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The HC Commodities Podcast
Whale Oil with Eric Jay Dolin (Summer Repeat)
00:48:47
In 1859, illumination throughout the major metropolises of the West was powered by whale oil. Whale oil was at the center of international trade (and trade disputes). Prices were at an all time high and great fortunes had been made. Yet, in that same year, Edwin Drake started the oil rush in Titusville, Pennsylvania…and every thing changed. Quickly. What lessons are there in this first energy transition in the modern era? In this episode we dig into the history of whaling and whale oil. Our guest is historian Eric Jay Dolan, author of Leviathan: A history of whaling in America. Eric takes us through the history of whale oil. A history of the first commodity cartels (they failed too), extraordinary entrepreneurs, boom and bust, environmental exploitation and Benjamin Franklin’s taste for Spermaceti Candles.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the HC Insider Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the commodities sector and the people within it. I'm your host, Paul Chapman. Today we're talking whale oil and the history of whaling. In the 1850s, American whaling was at the height of its power. The whale oil it produced was illuminating cities around the world. Yet just a few years later, the entire industry had collapsed in the wake of the discovery of oil and its refined product, kerosene. What lessons are there for the current energy transition that we're going through for its people, for the companies involved, and for the capital behind it? Our guest is Eric J. Dolan. After getting a master's at Yale for Forestry and Environmental Studies, Eric spent the early part of his career on environmental policy and has since become an author and historian, primarily focused on the maritime history of North America. We discuss his book, the History of Whaling in America, available at all good bookstores. As always, you can really support the show by leaving a positive review on the platform you're listening on and I hope you enjoy the episode. Eric, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks for having me.
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B
I'm excited to have this discussion. As longtime listeners might know, this is sort of the, this, the genesis of this comes from an episode that we did on coal and our guest, Hayne Parker, likened the transition of coal to that of whale oil. We're going to explore that, but it's a broader story, the history of whaling. It's one of an entire industry that came and went relatively quickly. It's the story of a commodity and it's a story of a transition. And it's also the story of the people who did it. And it's, you know, it's a fascinating part of American history. And we're obviously not going to get into the morality of, of whaling, but we're talking about the history of it. There's quite a story to tell here, but we can just sort of start off with some of the basics kind of firstly, the very early days of whaling. This had been going on for a long time with Native Americans. It was shore based, or typically it was finding carcasses of whales washed up and, and using all parts of that whale for food or whatever it might be. But particularly obviously, this unique sort of quality of the, the whale blubber. Can we sort of start there and then we can build on that?
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A
Well, when the first colonists came to what later would be the United States, and specifically the colonists that came to the pilgrim colony that started in Plymouth in 1620, they were very aware of, of whaling. Whaling was a major Activity in Europe, where they not only used the blubber, rendered down the oil for al illumination, but they also ate parts of the whale. And when the Americans got over here, the colonists got over here, they saw whales surrounding the Mayflower and thought, hey, we're gonna go whaling here. And the initial whaling, as you said, was basically waiting for drift whales to wash ashore. But the Americans never got the habit of eating whale meat. So basically, what they used the whales that they found on the beaches for was to cut off their blubber, throw it into these iron pots, melt it down, and take oil and used it for illumination. They also used, to a certain extent, the baleen that came out of the mouths of baleen whales as something to make hoop skirts. And there were some other uses for it at the time, but the main thing was illumination, because whale oil burned better than pitch or tar that they found, or pine and even tallow candles. So that's how it started. And for about from 1620s through probably the 1650s, most of the whaling that was taking place was waiting for whales to die and wash ashore. But slowly there was a transition, and people decided, why should we wait for the whales to wash ashore? Let's hop into small boats and go shore whaling. And that started to take off, especially in Massachusetts, but also in other colonies, as they were added to the list. And these whale boats, which were about 24, 25ft long, would go out with maybe six men on board. Oftentimes there were Native Americans thrown into the mix because they were very familiar with being in canoes and boats and also were very good laborers. So the colonists added them, and they went out. They would essentially post people on the beach to scan the horizon. And if a whale was seen spouting off in the distance, the yell would go out, whale ho. You know, whale in the bay. Men would come running from the local town, they'd hop into their boats, and they'd go offshore and harpoon the whales with rather rudimentary harpoons. But they were. They still worked. They would also use drogues very often, which were blocks of wood which were attached to the rope