Men walked on whales

Men walked on whales is the book’s bluntest image of the whale as material resource: in the 1950s, whale hide was processed into shoe soles, so human progress rested, quite literally, on whale bodies. The phrase compresses a much larger chain of capture, manufacture, exchange, and display. It follows whale matter from distant hunting grounds into factories and homes, and finally into the museums where the once-useful body survives as bone, oil, and evidence of its own exploitation.

The phrase and its industrial setting

By the 1950s, an average of 25,000 sperm whales were being killed each year. Their flesh could become vitamin supplements or animal feed; tendons from their heads were made into glue; and, in 1956, a single factory processed 980 tons of whale hide, tanning and dyeing it for shoe soles. The compact declaration Men walked on whales is both a report of this use and an indictment of its intimacy: the whale was not merely consumed at a distance but incorporated into the surfaces people stood on.

The trade’s scale was driven by value. By 1957, whale oil fetched £90 a ton, and a few years later whales were estimated to be worth £50 million annually to the global economy. The book places the phrase within this escalating extraction, in which industrial demand converted living animals into a broad inventory of materials. The result is not simply wastefulness or extravagance; it is a world in which the whale’s body becomes ordinary through processing, even as the scale of its destruction remains extraordinary.

From the sea into houses and households

The same transfer from ocean to human life appears in the account of New Bedford’s grand houses. Their decorative trim came from factories, but the wealth behind them came from the sea: the book describes mansions and gardens as having been dragged ashore from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. For every stoop and pillar, a whale died. Whale oil was exchanged for marble and Baleen for wood; the built environment preserved the cost of the animal in a form that could look, at first, entirely innocent.

Whale products also entered homes through elaborate manufacturing. In 1748, the technique for making candles from sperm-whale headmatter was introduced to New England. The material was heated in large kettles, stored in casks, cooled over winter, and pressed in woollen bags. The purest first pressing was called winter-strained sperm. The remaining matter became black cakes, which were pressed again in spring; after a third pressing, the residue was heated with wood shavings and potash to clarify it into white wax. The process turned a whale’s head into a sequence of saleable products—and, as the account emphasizes, fortunes.

Objects made from the body

Not every transformation was factory work. During long voyages, crews were often idle, and sailors were given whale teeth to engrave with scenes from everyday life, whaling, or their imagination. The teeth could reach ten inches in length; sailors soaked them in brine, polished them with sharkskin, and etched them with needles or knives. They inked the designs with soot from the ship’s rendering pots. Some pieces showed ships or whaling scenes; others borrowed images from Victorian periodicals or depicted imaginary classical subjects. These objects made the whale’s body a surface on which the sailors recorded their work and desires.

The teeth later acquired a different kind of value as collectibles. John F. Kennedy collected 34 whale teeth, keeping favourite examples on his Oval Office desk. In 1963, a tooth engraved with the presidential seal was ordered as a Christmas gift for him, but he died before receiving it. His widow placed the tooth in his coffin on the night before his funeral. A material once taken from a whale, worked by sailors, and prized as scrimshaw thus became a personal relic and a funeral offering. Its journey gives the phrase a further reach: human life was not only supported by whale products but marked by objects carrying the animal’s remains into memory and ceremony.

Bodies after use

The book’s museum scenes make the afterlife of whale matter visible. A 66-foot Blue whale, only six years old when it washed ashore on Rhode Island in 1998, was cut into sections and lowered into a river in cages. For two years, small organisms consumed its flesh; its cleaned skeleton was then reassembled and suspended in a museum atrium, where it was required to remain visible to the public by day and night. The skeleton still dripped oil. No longer a resource in the ordinary commercial sense, the whale became a public spectacle whose lingering oil made its former material presence impossible to ignore.

Other remains appear in less monumental form. A sperm-whale skeleton once articulated outdoors had collapsed after its iron supports rusted; some bones were later rescued and stored in an outhouse, while the rest lay scattered, awaiting reassembly. In another museum, a painted life-size cross-section of a female sperm whale accompanies a sample of its Spermaceti sac, whose oil had crystallized, and a dense block of blubber that felt more like wood than fat. A jar held Ambergris, identified as material from the whale’s rectum rather than the mysterious substance its discoverer had assumed it to be. Together, these exhibits bring the phrase back to the body itself: not an abstract source of wealth, but a mass of organs, oils, hide, and bone that continues to move through human systems long after the animal is dead.