Commercial whaling in Great Britain began late in the 16th century and continued after the 1801 formation of the United Kingdom and intermittently until the middle of the 20th century.
The trade was broadly divided into two branches. The northern fishery involved hunting the bowhead whale off the coast of Greenland and adjacent islands. The southern fishery 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 enterprise 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 explosive harpoons, continued into the 20th century and was mainly focused on the Antarctic and nearby islands where shore stations had been established. The collapse of whale stocks in the 1960s, due to overfishing, saw the UK abandon the industry after three and a half centuries of involvement.
Early history
Stranded whales, or drift whales that died at sea and washed ashore, provided meat, oil (rendered from blubber) and bone to coastal communities in pre-historic Britain. A 5,000 year old whalebone figurine was one of the many items found in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Scotland after that Stone Age settlement was uncovered by a storm in the 1850s.Tom Metcalfe, “Lost 5,000-year-old Neolithic figure rediscovered in Scotland,” Livescience, June 21, 2016. Whalebone weaving combs from the middle and late Iron Age have been found on archaeological digs in Orkney and Somerset.Helen Chittock, “Arts and crafts in Iron Age Britain: reconsidering the aesthetic effects of weaving combs,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 33 (3) August 2014, pp.315–6.
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 tongue, which is the King's."Chesley W. Sanger, “The origins of British whaling; pre-1750 English and Scottish involvement in the northern whale fishery,” The Northern Mariner, 5 (3) July 1995, p.15. 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."Sanger, p.15. Whales came to be known as "Royal fish", the disposal of which was an exclusive right of the monarch, or his local representative.Jackson, p.3. Indeed, to this day, the Crown Estate asserts that "theoretically The king can claim ownership" of beached whales and other "Royal fish".
The first tentative interest in commercial whaling may have occurred in 1576 when a British vessel sailed "to the country called Labrador, which joins Newfoundland, where the Biscay men go in search of whales."Hawes, p.21. 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., p.9: James A. Tuck & Robert Grenier, Red Bay, Labrador: World whaling capital AD 1550–1600, Atlantic Archaeology, St. John's, Newfoundland, 1989, pp.43–51. 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."Jackson, p.5. It may have been further stimulated when in 1579, for political reasons, parliament banned whale oil imports from the Spanish Basque country, the main exporters of whale oil.Loewen, Brad, “Historical data on the impact of 16th-century Basque whaling on Right and Bowhead whales in the Western North Atlantic,” Canadian Zooarchaeology/Zooarchaeologie Canadienne, No.26, 2009, p.9
The northern whale fishery A vessel owned by the London-based Muscovy Company discovered in 1610 and began to exploit the Spitsbergen (Svalbard) whaling grounds in 1611. By 1617 at least fifteen British vessels were whaling off Spitsbergen each season. Ongoing participation in the fishery proved elusive. It was 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 meantime, the Dutch had entered the fishery and soon became dominant.Sanger, p.16. By the 1660s, there were hundreds of Dutch and German vessels active off Spitsbergen, while in some years not a single British vessel.Sanger, p.22.
Parliament tried to revive British involvement late in the 17th century. It began with the Trade Act 1672 (25 Cha. 2. c. 7) that allowed British whaling crews to be composed of up to half foreign nationals, such as the skilled Dutch. The act also exempted British-caught oil from customs duty, and 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, which led to the creation of the Greenland Company.Sanger, p.23. 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 Spitsbergen fishery.Jackson, p.40-45. Two dozen new vessels were built and equipped and sent forth under the direction of Elking as agent and superintendent for the Greenland Fishery on a salary of £100 a year plus 1.5% of gross sales.Jackson, p.44-45. This initiative too was unsuccessful and spelled the end of chartered company involvement in the trade in Britain.Sanger, p.24.
Parliament wanted to revive whaling 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. The Whale Fishery Act 1732 (6 Geo. 2. c. 33) offered an annual bounty of twenty shillings (one pound sterling) a ton for all whaling vessels over 200 tons fitted out in Great Britain, the relevant legislation coming into force in 1733.Sanger, p.26-27. The bounty was increased to thirty shillings a ton in 1740, but even then only four or five British vessels sailed north each year. Most of these were owned by merchants who imported whale oil.Sanger, p.27.
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.Jackson, p.55. Just two ships were fitted out in 1749, increasing to twenty in 1750, and eighty-three by 1756. The forty shillings a ton bounty represented a subsidy of £600 for the average-sized 300-ton ship in the trade. 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 increased the demand for lamp fuel, including in street lighting. London was the best lit city in the world, with 5,000 street lamps by the 1740s.Jackson, p.56. The building industry also used whale oil as an ingredient in paint, varnish and putty. All of this increase in demand led to a rise in price. The average wholesale price was £14 7s 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.Jackson, p.57.
Scottish ports were well placed to participate in the growth of the fleet. They were closer to the northern whaling grounds and sent forth more whalers to the Arctic than English outports early in this revival of interest in the trade. Scottish ports involved in the trade, in order of importance, were, Leith, Dunbar, Borrowstounness (Bo'ness), Dundee, Aberdeen, Montrose, Glasgow, Anstruther, Greenock, Kirkcaldy and Alloa.
London remained the single most important port dispatching 71% of British whalers in 1753.Jackson, p.58-9. Other English ports involved include Hull (from 1598),T. Sheppard, "The Hull whaling trade," The Mariner's Mirror, 5 (6) December 1919, p.162. Newcastle (1752),Tony Barrow, "The Newcastle whaling trade 1752–1849," The Mariner's Mirror, 75 (3) August 1989, p.234. Whitby (1753),A.M. Barrigan, Bernard Stonehouse & Robb Robinson, "A newly discovered Arctic whaling journal," The Mariner's Mirror, 94 (3) April 2008, p.331. Exeter (1754),Conrad Dixon, "The Exeter Whaling Company," The Mariner's Mirror, 62 (3) August 1976, p.225. Ipswich (1786)A.G.E. Jones,"The whaling trade of Ipswich 1786–1793," The Mariner's Mirror, 40 (4) November 1954, p.297. and Peterhead (1788).James Gray, "The Peterhead whaling ship Eclipse," The Mariner's Mirror, 23 (4) November 1937, p.446. Additional English and Welsh ports participating during the "bounty period" (1733–1824) were Berwick, Bristol, Dartmouth, Grimsby, Liverpool, Lynn, Milford, Scarborough, Stockton, Sunderland, Whitehaven and Yarmouth.
There were setbacks along the way. These included war in Europe in 1756, which saw the crews of some northern whalers depleted by the press-gangs, regardless of exemptions granted to harpooners, line-managers and boatsteerersJackson, p.63. A fall in the price of oil at the same time also impacted the industry and led shipowners to leave the trade. There were eighty-three vessels involved in 1759, and just forty when the 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.Jackson, p.64.
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.Jackson, p.70 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.Jackson, p.73. Those vessels came from 23 different ports, with London alone sending 91 vessels, followed by Hull with 36 and Whitby and Newcastle with twenty each. The year 1788 was also one of massive loss with the fleet as a whole recording a deficit of £199,371, the London vessels by themselves losing £40,000.Jackson, p.74. Vessels began to leave the trade and by 1790 only eleven ports were still involved.Jackson, p.86-7.
The number of vessels involved in northern whaling slowly picked up as the turn of the century approached, largely unaffected by the French Revolutionary period and Napoleonic Wars.Jackson, p.81. 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.Jackson, p.84. Prices began to improve as the new century progressed and the Davis Strait fishery began to develop. The size of the fleet peaked in 1821 after which it began a long slow decline that lasted until the end of the century.