The History of Whaling
The three-thousand-year story of humanity's hunt for the largest animals ever to live, from prehistoric shore drives and Basque bay fisheries to the industrial fleets that lit and lubricated the modern world - and the international moratorium that sought to pull species back from extinction while whaling nations continued the hunt.
Timeline
Prehistoric and Indigenous Whaling
Humans hunted whales long before commercial industry: petroglyphs at Bangudae in Korea, possibly 6,000 years old, depict boats surrounding whales, and archaeological evidence from southern Brazil suggests baleen-whale hunting around 3000 BC. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Pacific, including the Inuit, Ainu, and Pacific Northwest peoples, hunted whales for subsistence using drogue floats and harpoons, a practice that continues today under indigenous quotas.
Location: Global coastlines
The Basque Whale Fishery
By the medieval period, Basque whalers had developed a systematic shore-based hunt of right whales in the Bay of Biscay, processing blubber into oil for lamps and soap. The fishery became so established that by the 16th century Basque crews were crossing the Atlantic, establishing shore stations at Red Bay in Labrador by about 1525 in pursuit of migrating whales.
Location: Bay of Biscay, Spain and France
The Arctic Fishery at Spitsbergen
English and Dutch expeditions reached the Arctic island of Spitsbergen after 1610, finding the richest right-whale grounds then known, and the first English whaling voyage sailed there in 1611. Dutch, English, and Danish-Norwegian fleets soon competed and fought over the grounds, establishing shore stations such as Smeerenburg, and by the mid-17th century had hunted the Spitsbergen stock into steep decline.
Location: Svalbard, Norway
American Sperm Whaling Begins
When Captain Christopher Hussey was blown offshore in 1712 and killed a sperm whale, Nantucket's whalers moved from shore-based hunting to offshore voyages. Sperm oil burned cleanly in lamps, spermaceti became a premium candle wax, and ambergris was a luxury perfume fixative, giving American Quaker merchants the basis of a deep-sea whaling empire.
Location: Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA
The American Golden Age
By 1846, the American whaling fleet numbered more than 700 vessels - over 80 percent of the world's whaling ships - and whale products ranked among the United States' most valuable industries. Voyages lasted years and ranged from the Pacific to the Arctic, harvesting whale oil that lit homes and lubricated the machines of the early industrial era.
Location: New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA
Petroleum Ends the Oil Boom
Edwin Drake's successful oil well at Titusville in 1859 opened the petroleum age, and kerosene rapidly displaced whale oil for lighting, followed later by steel-spring corsetry removing baleen's fashion market. Whale-oil prices collapsed, the American fleet shrank steeply after the Civil War, and the whaling industry's economic rationale narrowed.
Location: Titusville, Pennsylvania, USA
The Harpoon Cannon Opens Modern Whaling
The Norwegian Svend Foyn perfected the exploding harpoon fired from a bow cannon and paired it with fast steam catchers in the late 1860s. The technology let hunters pursue swift rorqual whales - blues, fins, and humpbacks - that had been beyond the reach of open boats, transforming whaling into a capital-intensive industrial enterprise.
Location: Norway
Antarctic Factory Whaling
A Norwegian company established the first Antarctic shore whaling station at Grytviken, South Georgia, in 1904, and slipway factory ships operating on the open ocean from 1925 freed fleets from land stations. Antarctic waters became the world's dominant whaling ground; in the 1930-31 season alone, fleets took some 37,000 whales, driving blue whales toward commercial extinction.
Location: South Georgia
The First International Agreements
The League of Nations sponsored the 1931 Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, the first international whaling treaty, which protected right whales and calves but lacked enforcement and excluded major fleets. Further agreements in 1937 and 1938 also failed as competing nations, freed from restrictions by others' non-participation, continued to expand their catches.
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
The International Whaling Commission
Fifteen nations signed the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in December 1946, creating the International Whaling Commission to set catch quotas and conserve whale stocks "in the interest of the nations of the world and of future generations." Early IWC quotas, set with industry data and dominated by whaling states, remained high through the 1950s and 1960s.
Location: Washington, D.C., USA
"Save the Whales" and the Moratorium
The 1972 UN environment conference voted overwhelmingly for a whaling moratorium, and the "Save the Whales" campaigns of the 1970s - including Greenpeace's high-seas confrontations with Soviet fleets - turned public opinion strongly against whaling. In 1982 the IWC voted for a pause in commercial whaling, effective from the 1985-86 seasons, to allow depleted stocks to recover.
Location: Global
A Divided Aftermath
The 1986 moratorium took effect over the objections of whaling nations: Norway continued commercial whaling under a formal objection, Iceland resumed commercial hunts in 2006, and Japan conducted "scientific" whaling until withdrawing from the IWC in 2019 and resuming commercial whaling within its own waters. Many depleted populations, including humpbacks and some right whales, have partially recovered, while others, such as the North Atlantic right whale, remain critically endangered.
Location: Global