that would make it difficult for the whale to sound and go deep under the water and would tire them out as they drag these floating blocks of wood behind them. And ultimately the whales would tire out. The men would row up to the whales. They would deliver the final strokes with the long, sharp blade, and then they tow the whale back to shore, would be processed. And then that process was the process of shore whaling was very active from the mid-1600s through the early 1700s and even a little bit beyond. But there was a switch taking place. And as whales became less numerous and the whalemen in America became aware that there were large populations beyond the horizon, they started to get into larger boats. And sometimes they would go on trips that would last a week, a month or maybe even six months, and they'd go down through the southern Atlantic and they'd go north off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and they'd attack right whales and humpback whales and ultimately sperm whales, which were the greatest of all whales to capture because of the valuable spermaceti oil in their head and the bright, cleaning, bright burning qualities of sperm whale oil. So the evolution of whaling went from drift whaling to shore whaling to offshore whaling. And we'll probably get into it later. But after the American Revolution, the offshore whaling went further and further afield. And ultimately American whalemen could be seen in any one of the world's oceans attacking leviathans of the deep.
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Yeah, and we're going to get there. There's a couple of things. So firstly, the ultimate use is primarily lumination in the form of oil burning can, oil burners and then down the line candles, which we'll come on to. But of course there are other applications as well, that oil became crucial in sort of rudimentary machinery, etc. The other thing is that what's fascinating is kind of already during this pre revolutionary period, you start to see some of the issues arise that would ultimately lead to that revolution in what a. The British government thought was its right to, to glean profits from this whaling, but also kind of the democratic nature as whaling started out from the very first days, you know, there'd be these lays where the finders of the whale and the people who participated in the very, very hard work of, you know, in, in princes processing the whale would have these equal shares. It was, it was quite tied to the sort of the nature and the, the democratic nature of those early colonists in and around Massachusetts.
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A
Oh, absolutely. And also one of the things that really bothered the colonists, not only in Massachusetts, but especially in New York, was the crown in the form of colonial governors, wanting to take a cut of the profits made by these men who went out whaling. It was an early form of taxation without representation. And a lot of these whalemen became very vocal. Some even went all the way to England to press their case that they shouldn't be taxed. And the local colonial governor had no right to take part of their profits because they were the ones that were taking on all the risk and should glean all of the profits. So, yeah, there was the American spirit, if that. That's one word you could use, or the American perspective on private enterprise was alive and well in the whaling industry certainly by the early 1700s.
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B
Hmm, let's talk about that illumination piece because it also spurred the illumination of major cities. You talk in the book about sort of the rise and this ties in with sort of the industrialization of whaling we're going to come on to. But can you just talk about sort of how crucial it was to illumination?
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Well, starting in the mid-1700s, about 20 or 30 years before the American Revolution, communities and cities like Philadelphia were starting to light up the night on a more active scale than they had before. You know, prior to the use of extensive use of whale oil and other forms of illumination. Once the sun went down, everything was basically over. But with the widespread use of whale oil and it being cheap enough so even laborers and common people could afford to buy the cheaper qualities of whale oil. They could light up their houses at night, they could work later, they could read if they were literate. And also they could make the cities and towns safer because they would have street lamps. And Benjamin Franklin is one of the people that introduced street lamps into Philadelphia. And it did have a measurable impact on the decrease of crime by illuminating the alleyways and streets. And this was also mentioned in London. The illumination of streets in London with whale oil lamps resulted in a marked decrease in criminal activity. So there are a lot of ramifications of having a better illuminated world. And that was one of them.
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Yeah. And obviously the revolutionary period had a significant impact on London and was felt by that time, American whaling and the oil produce was crucial. Let's talk about. So to this period or to. In the late 17th century, it was mainly these right whales, these baleen whales. And then as. As a whalers went further afield and we're going to come onto these incredible voyages that they did. Sperm whales started to be hunted. Not only do they have blubber, you know, these, these incredibly aggressive, well, large, able to defend themselves, I should say tooth whales who had this weird stuff, spermaceti, because it's so crucial to the story. Can you just talk about what that is? And we're still not, I believe, entirely sure what it's for in terms of biological uses.
