European Union

The European Union appears in Philip Hoare’s account as a decisive legal constraint on commercial whaling in the Azores: after the islands joined, whaling was illegal within the Union, delivering the final blow to an industry already losing workers and markets. Its significance in this passage lies not in a detailed account of the institution, but in the local change that its rules helped make unavoidable: whale hunting gave way to whale watching.

The Union and the End of Whaling

By the time the Azores joined the European Union, whaling was already a declining trade. Islanders were finding better work elsewhere, and demand for whale products had faded. Hoare presents Union membership as the final blow: within the European Union, whaling was illegal. The passage does not describe the policy’s implementation, but makes its consequence for the islands clear—the existing industry could no longer continue under the new legal condition.

A Local Economy in Transition

The change was not simply a matter of prohibition. With fewer people drawn to whaling and less appetite for its products, the old trade had been weakening before membership supplied its decisive legal limit. Hoare’s account thus places the European Union at the end of a longer contraction, rather than portraying it as the sole source of the industry’s decline.

From Hunting to Watching

The alternative emerged through persuasion and the practical transfer of knowledge. Serge Viallelle, who came from France in the 1980s to deliver a yacht, discovered the whales and stayed. He then had to persuade islanders that visitors would pay to look at whales. Whale watching replaced whale hunting, a shift Hoare compares with the change in Provincetown.

The Transfer of Expertise

The new trade was taught to the Azoreans by Al Avellar, a Provincetowner of Portuguese descent. The detail connects the islands’ emerging whale-watching work to experience from another community that had also made the transition from hunting to watching. In this account, the European Union marks the legal boundary that closed off the old livelihood; local persuasion and transferred expertise helped make a different use of the whales possible.