Kingston upon Hull was one of the principal northern ports through which Britain entered the Arctic Whaling trade. In the book’s account, it is not simply a place where ships departed: it connects maritime commerce, imperial appetite, dangerous work, and the public display of the people and animals drawn into that commerce. Its history is set beside Whitby’s, but the distinction matters. Together the ports show the reach of Britain’s northern fisheries; the recorded ship losses and cargoes make clear that this reach was neither safe nor abstract.

An Arctic gateway and imperial outlook

The Arctic appears as a field of wealth and exploitation, with its inhabitants also made objects of public curiosity. In 1847, Memidadluk and Uckaluk were exhibited with their artefacts before crowds in Kingston upon Hull, York, and Manchester. Their appearance in British cities places human display alongside the extraction of fish, meat, blubber, and baleen. The account treats this episode as evidence of an imperial outlook in which the northern region and its peoples could be regarded as resources available for British use or observation.

That outlook had a commercial history. British ships attempted to challenge Dutch competition in the Arctic at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, sailing from ports including Kingston upon Hull. The Dutch established a processing station at Smeerenberg on Spitsbergen, while British efforts fell behind as Dutch activity expanded. By 1671, the Netherlands was sending 155 whaling ships to Greenland, with annual catches sometimes reaching two thousand animals. The British trade’s decline prompted a campaign for its revival: in 1693, financier and merchant Sir William Scawen argued to Parliament that the industry had once benefited the kingdom through imported baleen and oil, employment for seamen, and provisions supplied to ships. He pointed to the interruption of English voyages to Greenland since 1683 and to rising baleen prices, from £60 to £400 a ton. Kingston upon Hull’s place in the story is therefore part of a broader contest over access to Arctic wealth.

Cargoes, expansion, and danger

The eastern ports closer to the northern fisheries became the stronger centre of British Whaling. The account identifies Kingston upon Hull and Whitby as its leading ports, while giving Whitby a separate record of activity: after Whaling began there in 1753, fifty-eight ships made 577 voyages over the following eighty years, taking 2,761 whales, 25,000 seals, and 55 polar bears. Those figures describe Whitby, not Kingston upon Hull, but they convey the scale of the regional trade in which both ports participated.

Contemporary cargo reports give a more direct measure of Kingston upon Hull’s traffic. In 1788, the Albion arrived with 500 butts of oil and two tons of fins from seven and a half whales. The Samuel brought 60 butts of blubber and a ton of fins from three whales. These returns made the northern trade visibly lucrative, as successive ships carried the products of the hunt into port. They also show how the catch was rendered into measures of cargo: each animal appears through the quantities it could supply.

The trade expanded quickly. Forty-four British whale-ships operated in the Greenland Sea in 1782; two years later, their number had doubled, and by 1787, 250 ships were sailing from British ports. War then disrupted the returns and drew men between the fisheries and the navy: inexperienced recruits were placed on whale-ships for training, while seasoned whalemen could be pressed into naval service. The growth of the fleet thus depended on more than demand for its products. It also exposed seamen and ships to political disruption and the risks of Arctic work.

Those risks were severe. In its peak years, Whitby lost seventeen ships, and the account estimates that one in ten British ships engaged in the Arctic fishery never returned. British crews hunted from smaller boats, sometimes killing whales from the ice and hauling the bodies onto it for butchering. Unlike American whalers, they did not render blubber aboard ship but carried it home in bulk. At the ice margin, as many as a hundred vessels could form a cordon, leaving little room for a whale to escape. Kingston upon Hull’s cargoes belonged to this system: its commercial success was inseparable from an operation that concentrated vessels and danger at the northern edge of the sea.

The Yorkshire whaling world

William Scoresby’s career provides a neighbouring example of the skills and scale associated with the Yorkshire fisheries, though the account anchors his work in Whitby rather than Kingston upon Hull. After serving aboard the Henrietta, he rose from harpooneer to captain. On his second voyage as its master, the ship returned with eighteen Greenland whales; during the next five years it took eighty more, producing nearly 800 tons of oil. Scoresby later commanded the larger Dundee, which took thirty-six whales on its first voyage. His record illustrates how a captain’s standing could be built through successive catches, and how the region’s ports were connected to voyages that reached deep into Arctic waters.

The same career linked the hunt to exploration and technical adaptation. Scoresby commanded a double-hulled vessel with metal plating on its bow, designed to push through Arctic ice, and devised an enclosed crow’s nest that sheltered its occupant and stored navigational and signalling equipment. His interest in routes northward was also tied to the pursuit of whales: the search for the North-West Passage opened access to their habitat. In this regional history, exploration and extraction are not separate projects. Knowledge of the ice and its routes could serve both navigation and the hunt.

A port in the afterlife of Moby Dick

Kingston upon Hull also became a place where the maritime past was reconstructed for film. For his 1954 film of Moby Dick, John Huston requisitioned an 1870 schooner that had recently appeared as the Hispaniola in Treasure Island. The vessel was fitted out at St Andrew’s Dock in Kingston upon Hull, where chandlers supplied original harpoons found in their lofts. The ship then sailed to the west coast of Ireland, where Huston chose to film only on overcast days to produce the gloomy appearance he wanted.

The production brought the equipment and working knowledge of a British port into a film about nineteenth-century Whaling. The harpoons were not merely decorative substitutes: they were original objects recovered locally and fitted to the schooner for its role as the Pequod. Kingston upon Hull’s contribution was practical and material, grounded in the port’s stores and maritime trades. The film’s voyage away from the city also gives the location a precise, limited role: it was the place where an old vessel was prepared and furnished before becoming part of a cinematic recreation of the whale-ship.

Across these episodes, Kingston upon Hull is presented through movement between shore and sea: Arctic voyages brought cargoes into its harbour; public exhibitions brought Arctic lives into its streets; and the film production drew maritime artefacts back into circulation. The port’s significance lies in that conjunction. It was a northern gateway to a profitable and hazardous trade, but also a setting in which the objects and people bound up in imperial Whaling could be displayed, interpreted, and made into cultural memory.