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A
Right. The first Americans to attack sperm whales in the open ocean were Nantucketers in the early 1700s. There was actually a voyage where they were leaving Nantucket's harbor to go after right whales and perhaps humpback whales, because humpback whales were also taken at the time. But right whales are the ones with the most blubber and baleen, so they were particularly profitable. So these guys in Nantucket went out looking for right whales, but a minor storm blew in, sent their ship way offshore, where they fell in with a school of sperm whales. And they harpooned one of them and laboriously rode it back to Nantucket and realized that this was a windfall, because not only could the blubber of sperm whales be rendered into oil that was comparable to that gotten from right whales, but in the sperm whale's head, in their spermaceti organ, their bulbous head, was this liquid called spermaceti, which, when it was in the animal, it was in liquid form. It was sort of a thick, gelatinous type liquid, but the minute that it was exposed to the air, it would turn into a crystalline mass. And there were ways of processing this oil to extract not only very high quality sperm whale oil, but also after pressing this wax multiple times and then treating it with alkali, you ended up with a very white wax that could be molded into candles, spermaceti candles, which burned very brightly and gave off very little soot. So it became a. One of the most valuable parts of the whaling industry was the sale of spermaceti candles to wealthy individuals. And one of the big supporters of spermaceti candles was Benjamin Franklin, who used them in his study. And Thomas Jefferson also was quoted as saying very favorable things about the light thrown off by spermaceti candles. So as the whalemen went farther and farther afield, they started encountering sperm whales in greater numbers. But the real bounty came in the late 1700s, when the first American ship rounded Cape Horn and went into the Pacific Ocean, which was literally teeming with probably millions of sperm whales. And that really gave a kickstart to the later American industry, which focused primarily on sperm whales and later bowhead whales, because the right whales had been hunted to near extinction, and humpback whales didn't have as much or as high quality blubber as the right whales or the sperm whales.
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And this will be familiar to someone in our audience. Of course, we just talk about sort of the value chain and the economics of, of whaling at this period. I mean, I think it was around 1760, you had the first cartel, as we would recognize it today. Right. The spermaceti trust was set up, which ultimately didn't really work. Like most cartels, there was always more incentive to. To break the rules. But can you Just talk to that a little. And already at this stage, it was incredibly lucrative.
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A
Right, right. I mean, on the eve of the American Revolution, there were over 300American whale ships and they were bringing in a huge amount of blubber oil and baleen. And in fact, more than 50% of the trade between New England and the mother country was revolved around whaling related products. And although many people in Massachusetts like to point to cod being the king, because cod fishing was very important at the time, actually whaling on the east of the American Revolution brought in more money than cod fishing. But the Spermaceti Trust is a very interesting interlude in the history of whaling. What was happening is the cost for the head matter that came out of the sperm whale which was used to produce these spermaceti candles. The cost kept going up. And the men who had created the factories to produce the spermaceti candles wanted to keep cost rises in check because if the cost went too high, then the cost of the spermaceti candles would also go too high and there wouldn't be a sufficient market for it. So what happened is a number of the spermaceti candle producers banded together in one of the first monopolies or attempted monopolies in American history, and a cartel or an energy cartel of sorts to restrict the sale of the head matter from sperm whales and then to allocate it among their members. And the initial problem was is they didn't have all the spermaceti manufacturers in the Spermaceti Trust. They added more. There were ultimately, I think, 12 different manufacturers. And for a while it worked after a fashion. There were a lot of people that went behind other people's backs and bought head matter without informing the Spermaceti Trust. And then finally, the biggest fear was that a owner of whaling ships that caught the sperm whales and provided the spermaceti to the candle manufacturers would decide to become a vertically integrated company, basically capturing the sperm whales, taking the sperm ceti oil and also having their own candle manufacturing plant. And William Roach, part of the very famous Nantucket Roach family, that was very big in whaling at the time, decided to do that. But before things went very far, the American Revolution broke out. And the Spermaceti Trust, for all intents and purposes, was done for at that point. But for a while it worked after a fashion and they were able to keep the price of spermaceti candles to a more reasonable level. Although it wasn't reasonable to an average laborer, it was reasonable to a wealthy individual. Benjamin Franklin in the colonies. Yeah, Benjamin Franklin, or people of his
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ilk yeah, just say the Revolutionary War happens. What happens to the price of spermaceti candles of whale oil to illumination? How was this felt in the UK for example, or in France? I mean, this was very much a global market even by this stage.
