How three centuries of hunting turned a single animal into lamp oil, perfume and cultural memory — and why its traces still lie on the shores of Svalbard.
The Whale That Lit the World
Reading Time: 9 min
Institution: Pomor Museum / Art Arctic Gallery
Contributor: Tatiana Betcher
An animal that answered every need
01/09
What changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was scale. Growing cities needed light. Industry needed technical oils. People needed meat. A single animal answered all three demands at once, and almost nothing was wasted: the blubber, the flesh and the bone were all put to use.
People have hunted whales since antiquity. The evidence is not only archaeological: Inuit dwellings built from whale bone, ornaments carved from baleen, but literary and religious: the biblical account of Jonah, Japanese myth, Norwegian legend.
Blubber, baleen, spermaceti, ambergris
03/09
Toothed whales fared no better. The sperm whale, inedible to Europeans, carried two substances of exceptional value: spermaceti, used for centuries in cosmetics, and ambergris — a waxy material formed in the digestive tract, prized as a flavouring, an aphrodisiac, a medicine, and a fixative in fine perfumery.
The greatest prize, however, was baleen: the horny plates that hang from the palate of filter-feeding whales and strain plankton from the water. In the early years of the trade, the plates from one animal could cover the cost of an entire expedition. By the close of the eighteenth century the Greenland right whale had been hunted almost to extinction.
The greatest prize, however, was baleen: the horny plates that hang from the palate of filter-feeding whales and strain plankton from the water. In the early years of the trade, the plates from one animal could cover the cost of an entire expedition. By the close of the eighteenth century the Greenland right whale had been hunted almost to extinction.
Whale oil burned in lighthouses and street lamps. It lubricated pistols, watches, typewriters and, later, steam engines, because it withstood extreme temperatures.
Source: To be generated · BB Research
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The short version is here. The long version is a field trip.
The gun, the steam engine, the last grounds
07/09
By the second half of the last century the Soviet Union accounted for 43 per cent of the world catch and Japan for 41 per cent. The last region of industrial whaling was the Antarctic, in the middle of the twentieth century.
The Dutch had led the trade traditionally, and the Americans after them. From the late 1930s the Soviet Union began to build up a whaling industry of its own; in the summer of 1932 the factory ship Aleut had already sailed for the Far East with three catchers bought in Norway — Avangard, Trudfront and Entuziast — and in the 1940s the Slava flotilla substantially increased the catch. The initial object was oil and spermaceti for pharmaceutical and cosmetic manufacture; with meat in short supply, whale meat was then taken for food as well.
Two inventions made the hunt decisive: the harpoon gun, patented in 1867, and the replacement of sail by steam.
Schematic of the whaling factory ship Aleut
Source: To be generated · BB Research
Source: To be generated · BB Research
Why this is a page in cultural history?
09/09
After the story of Jonah, the best-known monument to this age of brave and brutal men remains Moby-Dick, the epic novel published by the American writer Herman Melville in 1851 — and the graphic illustrations made for it in 1930 by the American artist Rockwell Kent.
The End: 1982
08/09
In 1982 an international convention banned commercial whaling, while preserving a limited right of hunt for northern peoples. In 1987 pelagic whaling ceased across all waters of the world ocean. The last age of the industry was over.
Source: To be generated · BB Research
Data: International Whaling Commission catch statistics
Data: International Whaling Commission catch statistics
The whale-oil works at Smeerenburg, Svalbard.
Source: Cornelis De Man (1621–1706) Web Gallery of Art · Via Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain
Source: Cornelis De Man (1621–1706) Web Gallery of Art · Via Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain
The Arctic Eldorado
04/09
In the accounts of sailors it grew into legend: a vast, prosperous town lit through the Arctic night by hundreds of lamps, every one of them burning whale oil.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Svalbard was one of the principal centres of the trade. Smeerenburg, on Amsterdam Island, was the northernmost European port of its day and a whale-oil works in all but name.
What is left on the shore
06/09
Part of that history is now held in the museum and exhibition centre at Barentsburg, in a display devoted to the European whalers.
The traces are still there. On the shores of Svalbard one can find the remains of whalers' camps and whale bone lying where it was left: the foundations of houses, the ovens and the landing place at Recherche Bay, in Bellsund.
A story older than the industry
02/09
The image had a long life in manuscript painting, from the thirteenth-century Carrow Psalter in England to the Byzantine miniature of the Paris Psalter, centuries before whale oil became an industrial commodity.
The tale of a man swallowed by a fish or a whale travels widely; it recurs across myth and folklore, and in many versions the man passes into the other world inside the creature that has taken him. Kipling parodied the motif in his account of how the whale came by its curious throat.
The story of Jonah. Paris Psalter,
tenth century.
Source: By Département des manuscrits, Grec 139 , Via Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain
tenth century.
Source: By Département des manuscrits, Grec 139 , Via Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain
Jonah and the whale. Carrow Psalter, England, mid-thirteenth century.
Source: The Walters Art Museum,
W.34 · CC0
Source: The Walters Art Museum,
W.34 · CC0
Part of the exhibition on European whaling at the Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre in Barentsburg.
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
Remains of whalers’ houses, blubber ovens and a landing stage at Recherche Bay, Bellsund.
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
Archaeological remains from the historic whaling site at Recherche Bay, Bellsund.
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
Source: Pomor Museum and Exhibition Centre, Barentsburg · Used by permission
