twentieth century

The twentieth century is presented as a turning point in the human relationship with whales: industrial technology widened the hunt even as older whale-oil markets weakened, and the animals’ bodies became resources for war. The century also brought evidence of population collapse and complex whale societies, making protection urgent but not guaranteeing recovery. Its history moves from intensified extraction toward a belated reckoning with what hunting had taken away.

An industrial inheritance

The century’s expanded whaling depended on technologies and commercial pressures established earlier. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake’s oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, signalled the rise of petroleum as a rival source of illumination and the end of the sperm-whale fishery’s former dominance. Yet the transition away from whale oil did not end the hunt. Sven Foyn’s patented grenade harpoon, developed in the nineteenth century, made it possible to pursue fast, large rorquals that earlier whalers struggled to catch. By the twentieth century, steamships and harpoon-launchers had made capture more efficient and extended the industrial hunt to new grounds.

As American whaling declined, European operators opened the Antarctic to commercial exploitation. In 1904, Norwegian and British armed steamships began hunting there, supplying whales for the manufacture of nitroglycerine. In 1925, Norway launched the first factory ship, the Lancing, bringing processing aboard a vessel and enabling the slaughter to proceed at a new scale. The book presents this shift not as a clean break from the older whale-oil economy, but as the conversion of whale bodies to new industrial uses.

Whales and the wars

The two world wars intensified the connection between whale exploitation and human conflict. The book estimates that 50,000 whales perished during the global conflicts, while whale products served the machinery of war. In the First World War, whale oil helped prevent trench foot, and stranded cetaceans were used to make glycerine for munitions. The same South Atlantic humpback population was driven to extinction by 1918. The account places these losses beside the destruction suffered by people, stressing the shared role of whales as material for wartime production without equating their circumstances.

The expansion of factory-ship whaling extended the pattern beyond wartime demand. Within two decades of the opening of the sub-Antarctic grounds, observers were reporting alarming declines in rorqual numbers. The scale of killing made regulation increasingly urgent, but the historical record in the book shows how commercial capacity could grow faster than restraint.

Population loss and continuing risk

The consequences reached beyond the removal of individual whales. The book suggests that twentieth-century hunting may have reduced the genetic likelihood of large sperm whales, since the largest lone bulls were especially likely to be taken. It also notes that estimates of sperm-whale longevity rely on whaling statistics collected after many older, larger animals had already been killed. By the end of worldwide whaling, nearly three-quarters of sperm whales had been killed: a population estimated at more than a million in 1712 had fallen to 360,000 by the end of the twentieth century.

The North Atlantic right whale illustrates how protection could coexist with acute danger. Fewer than 400 were said to remain, and although the species became the first cetacean protected from hunting in 1935, its numbers remained static. Shipping lanes were moved north and vessels were instructed to keep 500 yards from whales, yet collisions continued to threaten the population. More than 60 per cent of right whales had been caught in fishing line, while ship strikes killed animals including females of calf-bearing age. With only eight matrilineal lines remaining in the northern species, the accumulated effects of centuries of hunting left its future precarious.

By the later twentieth century, the threat was no longer described only as a question of numbers. Research indicated that cetaceans solve problems, use tools, experience joy and grief, and pass abilities between generations through cultural transmission. Hal Whitehead warned that whaling may have destroyed not only individuals but knowledge about how to use particular habitats. Sperm whales were recovering slowly after the 1986 moratorium, with the population growing at about one per cent a year; the book presents that rate as fragile evidence of survival, not proof that the damage had been undone.

From extraction to study and remembrance

The century also altered what people sought from whales. Stormy Mayo, who first saw a right whale as a sixteen-year-old fishing with his father on Stellwagen Bank, later helped found the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown in 1976 and collected data on right whales. He became the first person licensed by the government to rescue entangled whales. The rescue work repurposed methods associated with hunting: rescuers used sea anchors to slow an animal, while Mayo approached with a long-handled hook to cut fishing line. The contrast is stark: equipment once used to secure a capture became part of an effort to release a whale.

A different afterlife appears in the blue-whale skeleton displayed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. 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 the whale to be visible to the public by day and night. Its carcass was cut into sections and lowered into the river in cages; after two years, the skeleton was reassembled in an atrium built to meet that condition. The specimen turns a young whale’s death into a public display, joining natural history to the institutional choices through which people encounter whales.

The century’s record therefore remains divided between new knowledge and irreversible loss. Researchers could describe whale societies and cultural transmission with increasing care, even as populations declined and one cetacean species, the Yangtze River dolphin, was declared extinct while the book was being written. The prospect that half of all animal species, including the right whales of Cape Cod Bay, might disappear by the century’s end is presented as a warning rather than an accomplished outcome. Study and rescue mark a changed relationship, but the history they confront is one in which industrial killing has already narrowed the possibilities for recovery.