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A
Right. Well, during the American Revolution, basically American whaling, which they were the number one whalemen in the world, was almost entirely shut down. So England and France and European countries who had formerly purchased whale oil from American sources, they did suffer and prices fluctuated a lot. But after the war was over, an interesting thing happened. The American whalemen thought that, oh, England's going to welcome us back with open arms because they want our whale oil. Well, England was understandably very upset with the Americans who had broken free and created their own country. And they wanted nothing to do with the American whalemen. In fact, they wanted to penalize them and try to build up the British whale fishery, which had for many years had a checkered past. It never was able to really compete head on with the Americans. But now the Americans were a different country. The British slapped a huge tax on American whale oil coming into the country and that made it cost prohibitive. And the hope was that the British whalemen would fill the void. They did to some extent. But by the end of the 1700s, Britain realized there's no way that they're going to be able to compete with the Americans. And American whale oil started flooding back into not only England, but also other parts of Europe, including France and other places. So the American golden age of American whaling happened in the 1800s, and that's where it reached its greatest heights, when American whalemen and out competed everybody.
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And some of that story is fascinating. You know, the, the British attempts to try and lure over. I mean the book is filled with these incredibly colorful characters and, and part of the issue was incentive, right? The, and this bruises onto the economics was always in American whaling, okay, the profits would definitely split unevenly, in fact, incredibly so by the end. But it was very different to the British approach where people would just receive wages.
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Right.
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And an interesting facet there. Right?
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Yeah. I mean, flat being. I think I have a sentence in the book that flat wages or you know, just salaries don't inspire zeal. If you're an American whaleman and you get a lay, even if it's a small lele, let's say it's 1 175th of the profits of the voyage, you still have the hope that you'll have a greasy trip and the ship will return with a hold full of oil and Baleen and even a 1 175th portion of the profits might turn out to be a very good payday. Whereas if you're paid a flat fee for going out for a year, a couple of years at a time, and it doesn't matter whether you come back full of oil or not, you're not as likely to take perhaps chances or risk your life as readily if there's the opportunity for Inc. Profits at the other end.
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The HC Insider podcast is brought to you by HC Group, a retained search intelligence and advisory firm focused solely on the global energy and commodity sector, with six locations across Asia, Europe and the Americas and over 50 consultants. To find out more, go to our website HCGroup Global. There you can also sign up for our HC Insider content for more interviews and white papers on relevant trends and talent impacts in the commodities world. Let's go to the 1850s, right? And this is, and it will be a surprising story. So 1850 kind of, it's, we're right at sort of the peak of the golden age, if you'd like, of whaling or you know, around that when the whale oil is most worth, its most valuable, you've got these incredible voyages. Can you sort of, I guess give us some sense, starting with I guess, the economics. So you had these, you know, how it would work, how that money would flow and then give us some sense of the sheer distances covered and the two three year trips and you know, a captain might turn on a whim and say we haven't got enough yet, we're going to spend another year at sea. And you know, everyone on board would have to like it and do their scratching away on some whale bone and write sort of quite solemn diaries or visit Hawaii as it often happened as well. But can you just give us some sense of that economics first and then the scale and scope of this industry and its importance to the US economy in 1850?
