Whaling in the United Kingdom

Commercial whaling began in Britain late in the 16th century prior to the 1801 formation of the United Kingdom and continued intermittently until the middle of 20th century. The two branches of the trade were northern and southern whaling. Northern whaling involved the taking of the north Atlantic right whale or bowhead whale off the coast of Greenland and adjacent islands. Southern whaling was activity anywhere else, including in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and off the Antarctic. The Sperm whale, the Southern right whale and Humpback whale were the main target species in South Sea whaling. The industry went on to become a profitable national enterprize and a source of skilled mariners for the Royal Navy in times of war.

Modern whaling using factory ships and catchers fitted with bow-mounted cannons that fired harpoons with explosive heads continued into the 20th century and was mainly focused on the Antarctic and nearby islands. The collapse of whale stocks in the 1960s due to overfishing saw Britain abandon the industry after three and a half centuries of involvement.

History

Stranded whales, or those that died at sea and washed ashore, provided meat, oil and bone to coastal communities in pre-historic Britain. A 5,000 year old whalebone figurene was one of the many items found in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Scotland after that stone age community was uncovered by a storm in the 1850s. Whalebone weaving combs from the middle and late Iron Age have been found on archaeological digs in Orkney and Somerset.

A charter granted to Hilary, Bishop of Chichester, in 1148 gave him the right to “any whale found on the land of the church of Chichester, except the tounge, which is the Kings.” The English king had asserted the right to the entire whale by 1315 when Edward II reserved “to himself the right of all whales cast by chance upon the shore.” Whales came to be known “Royal fish” the disposal of which was a exclusive right of the monarch.

The first tentative involvement in commercial whaling may have occured in 1576 when a British vessel sailed “to the country called Labrador, which joins Newfoundland, where the Biscay men go in search of whales.” The Basques had whaled in the Bay of Biscay from the twelfth century and by the middle of the sixteenth century were crossing the Atlantic each year to the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland where they established temporary whaling settlements. Sustained British interest in the trade began in 1577 when the Muscovy Company in London was granted a Crown monopoly to hunt whales “within any seas whatsoever.”

British northern whaling

A vessel owned by the London based Muscovy Company discovered and began to exploit the Spitzbergen (Svalbard) whaling grounds in 1610. By 1617 at least fifteen British vessels were whaling off Spitzbergen but ongoing participation in the fishery proved elusive due in part to costly competition between rival chartered companies as they tried to exclude each other and their foreign rivals from the region. In the meatime the Dutch had entered the fishery and soon became dominant. By the 1660s there were hundreds of Dutch and German vessels active off Spitzbergen while in some years not a single British vessel.

Parliament tried to revive British involvement with legislation in 1672 that allowed up to half British whaling crews to be composed of skilled Dutch or other foreign nationals and exmpted British-caught oil from customs duty and at the same time imposed a £9 a tun duty on oil and £18 on “whale fins” (baleen) imported from other national fleets. It was not till Dutch involvement began to falter in the 1690s due to political turmoil and warfare in Holland that the British saw an opportunity and led to the creation of another chartered company, the Greenland Company. The initiative was unsuccessful and the losses incurred were so large they discouraged further British involvement in the trade till the 1720s when Henry Elking persuaded the South Sea Company to try the Spitzbergen fishery. Two dozen new vessels were built and equiped and sent forth under the direction of Elking as Agent and Superintendant for the Greenland Fishery on a salary of £100 a year plus 1.5% of gross sales. This initiative was also unsuccessful and spelled the end of chartered company involvement in the trade in Britain.

Parliament wanted to reduce the trade imbalance with Holland and at the same time build up a naval reserve of ships and men that could be easily mobilised in times of war and so in 1732 it offered an annual bounty of twenty shillings a ton for all whaling vessels over 200 tons fitted out in Great Britain, the relevant legislation coming into force in 1733. The bounty was increased to thirty shillings a ton in 1740, but even then only four or five British vessels to sail north each year, most of them owned by merchants who imported whale oil.

The government increased the bounty to forty shillings a ton in 1750 and this proved the tipping point for a take off in the trade. Just two ships were fitted out in 1749, but twenty in 1750, and there were eighty-three by 1756. The forty shillings a ton bounty represented a subsidy of £600 for the average sized 300 ton ship in the trsde. Also important was a jump in demand for whale oil. The manufacture of woollen textiles was increasing and right whale oil was widely used to clean wool before it was spun. The industrial revolution needed lubricants for machinery and growing urbanization in British cities increased the demand for lamp fuel, including in street lighting. London was the best lit city in the world with 5000 street lamps by the 1740s. The building industry also used whale oil as an ingredient in paint, varnish and putty. All of this increased demand led to a rise in price. The average wholesale price was £14 and 7 shillings a tun early in the 1740s and this rose to £27 a tun in 1754. At the same time Dutch had started to withdraw from the fishery. Scottish ports were well placed to participate in the growth of the fleet being closer to the whaling grounds and sent forth more whalers to the Arctic than English outports early in this revival of interest in the trade although London still remained the single most important port despatching 71% of British whalers in 1753.

