Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is the decisive hinge in the book’s account of the changing relationship between humans and whales. From the expansion of commercial whaling to the arrival of petroleum, explosive weapons, and factory ships, industrial development repeatedly altered what people wanted from whales and how efficiently they could pursue them. The same history that made whale bodies into fuel, fashion, and wartime material also helped inaugurate the Anthropocene and brought the survival of whale populations into question.

Industrial scale and the labor of whaling

Around 1800, industrial expansion began a new geological epoch in the account offered by the book. At sea, its consequences were visible in a rapidly growing whaling economy. During the boom, new ships were said to be built by the mile, while vessels once used to carry tourists were refitted to carry harpooners around Cape Horn. The Acushnet, newly built and 104 feet long, embodied this expansion: a working ship whose crew was organized not simply by rank but by shares in its future profits.

Those shares reveal how sharply the enterprise divided its rewards. Captain Valentine Pease claimed one-twelfth of the profits, the first officer one twenty-fifth, and a foremost hand such as Herman Melville one seventy-fifth; a greenhand could expect just one one-hundred-and-ninetieth. For Black or mixed-race crewmen, including the cook and two deckhands, the voyage followed a history of labor under a master. The ship’s contract imposed another form of control: men were not to leave until the hold was full of oil, and misconduct could cost them pay or bring the lash. Because they had to buy clothing from expensive shipboard supplies, some returned with their earnings consumed by debt. Two men deserted even before the Acushnet sailed; of its original twenty-six, only eleven would return. Industrial production depended on labor that was both dangerous and tightly constrained.

The whale’s body also entered less visibly into the material culture of the trade. Long periods of inactivity aboard ship were filled by scrimshaw: sailors soaked whale teeth in brine, polished them with sharkskin, and etched them with needles or knives before inking the designs with soot from the try-pots. The images could record ships and whaling scenes, but also fantasy, desire, and everyday life. These objects made the teeth of hunted animals into personal records and keepsakes, even as they expressed the excess and reach of the industry that supplied them. John F. Kennedy later collected thirty-four whale teeth, keeping favored examples on his desk; in 1963, a tooth engraved with the presidential seal was placed in his coffin after his death. A whaling by-product thus acquired a new life as a political and personal relic.

Energy transitions and new weapons

The shift from whale oil to other energy sources did not happen in a simple or immediate sequence. Kerosene and coal gas were already lighting streets and homes from the 1840s, and the spread of domestic lighting initially increased demand for whale oil as well. But in 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled for oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The gush from the ground signaled the end of the sperm-whale fishery and the beginning of another form of extraction. In 1879, the first electric light was switched on; the world increasingly looked elsewhere for illumination as the price of whale oil fell and earlier hunting grounds were depleted.

Industrial technology also changed which whales could be caught. On Christmas Eve 1868, Sven Foyn recorded his thanks to God after patenting a grenade harpoon designed to explode in a whale’s head. His weapon, used from a steamship, enabled Norwegian whalers to pursue the great rorquals that earlier whalers could not readily catch. Blue whales and fin whales, among the largest animals on Earth, were suddenly exposed to a more lethal fishery. The account describes the consequence in stark terms: once sighted, a whale was as good as dead. Norwegian whalers soon killed a thousand fin whales a year, while humpbacks were also drawn into the new era of steamships and harpoon-launchers. The technology answered an economic problem created by depletion: when profitable sperm and right whales had become scarce, industrial efficiency opened new species to pursuit.

Whales as industrial and military material

As American whaling declined, European fleets expanded into the Antarctic. From 1904, Norwegian and British armed steamships hunted there for a new use of whale products: the manufacture of nitroglycerine. The paradox is central to the book’s history of industry. Animals that had supplied light and other products now provided raw material for explosives, even as the twentieth century turned to war on an enormous scale.

The costs were borne by whales as well as people. Fifty thousand whales perished during the two world wars. By 1918, the entire population of humpbacks in the South Atlantic had been driven to extinction; their oil helped prevent soldiers from suffering trench foot. A report by Sidney Harmer on stranded cetaceans that year noted that several specimens were used to manufacture glycerine for munitions. Whales were therefore not merely caught during wartime: their bodies were incorporated into the machinery of war.

The introduction of factory ships intensified this industrial logic. In 1925, Norway launched the Lancing, the first factory ship, and processing at sea enabled a vastly expanded slaughter. The book describes one and a half million rorqual whales killed in this period, alongside warnings that their numbers were declining alarmingly. The reach of industrial whaling connected remote ocean grounds to manufacturing and military demand, while making the destruction of whale populations harder to separate from the wider history of twentieth-century mass violence.

The Anthropocene and uncertain futures

The book places this history within the Anthropocene: a proposed epoch beginning around 1800, when industrial activity became a force capable of changing the Earth system. Its image of that change is not only the extraction of whale bodies but the retreat of polar ice. As fresh water locked in the ice enters the ocean, the North-West Passage becomes a permanent reality, opening routes between continents while prompting renewed plans to exploit Arctic resources. The apparent opening of a passage is also a sign that the environmental conditions sustaining older whale habitats are changing.

The effects on marine food webs remain uncertain. Krill that feed on algae beneath the ice may diminish, while warming oceans are already reducing food sources at lower latitudes and pushing whales northward, toward polar refuges that may disappear. Nutrients released in the Antarctic could, on the other hand, benefit parts of the food chain. The book refuses to turn these possibilities into a settled prediction: humanity is living through a vast experiment whose outcomes are not yet known.

The scale of loss makes that uncertainty urgent. The book notes that the Yangtze River dolphin was declared extinct while it was being written, and warns that many more species, including right whales of Cape Cod Bay, could face the same fate. Research into sperm-whale societies adds another dimension: hunting may have removed matriarchs and the knowledge they pass on, as well as the large males with whom females mate. Industrial history thus reaches beyond the number of animals killed. It threatens the social knowledge of surviving populations and leaves open the possibility that, as human industry reshapes the ocean, the animals it has persecuted may vanish before their lives and cultures are understood.

Industrial remains and changing ways of seeing

The book also follows industrial history into museums and surviving objects, where the whale appears as both a specimen and a record of extraction. In New Bedford, a fifty-ton blue-whale skeleton hangs above a museum reception desk. Washed ashore on Rhode Island in 1998, the six-year-old animal was claimed by both the museum and the Smithsonian Institution; the compromise required that it be displayed publicly by day and night. Its carcass was cut into sections, lowered into the Acushnet River in cages, and cleaned over two years by minute organisms before the skeleton was reassembled in an atrium. Even on display, it drips oil, making the industrial past palpable in the museum air.

A different remnant survives at Burton Constable: a great grey whale bone, weathered for decades, with other bones scattered in outhouses nearby. The remains had once been arranged outdoors to suggest the animal swimming, until their supports rusted away and the skeleton was neglected. Its later rescue and anticipated reassembly turn a damaged industrial-era relic into an object of renewed attention. Such displays do not undo the history that made whales available for capture and study. Instead, they expose its afterlife: bodies once pursued for their commercial value become evidence of what industry took, and of how much remains unknown about the animals it transformed.