They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
—D. H. Lawrence, “Whales Weep Not!”
Norway—the “Land of the Midnight Sun”—is a magnet for people in search of “unspoiled” nature. It possesses a long and jagged coastline with spectacular fjords and a narrow interior with high and rugged peaks. hun-dreds of bird species soar through its skies, and salmon, cod, and capelin teem along its shores. Sparsely populated for its size (4.5 million people in an area of 125,000 square miles), Norway has just a single major city, its capital, oslo (population 503,000). Cocooned in splendor, Norwegians do not need to drive to a national park to enjoy the great outdoors. yet this na-tion also harbors a deeply troubling environmental legacy: from the 1860s to the 1960s, Norway was the greatest whaling power in the world. For the better part of a century, Norwegians killed more whales than did all other peoples on the face of the earth.1
the person most identified with Norway’s rise to prominence as a whaling power was Svend Foyn. Foyn was born in 1809 in tønsberg, a port town in the province of Vestfold, on the western side of the oslo fjord, just south of oslo. he made his fortune as a sealer on Jan Mayen Island
(north of Iceland) before turning his attention to whaling in the 1860s, an endeavor that preoccupied him until his death some three decades later in 1894. a risk-taker and an innovator, Foyn poured his time and money into the improvement of hunting techniques. In 1863, he built the world’s first steam-powered whale catcher, Spes et Fides (hope and Faith). Less than a hundred feet long and equipped with a fifty-horsepower engine ca-pable of only seven knots, it merely hinted at the mammoth, oil-powered whale catchers that would come later. But it already far outpaced the tra-ditional sail-driven schooners and rowboats of his day, and it required a much smaller crew, so its design was soon adopted by others. Foyn was also among the first whalers to install an accumulator (a winch-and-rope system that functions much like a fishing rod) on his ship, thereby greatly reducing the frequency of snapped ropes and lost whales. In the 1880s, he installed yet another device, an air-compression pump, which forced air into a captured whale’s body cavity to keep it afloat for easy processing.2
Foyn’s best-known invention—and the one that earned him the nick-name “father of modern whaling”—was the harpoon gun. Patented in 1870, it provided whalers with a surefire method for killing all species re-gardless of their size or speed. accurate and reliable, it became the model for all subsequent whaling guns for the next hundred years. Shaped like a piece of light artillery, it was mounted on a swivel on the vessel’s bow. It consisted of three distinct devices that worked together: a cannon, a har-poon, and a grenade (originally with gunpowder and sulfuric acid). the cannon was used to launch a harpoon deep into the whale’s backside. the harpoon was fastened to the ship with a rope. the harpoon tip contained the grenade, and just behind the grenade were four backward-facing barbs.
Upon impact, the four barbs opened outward (much like umbrella ribs), preventing the whale from dislodging the harpoon. the movement of the barbs also triggered the exploding device, which detonated once the har-poon was lodged inside the whale’s body. If all worked as planned, the whale died within a half hour or so, without pulling and thrashing the ship too much.3
Foyn’s many innovations gave the Norwegians a competitive edge that they would not fully relinquish until the 1960s, by which time most of the world’s whale stocks were already severely depleted. his home province of Vestfold, Norway’s most populated region and busiest shipping cen-ter, emerged as the center of the world whaling industry. Its three main ports—Sandefjord, tønsberg, and Lavik—generated much of the capital and produced most of the ships and crews for whaling expeditions worldwide,
even those flying under foreign flags. (In 1931, for instance, all but 142 of the 10,691 whalers in the antarctic were from Norway, of which nearly 8,000 came from Vestfold alone.)4 Norwegians pioneered in the development of the modern floating factory, the high-pressure boiler, and the stern slipway. they discovered methods for turning whale wastage into usable products such as animal feed and fertilizer. they designed stronger ropes and sturdier harpoons. they were the first to fully exploit the arctic hunt-ing grounds, the first to open up the antarctic, and the first to engage in modern pelagic whaling. Norwegian was even the official language aboard nearly all whaling ships, and the one word every whaler understood with-out a translator was hvalblast (meaning “thar she blows”).5
So thoroughly did Norway dominate the whaling industry after the 1860s that all previous hunting techniques came to be known as “old whal-ing” and Norwegian ones as “modern whaling.” Sail and human muscle powered the old vessels, whereas coal and oil fueled the modern ones.
old whalers used handheld harpoons, but modern ones were grenade-tipped. old whalers fastened the carcass to the ship’s side or hauled it to a nearby shore station in order to strip (flense) the fat (blubber) from the whale. Modern whalers, by contrast, learned how to hoist a dead whale directly onto a ship’s deck for quick flensing. old whalers boiled (ren-dered) the blubber slowly in specially designed cooking pots (tryworks) and then stored the oil in barrels; at best, they could squeeze only about half the oil from the carcass. Modern whalers learned how to render the entire carcass in high-pressure boilers and store the oil in huge tanks, wasting little. old-style whaling was an artisanal enterprise, limited in size and scope. Modern whaling was an industrial enterprise, limited only by the number of whales in the ocean. old whalers stayed mostly in the arctic regions, close to their shore stations and home markets.
Modern whalers worked almost entirely in the Southern ocean (south of 60º south latitude) around the antarctic continent. old whaling led to the gradual depletion of one hunting ground after the next over many centuries. Modern whaling was undertaken on a scale so massive that it can only be called exterminationist.
the figures tell the tale. the Basques, the world’s first great commer-cial whalers, snagged about five hundred whales per year between 1530 and 1610.6 the Dutch, the foremost whalers of the seventeenth century, killed an average of eight hundred bowheads (their favorite whale species) be-tween 1670 and 1719.7 By contrast, antarctic whalers killed around nine thousand whales per year between 1904 and 1924 and over thirty thousand per year in the 1930s.8