Setbacks included war in Europe in 1756 which saw the crews of some whalers depleted by the press-gangs regardless of exemptions granted to harpooners, line-managers and boatsteerers in the industry. A fall in the price of oil at the same time also impacted the trade and led shipowners to leave the trade. There were eighty-three in 1859 and this had dropped to forty vessels by the time war ended in 1763. Whaling remained at a low ebb for the next decade with some ports, such as Whitby and Hull leaving the trade entirely for a time. Numbers slowly increased till there were fifty vessels involved by 1770.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) acted as another break on northern whaling. When peace came in 1783 it was followed by an expansion in the British economy and a renewed demand for whale oil. America had been a major supplier to Britain especially of sperm whale oil. Britain started to participate in the sperm whale fishery in 1775 and imposed a heavy duty on oil imported from elsewhere. The high tariff barrier remained after peace was declared and acted as an accelerant to British involvement in South Sea whaling. British activity in the Arctic also began to increase. The number of Greenland whalers rose from 44 in 1782 to 102 in 1784. The Greenland fishery peaked in 1786-1788 when 250 British vessels were involved with an aggregate tonnage of 73,000 and employing about 10,000 men. Those vessels came from 23 different ports with London alone sending 91 vessels, followed by Hull with 36 and Whitby and Newcastle twenty each. The year 1788 was also one of massive loss with the fleet as a whole recording a defecit of £199,371, the London vessels by themselves losing £40,000. Vessels began to leave the trade and by 1790 only eleven ports were still involved.

The number of vessels involved in northern whaling slowly picked up as the turn of the century approached, largely unaffected by the French Revoloutionary period and Napoleonic Wars. The price of oil and bone was volatile and the latter ranged in price from £400 a ton to just £30 between the 1760s and 1815. Prices began to improve as the new century progressed and the Davis Strait fishing ground began to be developed. The size of the fleet peaked in 1821 after which it began a long slow decline that would last till the end of the century.

The decline began when a turn toward free trade in the Board of Trade in the 1820s led to the removal of the bounty in 1824. Also significant was a fall in the price of whale oil to just £18 in 1820-21 season in response to weak demand caused by a rise in imports of seed oil. More free trade legislation in 1844 saw the hight duty on American-caught whale oil reduced from £27 18s 7d per tun to just £6 6s and sperm oil £15 15s. Although of benefit to consumers of whale oil the whaling industry found itself exposed to the cold winds of competition and it withered in response.

Poor seasons became more common as whale stocks declined, further hastening the exit from the industry. Vessels stayed longer on the whaling grounds to achieve better results and in the process were sometimes trapped by the ice and were forced to over-winter during which numbers of ships lost large numbers of crewmen from scurvy or starvation especially if the ship had been crushed by the ice and the men had to evacuate their ship.

British southern whaling

British South Sea whaling had its origins in the American War of Independence. Sperm whale oil, a valuable substance worth two or three times more than northern right whale oil, had been imported from the American colonies till the outbreak of war restricted supply and this prompted British entrepreneurs, particularly those who had previously imported the oil, to send their own ships into the South Seas to obtain this valuable commodity. Ten South Sea whaling vessels left Britain in 1775, including nine from London, and crossd the equator into the South Atlantic in search of sperm whales. British South sea whalers went on to make 2,543 voyages between 1775 and 1859. These voyages were made by 930 vessels owned by 300 principal shipowners.

They initially “fished” in the mid and south Atlantic, spreading into the Pacific and Indian oceans in the 1780s. The government bounty of forty shillings a ton paid to northern whalers was extended to the southern fishery in 1776 and for the average vessel of 300 tons represented a subsidy of £600 per voyage. A heavy import duty that applied to oil imported from other countries was not lifted even after hostilities between Britain and America ceased in 1783 and was an additional incentive for shipowners to remain involved in the trade.

The story was not one of continious expansion and there were setbacks along the way. These include the conflicts of the Anglo-French War (1778-1783), the Anglo-Spanish War (1796-1808) and the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States which forced whalers travelling to and from the whaling grounds to do so in convoys protected by Royal navy warships. This was not always enough and in 1797 almost the entire British whaling fleet in the Pacific were captured when they called at ports on the coast of Chile and Peru for supplies unaware war had broken out between Spain and Britain. The US warship ‘’Essex’’ captured a dozen British whalers in the Pacific in 1812, the value of the loss in ships and cargo estimated at $2.5 million. As well as a problem, these conflicts also presented opportunities for British whalers, many of which sailed for the Pacific with Letters of Marque obtained from the government allowing them to attack, capture and plunder enemy-owned trading vessels.

Another significant barrier to expansion were Crown monopolies granted to the East India Company and the South Sea Company which restricted British maritime activity in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to company ships or other vessels that had been licensed by these chartered companies. Pressure exerted by the London whaling lobby saw these restrictions gradually lifted between 1786 and 1813 after which British whalers had unrestricted access to all whaling grounds.

The owners of South Sea whalers supplimented their profits by sometimes chartering their vessels on the outward voyage to the British government for use as convict transports and store ships to the Australian colonies. Others took with them trade goods they sold in the Australian colonies or at ports in South America. Contraband trading at South American ports and bays could a lucrative business but if detected by the Spanish colonial authorities might result in confiscation of the ship and a lengthy period of imprisonment for the crews.

In the years between 1800 and 1809 the British South Sea whaling fleet averaged 72 vessels with 30 ships returning each year. The annual average catch during this period was 1,634 tuns of sperm and 3,300 tuns of southern right whale oil, with an average annual value of £122,000. British involvement in South Seas fishery reached its peak in terms of the number of vessels involved in the years between 1820 and 1822. The end of subsidy payments in 1824 played a part in the decline, as did the reduction in the duty on imported foreign-caught oil in 1843 and its abolition in 1849. By 1843, only 36 vessels were stilling involved in the trade and just 20 by 1850. The last British vessel involved in South Sea whaling in the age of sail was the ‘’Cowlitz’’ (Captain Bushell) which returned to London in 1859.

References

• Hawes, Charles Boardman (1924). Whaling. London: William Heinemann. p. 21.
• Jackson, Gordon (1978). London: Adam & Charles Black. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help)