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A
Sure. Right around that time there are about 900 whale ships were worldwide and about 760 of them were American. The leading port for whaling was New Bedford. But ultimately close to 60 different ports sent out at least one whale ship during the 1800s. And these voyages would go to almost every ocean imaginable. The average length of a voyage would be about four years. The all time record was 11 years. And you're absolutely correct, if they were having a poor trip, oftentimes the captain would just go farther afield, hopefully to come upon a pod of whales and turn their trip around. And the economics was that the closer you are to the Top of the food chain, the better you do. The owners of the vessels and the outfitters, in many instances, made a healthy profit from all these voyages coming and going during those years. The captains, the first mates, the doctors on board, the officers, they got short lays, which were more profitable. But the further you went down in the crew, down to the cabin boy or just the men before the mass, they got the long lays and the worst end of the stick, so to speak. And it became more and more difficult with so many whale ships going out to get a full complement or a crew. So they started sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of the dregs of society, as they were referred to at that time in America as there was some shanghaiing going on. They would pick up whalemen from other areas, from the Cape Verde Islands, from Hawaii, other places that they went to. And it really. By the 1850s, most of the men on board were going to come home after a trip of four years and maybe have 20, $30 in their pocket, or maybe sometimes only a couple of cents, or some of them might have even lost money on the. The endeavor. So it was a very difficult way to earn a living. And that made it more and more difficult to crew the ships. But it was a very large industry in. In Massachusetts, for example, it was the. I think it was the third largest industry in Massachusetts. It was about the fifth largest industry in the United States at the time. They were capturing 8 to 10,000 whales a year. They were employing about 70,000 people were employed in the whaling industry, and they brought in profits that were also along that same scale. So it was a big industry. It was an important industry. But as we'll probably get into, by the 1850s, it was facing some stiffer competition. Illumination was still very important. And New Bedford was known as the city that lit the world, for good reason, because they were providing most of the whale oil at the time. But there were other sources of illumination. For example, there was lard oil, which came from hogs, which they were called prairie whales, that burned. It didn't burn as well as whale oil. There was camphine, which was a distillate of turpentine and alcohol, which produced a very nice, strong, bright light. But it had the unfortunate tendency of exploding every once in a while and causing great damage to those who were near the flame. So that was something that the whaleman never ceased. They always made a big point of pointing that out when people would say, camphine is going to take over your business. And they said, well, you Know, it may kill the consumers first. Then there was also gas, hydrogen gas, which came from a process using coal. But that was relatively limited in 1850 because it was a involved process and you couldn't generate a huge amount of gas. However, in the 1850s, New Bedford, the veritable the home of whaling in America, their street lights stopped being illuminated with whale oil and started to be illuminated with gas, or house gas, as they called it. But the real death knell for the whale oil illumination business came in the late 1850s when oil was struck in Titusville, Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake and his crews. And that oil, one of the byproducts that you can extract from oil is kerosene. And kerosene was known about for many years. They could get it from rocks and other places, but only in small amounts. Now, with huge amounts of oil gushing from an increasing number of wells around the country, they suddenly had an almost unlimited source of kerosene, which quickly became much cheaper than whale oil. It burned very nicely and it just swamped the market. So within a couple of years, the market for whale oil was greatly diminished. And not only that, petroleum byproducts are also very useful for lubrication. And lubrication was very important at this time, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. So whereas whale oil, in particular sperm whale oil and oil from pilot whales was used to lubricate everything from watches to large gears of machinery, all of a sudden, the byproducts of petroleum could be used and worked just as well. So the bottom really fell out of the American whale oil industry. And then the Civil War came, which set the whale industry on its heels for a number of reasons. And after that, and I guess we'll get into this after that, whale oil never really came back. There were. It would come back in fits and starts, and it would be used for specialty applications. But essentially, by the 1870s and 1880s, the American whaling industry was not going out primarily to get oil and to render oil from whale blubber. It was going out to get baleen. And we can talk about that later. I don't want to jump ahead.
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There's a few things that struck me about that if we put baleen aside, which adds sort of a complicating factor that wouldn't really exist in an energy transition today. Well, maybe it does in terms of lubricants, you know, but, you know, it couldn't have happened at a word. Well, firstly was the scale and swiftness. Right. So I think the. The peak year in American whaling was like 400,000 barrels, barrels there or thereabouts of oil in, I think, the 40s. And within a year of Titusville, you had a million barrels of oil being produced basically overnight. So there's the sheer volume and scale and. But it couldn't have happened at a worse time either, because by this time, whale oil was becoming increasingly expensive, as you mentioned, because of scarcity. And secondly, I mean, like, we sort of touched on it, but this was an atrocious way to make a living. It was incredibly dangerous, incredibly boring. You really didn't get paid anything. That pay was itself uncertain. I mean, Moby Dick obviously looms somewhat large in the book, but so does the. The Essex as well. Right. Which. There's a true story behind that. You know, this was. So all of those people. What's fascinating is all of the workers in the whaling industry suddenly found ready jobs in the petroleum industry that were far, far more conducive to happy life, marriage and safety and all the rest of it, Right?
