"Whales: In Deep Trouble"

...Perhaps something atavistic lurks in the way in which we see cetaceans. Whales and whaling are part of British heritage: in the 18th and 19th centuries, ports such as London, Hull and Whitby conducted massive culls of common or bowhead whales. From 1785 to 1826, Britain's greatest whaler, William Scoresby Sr, killed 533.

Before the discovery of petroleum in 1859, London, Paris and New York were lit and lubricated by leviathans. Whaling - worth $120m a year by 1850 - was America's first global industry, the germ of its empire. And unlike modern hunters, who at least claim whales for sustenance, the one part of the whale not used by the Victorians was its meat. Strips of fingernail-like baleen, with which whales strain their food, were used for umbrellas and corsets. Ambergris, produced by the sperm whale in reaction to indigestible squid beaks, was precious as a perfume fixative. Equally prized was oil from the animal's block-like head. Even in the late 20th century, Nasa used this oil in its equipment.

We cannot be excused our culpability. Almost anyone born before 1960 ate whale - in margarine or ice cream - wore it as a cosmetic or fed it to their pets. The peak of whaling was not the brutal days of Melville's Moby-Dick, but the 1960s when, in one season alone, floating factories "processed" 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales and 2,566 sperm whales - not including the thousands killed by the Russians, unreported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The whale, too, was a victim of the Cold War.

Now, the greatest danger that it faces is not a harpoon, but fishing nets and shipping routes. The North Atlantic right whale, reduced to just 300 individuals by the legacy of whaling, has a gene pool so compromised that it is unlikely to survive the century.
commondreams.org

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January 2006
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