First World War

The First World War marks a point at which the book’s histories of whaling and warfare converge: whales were hunted for materials used in the conflict, while the same period’s scientific records preserved evidence of animals lost to hunting, military activity, and stranding. The war intensified an already expanding industrial use of whales and made their disappearance harder to separate from the human violence of the age.

Monitoring whales before and during the war

In 1913, the Crown gave the Natural History Museum, London the first right of refusal over the carcasses of royal fish, recognizing their scientific as well as commercial value. The Board of Trade asked the Receivers of Wreck, stationed around the country, to send telegraphic reports of stranded whales to the museum. During the First World War, its director, Sidney Harmer, compiled the earliest records. The system made individual strandings part of a national record, even as the coastguards responsible for reporting them had wartime duties of their own.

The entries register how war altered the interpretation of an animal on the shore. A finback in the Firth of Forth was initially mistaken for an aeroplane. At Skegness, a rare Sowerby’s beaked whale appeared to have been killed by rifle fire, perhaps because it was mistaken for a German submarine; its calf lay beside it. Other whales died after swimming into minefields intended to destroy U-boats. These records place cetacean deaths within a landscape of military surveillance and weapons, where a whale could be misidentified as a threat or lost to hazards laid for human enemies.

Whales as material for war

The connection between whales and warfare preceded the conflict itself. From 1904, Norwegian and British armed steamships opened Antarctic waters to commercial whaling, seeking a new use for whale products in the manufacture of nitroglycerine. During the two world wars, some 50,000 whales perished. The book sets this loss beside the human deaths and destruction of the same conflicts: animals supplied materials for warfare while also suffering from its industrial and military systems.

The consequences were stark in the South Atlantic. By 1918, the entire population of humpbacks there had been driven to extinction. Whale products entered the war economy in more than one form: their oil helped prevent soldiers from suffering trench foot, while stranded cetaceans could be used to manufacture glycerine for munitions. Harmer noted that several specimens were put to that use. The whale’s body thus moved between the shore and the factory, becoming both a casualty recorded by naturalists and a source of material for the conflict.

Research, abundance, and loss

Efforts to understand and regulate whaling were underway even as exploitation accelerated. In 1913, Sir William Allardyce, governor of the Falkland Islands, recognized that new hunting techniques in the Southern Ocean threatened rapid depletion. The Colonial Office in London agreed to his proposal for licences, and G. E. Barrett-Hamilton of the Natural History Museum, London was sent to investigate sustainability. He died of a heart attack shortly after arriving in South Georgia. Percy Stammwitz, who had accompanied him, reported his death, but his other letters described waters still crowded with whales before the war’s destruction of Europe and the rapid expansion of southern whaling.

Stammwitz reported whalers seeing whales spouting in their thousands around South Georgia, with some animals reaching one hundred feet in length. The contrast between that abundance and the South Atlantic humpbacks’ extinction by 1918 gives the wartime period a compressed ecological chronology: the plentiful animals described before the conflict became part of a population devastated within a few years. The scientific mission’s aim of assessing sustainability therefore unfolded alongside a hunting industry whose scale and technology were already changing faster than its records could restrain.

Historical significance

The First World War appears not as an isolated cause of whale decline but as a moment when several pressures became legible together. Commercial whaling supplied industrial and military demand; weapons and minefields created hazards at sea; and museum records converted strandings into evidence of loss. The book’s wartime account also resists treating scientific collection as separate from the economy of extraction: some carcasses recorded for study were subsequently used for munitions.

Harmer’s lists and Stammwitz’s earlier reports preserve different views of the same changing world: individual animals dead on British shores, and vast schools still visible around South Georgia before their disappearance. Read together, they make the war a measure of how human conflict extended beyond the battlefield. Whales were not merely symbols of catastrophe; they were living populations, hunted bodies, recorded specimens, and material resources caught up in the same period of accelerating destruction.