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A
No, absolutely. It was an incredibly rapid transition. It wasn't a slow adoption of a new technology. It was fundamentally a paradigm shift. And you're absolutely right. A lot of whalemen who suddenly found themselves out of work. Not only was it becoming more difficult to be a whaleman, because a lot of whales we driven were being driven towards extinction or diminishing numbers. So the trips had to be longer just to fill a whale ship. Also, insurance companies were hesitant to insure these trips because there were a lot of accidents and a lot of questions about the durability of the whale oil market. So there are a lot of things that are acting against whaling operations. And then all of a sudden, not only do you have petroleum coming out of the ground in enormous quantities, but you have a whole new industry springing up around it. And many of the owners of whale ships took their capital and invested in the oil industry or the burgeoning cotton industry, especially in Massachusetts. And a lot of the men who worked on those whale ships would view working on land at an oil facility being a step up than being in the hold, you know, on a whale ship for three or four years at a time. So, yeah, it was a pretty dramatic change. And it was all complicated by the Civil War. I mean, the Civil War just threw everything up in the air. And the whale oil industry was never able to come back, because by the end of the 1850s, not only was whale oil more difficult to obtain, but it was also becoming more expensive because of that scarcity. So kerosene, which became cheaper and Cheaper and cheaper, the more oil wells that were sunk, whale oil had no chance.
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B
And what's amazing in that as well is actually the peak price for whale oil was in 1865. Right. The end of the Civil War. You kind of had this weird moment that seems fascinating.
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A
Right. Well, that's because basically the entire country was in a shambles. The networks that were generated from the petroleum fields were also damaged, just like every other network in the United States was damaged. And there was still a need for illumination. And there were ready supplies of whale oil, some of which hadn't been sold because of the onslaught of kerosene. But there's still whale ships that were going out and capturing whales. So I think it was just a confluence of. Of the utter destruction of society to some extent and the normal networks of business and a small window of opportunity for whalemen to fill the void or generate the supply that was necessary to re illuminate parts of the country that had been shattered. But that didn't last very long.
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B
Yeah. The other thing that's striking about this is there's no mention, no hint of stop wailing for the morality of it. Right. Or the biological degradation that it was causing that didn't really enter into this. Right. It was pure utility and economics that made this transition.
- [33:53]
A
But consider the time that we're talking about and the American conservation movement, which launched societal concern for animals and animals going extinct, didn't really start to take off until the very end of the 1800s and then on into the early 1900s. So at the time this transition to kerosene was taking place, there was no conservation movement, there was no such mentality within the culture, although there were individuals who definitely thought about, even if they didn't worry about the ultimate extinction of the animals, because. Not because of the animals inherent right to survive, but because they were killing the golden goose that laid the eggs. They knew that these whales were getting scarcer and scarcer, and as a result, it was more difficult to earn a living. So that's. It was posed as an economic problem, not an ecological problem. There is one exception to that, sort of an exception. There's a great letter that I have in the book that was written by, quote, unquote, a polar whale because they were attacking bowhead whales increasingly in the mid-1850s because they produced huge amounts of oil and also a lot of baleen, and they were rapidly dwindling in numbers. So somebody wrote an impassioned letter to the Honolulu Friend newspaper, basically saying, you are running me and my family members to Extinction. Can't all you whalemen just stop attacking us and you know, take on some other activity? It wasn't really an ecological plea. It was a self interested plea of the quote unquote polar whale. I'm sure that it was a whaleman of some sort that penned the letter, but we're not sure who did. So there were some ecological concerns even earlier in the 1800s, but it wasn't a widespread societal concern. And it's hard to evaluate actions then using our current sense of morality and what we consider to be important, because they just weren't thinking in the same way that we do today.
