales. But we saw the Russian catchers and the Russian Japanese taking them all the time, so it couldn't go on.
- [50:37]
Dan Snow
Were you aware of an anti whaling movement though, while you were serving working as a whaler?
- [50:42]
Gibbie Fraser
It was beginning to show. Yeah.
- [50:44]
Dan Snow
Did it bother you or did it.
- [50:45]
Gibbie Fraser
No, they won't interfere with my job, but I'm on their side.
- [50:52]
Dan Snow
You don't regret being A whaler?
- [50:54]
Gibbie Fraser
No, no, no. I enjoyed my time. Whaler. I'm actually proud to be a whaler.
- [51:02]
Dan Snow
Industrial whaling was officially outlawed by a global moratorium passed by the International whaling commission in 1982. It came into effect in 85. It's thought that up to 3 million whales were killed in the period of 1900 to 1990. That's like humans killing 82 whales every single day for 100 years. Now, despite the moratorium, three countries, Japan, Norway, Iceland, still take part in commercial whaling. They defy the international ban. There are various legal mechanisms and loopholes. And more recently, Japan made headlines in 2019 for leaving the International Whaling Commission claiming cultural significance. Meanwhile, Norway still hunts minke whales in the northern Atlantic, setting its own catch limits. The recovery of whales is happening, though it's been slow and it differs greatly between species. But there's been progress over the last four decades in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
- [51:54]
Jane Pearce
So there's good news around South Georgia. South Georgia waters have been monitored. It's now marine protected area and the British Antarctic Survey do regular surveys. And there is an estimate that the southern humpback that feeds in the Antarctic waters is now up to 93% of what it was before the industrial whaling situation. So that's really, really good news. Unfortunately, blue whales, fin whales, are still struggling. They're still very rare sightings of blue whales. They're there and they're very hard to monitor, so numbers aren't secured. We don't know the data, but they're there, which is really important to understand. So they are breeding, they are coming back to the southern waters to feed. So it's good news. It's definitely happening. But they're very, very slow breeding animals and so it's going to take centuries for those numbers to ever bounce back. And possibly they'll never bounce back. We don't know. It's very difficult.
- [52:57]
Dan Snow
And while commercial whaling no longer posed the same threat that it once did, there are now new obstacles facing these creatures.
- [53:04]
Richard Sabin
With the baleen whales generally more solitary, they're calling to each other over thousands of kilometres of ocean. And of course, now they have to fight against anthropogenic noise, underwater noise that we humans are generating because of our activities. The fact that they can't find each other means, of course, that that can cause stress.
- [53:22]
Dan Snow
Add to that is the constant threat of entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes and, of course, climate change and pollution. Christian Salveson, the Edinburgh whaling company Gibby worked for, sold its last whaling ships in 1960. It meant that the island communities and port cities that relied on that trade had diversified to ensure their survival. For much of the 20th century, Dundee had already been facing something of an industrial crisis. And the final blows came with the end of whaling. In the 60s and 70s, dockyard activity largely dried up and many of the factories closed their gates. Dundee closed its last Mill in 1999. This is Helen Balfour again, whose grandfathers have both been whalers. Do you know if your grandfather was sad because he was part of one of the last expeditions ever to go out from Gritviken, from South Georgia and look for whales?
- [54:14]
Helen Belfort
Yeah, I mean, I think both of them that were there, they are similar to the other whalers. They acknowledge that it was really hard for the whales. Like, obviously they don't want to bring them to extinction, but also they knew that, that they kind of had to find some other work that was going to work for them. Back in Shetland, my grandad, Jimmy, he was coming home to marry my granny, so he knew that he had to get into something else as well. And it kind of helped make the decision.
- [54:39]
Dan Snow
And did that community, did Shetland pivot successfully? Were there other jobs or did the community really suffer?
- [54:45]
Helen Belfort
There was things that changed in Shetland, people when they came home from the whaling, because there was much more money. The economic situation really changed and people were able to buy fishing boats or buy into businesses. And I think that helped Chitlin's economy a huge deal. Obviously, latterly, Shetland got into the oil industry and that also helped. But without maybe that support during the 60s from the whaling industry and that economic support, I don't think that Chitlin's economy would have grown as much as what it had during the 20th century.
- [55:18]
Dan Snow
Preserving the heritage of whaling means grappling with a complicated legacy. Looking at both the ecological history and the human story gives us a fuller understanding of an industry that underpinned much of the modern world, but came at enormous cost. Two things can be true at once. Whaling methods were cruel and the practice had to stop to protect these incredible animals. But also, the social history of whaling is important and should be approached with a willingness to understand and learn. Whaling is part of Britain's history and key to the identities of these Scottish communities in particular, that were shaped by. Can be hard to marry these two truths together. But it's being done in the groundbreaking research by the South Georgia Heritage Trust. We've got the Whalers Memory bank, which is a website. It's available to anyone. It's packed with history and testimony and images about the history of whaling in the Southern Ocean. My guest, Jane and Helen have been instrumental in building this resource, interviewing Britain's remaining whalers while they're still here to tell their stories.
- [56:15]
Jane Pearce
It's really wonderful meeting them, actually. It's really interesting. And I think we're Sat here in 2025 with our lens of whaling as being a barbaric, awful activity. But what we have to try and do is separate the business of whaling, the men at the top of the food chain, if you like, with all the profits from this activity, with the men that actually worked down in the south of South Georgia, the Southern Ocean, on the high seas, it's a completely separate world, if you like. So we call them whalers, but actually they were plumbers, technicians, electricians, mess boys, chefs, laundry men, sailors. So there were a whole range of trades worked down in South Georgia, and we call them all whalers, but these guys went down post war, so between 40s, 50s and 60s. They're now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, but they have these amazing stories of being south. They went on an adventure, they earned good money, there was camaraderie. Yes. Some were homesick, yes. Some didn't like it. It was really, really brutal, hard work. But many of the stories from these ex whalers is one of shared memories, great friendships, and when you talk to them and you get that feeling from them that it was a great adventure. The business of whaling was very separate from what they were doing day to day. It's almost like they were two different things. And the money that they earned, it gave them a start in life. A lot of whaling money went into places like Shetland. You know, they went home and started new businesses. Many of them were saving to get married and buy houses. You know, it gave them a start in life that changed their lives, if you like.
- [57:59]
Dan Snow
Is it interesting for you now when we're trying to think about the whaling industry and preserve these memories and in some ways celebrate some of the things about the community and the. At the same time as acknowledging the ecological disasters of driving some whales to extinction. Is that a challenge for you as a professional? How do you marry those messages together?
- [58:17]
Helen Belfort
Yeah, it's quite difficult to get the nuance right because people are often coming to it with modern biases and straight away, when they see anything about whale and they think, bad, we shouldn't speak about this. But actually, once they read about the whaler's memory bank and they learn about the human impact that it had and what it was like for communities and what it was like for men who were working there, they realized that the story is much more nuanced and that it's a really interesting part of Britain's industrial heritage that's largely been forgotten about or untold to a lot of different audiences around Britain. So bringing that back into even just speaking to people about it and having attention from it, it's really great to be able to share that with the world and and be able to share those stories.
- [59:05]
Dan Snow
You can explore these stories for yourself at www.whalersmemorybank.sgmuseums.GS and we'll put a link in the show notes. Don't worry. Thank you so much to all my guests Jane Gibby and Helen Richard Sabin from the Natural Museum, who are doing loads of research into the ecological history and impact from whaling and what the future holds for these species. We'll have another episode of Dan Snow's History up for you on Thursday. Fear not. See you then.
- [59:44]
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