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B
Yeah, okay, so coming back to this transition there, so you've got this element of, of availability. It was obviously the utility was there, it burnt nicely, you know, it was a good substitute. Also had lots of other applications as well in forms of lubricants and so on that quickly also contributed to that volume being produced and lowering the costs. You know, this whole story is, as you mentioned, is complicated by the fact that whaling continued for another 60 years or so, or 55 years. I think it is, you know, because baleen had this utility, these long teeth like structures that are used to trap microorganisms and so forth, krill and so on for the whale to eat, to filter the food. What did they. So the whaling kind of continues at a much reduced rate for this stuff that went into Victorian ladies corsets and I'm sure some men's as well.
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A
Right.
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B
What happened to whale oil as a illuminant? You know, what did they do with the whale oil? Did they even bother, you know, rendering it down at this point? I mean, how. When was the last whale oil, spermaceti candle burned kind of thing?
- [37:14]
A
Oh, well, spermaceti candles I don't think were much in use in the late 1800s. We don't have many mentions of them by that time, especially since the coming of the incandescent bulb and also kerosene maybe. There were specialty markets for spermaceti candles, but I don't think they were used that extensively. There were still some whalemen that were going out and rendering blubber into oil because there were specialty applications. And there were some places that were still using whale oil, but it was very minimal. And in fact, there were many cruises that were called whale bone cruises because they were going out to catch these primarily bowhead whales, which have the longest baleen of all in their heads. They would catch them, strip out the baleen and then let the carcass go. They wouldn't Even cut off the blood and render it into oil, because it was essentially worthless or not worth their while. They were up there for the baleen. And it's hard to imagine today that baleen being used as corset stays also in umbrellas and shavers and a lot of different products that it went into that it was that large of an industry. But it was because women wanted to have this hourglass shape. And towards the end of the 1800s, there were times when whalebone was selling for four or five dollars a pound and some ships were coming back earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it really revived a segment of the whaling industry towards the end of the 19th century. But with the change in fashion, everything was essentially lost. And that was in 1907. A Frenchman named Paul Poiret decreed that women should no longer have that hourglass, that distorted shape, but they should have a more slender profile. And with that pronouncement, since he had a lot of power in the world of fashion, he almost single handedly caused the baleen market to become extremely depressed. Nobody wanted to purchase corsets anymore. And if they did, there were other plastic like things, gutta, percha and other things that could be used just as easily and were cheaper. So the men in New Bedford in particular, they sort of started a whalebone trust to try to pull together all the baleen that was still out there and wait for a better day and then sell it. But that better day never came. And essentially by the beginning of World War I, the American whaling industry was almost completely dead. There was a brief uptick during World War I because sperm whale oil, spermaceti oil, was very useful in ships as a lubricant and could deal with pressure changes. But other than that, and other than trying to get Americans to eat whale meat, which they never really cotton to very much because we were sending a lot of our mutton beef overseas to our men who were fighting in the war. Whaling was something that you saw on the silver screen. There were some silent movies, such as down to the Sea and Ships which used some of the old whale ships like the Charles W. Morgan as props. But by the end of World War II and into the 1920s, there were almost no American whale ships operating. And the last one, the Wanderer, crashed on the shores of Cuddyhunk island as it was preparing to go out on a shortened atlantic cruise in 1924. So that's the end of the traditional Yankee whaling or American whaling. But as I talk about in the book, and as people know, whaling continued On a much larger scale, in many instances on an industrial scale, other places in the world. And it was a very different kind of whaling that had taken place than in the United States. Places like Norway, Germany, Japan, they went out in steam powered and then oil driven ships and they had explosive harpoon guns. And these enormous ships could go after the whales that the American whalemen couldn't have handled, like blue whales and fin whales. And also a lot of other countries, unlike the Americans, used almost every part of the whale. You know, the intestinal gut was used to string tennis rackets, some of the oil was used to make margarine. There were all sorts of. They basically didn't let anything go to waste. And that wailing continued throughout most the of of the 20th century, until the international moratorium on whaling, which had some countries such as Japan and others that didn't participate. And today whaling is almost essentially gone. But there are some countries that go out and still do some whaling and there's some native tribes, especially in the Pacific Northwest, that have explicit government permission to go out and do ceremonial hunts of small numbers of whales. But the number of whales that were killed during the 20th century by this industrialized whaling dwarfs the number of whales that the American whalemen killed in the prior two to three centuries.
- [42:53]
B
Wow. Well, fascinating. So I guess when you sort of step back, I mean, if there weren't the sort of the other applications. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? But there weren't, it wasn't the baleen. If it weren't for that, it feels like there might not have been a whaling ship going out within a couple of years of the end of the Civil War. Right. I mean, it was that dramatic, that transition. It wasn't actually. This idea of a long, a longer transition is really one clouded by other applications, other uses for, for the whales. The actual whale oil story is it has this abrupt end. I mean, is there any sense of how, you know, I mean, when you were New Bedford or Nantucket, I mean, was it. This must have been shocking to these, the coffins and the roaches and these sort of dynasties of huge amount of wealth that had built up through this industry that was really in reality 100 years old. Right. I mean, it was just. It must have been extraordinary.
- [43:51]
A
Oh yeah, it was shocking. But a lot of these business magnates were nimble and they could see the handwriting on the wall, even though it came rather quickly. I mean, there was an earlier time when Nantucket was the leading whaling port, but then the sandbar at the mouth of Nantucket's main harbor meant that larger and larger whale ships couldn't get in there. They had a brief solution to that, but ultimately, that combined with the massive fire in the 1840s and the California gold rush, which took a lot of whalemen to the west coast looking for their fortune, essentially killed Nantucket's whaling industry, and New Bedford took over the reins. But the leading whaling vessel owners in Nantucket and those in no Bedford and other places, people who had made a lot of money from whaling, in many instances just diverted their capital to other industries, whether it be Wamsuda. Cotton manufacturing in Massachusetts, or oil wells or railroads, were very big at the time. And a lot of people that were involved in all sorts of trades, like the China trade and the opium trade, diverted their capital once those became more problematic into other avenues. And it's just. I mean, that happens today. There are industries that go in and out of fashion. There are companies that fail. But oftentimes the owners of those companies, if they were smart, they tucked away some money or they left with money, and then they would take it. And maybe, like venture capitalists, they would invest it somewhere else. And they may have even done better later on. But a lot of the men who worked in the whaling industry just had to go to different places to get employment. And that's not to say that these whalemen like the change. Of course, they would have loved to have continued to have a vibrant whaling industry, because that was one that they knew best and that's what they were involved in. But once, once it was just diminishing returns. They had to make some difficult business choices. Some of them retired, others reinvested, and different places.
- [46:09]
B
Well, it's been a fascinating discussion. I really enjoyed the book. The book we're talking about is Leviathan, the History of Whaling in America. You've written a number of books on American history and especially maritime history as well. Yeah. And it's fascinating. I think there's a story with a lot of lessons within there. Right. Or insights. Some are analogous to what's going on today in the energy transition. Others. Others are just, you know, more sort of general reflections on things like incentives and people in capital movement and. A fascinating story.
- [46:38]
A
Yeah. Well, let me just add one thing that I think you touched upon, and maybe it's a cautionary tale for those involved in the energy sector today. But I think that the one message that many people have talked about in the whaling oil example is that nothing ever stays the same. There are new industries, there are new opportunities that come along, new technologies, that replace things that could have been in place for many, many years. And I who's somebody who has an environmental background, I think in the future it's inevitable that we're going to move beyond the energy economy that we have today. Exactly what it's going to look like in the future, I'm not sure. My only hope is that our energy future is more benign or has a more, a less dramatic negative impact on the environment than our current system does. And I hope everybody, I would hope everybody would agree with that. And I'm sure that the people that are invested in energy sources today are going to be many of the same people who are investing in the new energy sources of the future. Because just like the whalemen who owned all the vessels, they too are nimble.
- [47:50]
B
Exactly. And I echo those sentiments indeed. Well, Eric, what a pleasure having you on. I would thoroughly recommend the book and look forward to hopefully having you on again in the future and talking on other subjects as well. Obviously, I know you've got a rich background in this.
- [48:03]
A
Well, that'd be great. Thank you very much.
- [48:06]
B
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