As I understand it, during the heyday of the US whaling industry whales were killed and their blubber was removed and rendered into whale oil, which had great value, but by and large the rest of the animal was dumped overboard as waste.
Given that these ships were out to sea for weeks, or perhaps months at a time, I would have thought that whale meat would have been a good protein source, but from what I have read, little if any whale meat was eaten. Is this really the case, or was whale meat eaten by the sailors?
Of course there was no refrigeration on board so any meat would spoil fairly quickly, but couldn’t it be salted and preserved? Was there really no market for whale meat in the late 1800’s?
From what I gather, whale meat is pretty funky tasting to say the least. Salt pork by comparison was pretty standard stuff for everyone back then.
Also, the big issue for sailing ships of that era was water, not food. They’d put into port to get water, and just buy provisions already salted and butchered. That’s a lot easier than lugging a bunch of salt around and salting your own whale meat, especially if it tastes more or less normal.
Apparently the Japanese have a hankering for it, although in those days trade between the US and Japan was almost non-existent. I guess there really wasn’t a market for it… even as pet food.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Moby Dick. But, IIRC Ishmael mentions that only a few sailors have a taste for whale meat. A few have a meal or two. Either Stubb or Flask has the tips of the fins and tail pickled, and eats a meal or rare whale (“Hold the meat in one hand. Show it a live coal with the other and call it done”). Nobody else seemed interested in eating whale.
The valuable products included oil (rendered from blubber), baleen, spermaceti (from the head of Sperm whales), and, quite rarely, ambergris (from intestines of Sperm whales). But the remainder of the whale was never dumped overboard, for the simple reason that it was never onboard.
In the old days, there was no way to haul an entire whale on board: ships were not nearly large enough and human muscle power not remotely up to the job. Whalers practiced outboard flensing, whereby the blubber and other products were stripped from a whale that had been killed and brought alongside the ship. When this was done, the rest of the carcass was simply cast loose.
Inboard flensing was an innovation begun around 1920. A “whaler group” consisted of a large factory ship capable of hauling whole whales on board, and several small (tugboat-sized) vessels, equipped with guns that shot exploding harpoons, that captured whales and towed them to the factory ship. Pretty much the entire whale was rendered into useful products including animal food, bone meal, etc.
This modern form of whaling (almost exclusively practiced at high southern latitudes) peaked in the early 1950s. It became uneconomic by 1960 due to severe depletion of whale populations. All are now recovering - some quite slowly.
In roughly 1973 I was a draftsman for TRW Ross Gear Division - made steering gears for heavy trucks, including some for WWII tank retrievers (not a lot of call for them, but they were an inventory item).
I was assigned to go through the blueprint vault and change all specifications for AAA lube to BBB.
Turns out AAA was Sperm Whale oil. 1973.
Why so late? Don’t know - maybe somebody actually tried to build one of the old things and found it hard to source that lube.
Another important whale product was baleen, the flexible “whalebone” that was used to make many products that called for a tough, waterproof, springy material. The flexible “boning” in corsets, hoops for skirts, buggy whips and other things were made from baleen.
After petroleum in Pennsylvania in the 1850s killed much of the market for whale oil, whalers still hunted the baleen whales for their bone.
My hometown is the place where Melville sailed from before he wrote Moby-Dick and Fairhaven is still home to Nye Lubricants, which was America’s last whale oil company.
Nye became famous for its watch oil and fine machinery oil. It’s my understanding that whale oil stays liquid at much lower temperatures than other natural oils so is was perfect for lubricating fine watch and clock mechanisms. The works wouldn’t gum up in the cold. Later whale oil was used in the automotive industry, most notably in transmissions.
In 1972 the Marine Mammals protection Act went into effect. Until that time Nye Oil Company had still been harvesting whales. Once they could no longer acquire new oil, they had to rely on their reserve stock. I’ve heard that Nye sold its last whale oil around 1980 or so.
Today the company specializes in synthetic lubricants.
I still have a small quantity of Nye sperm whale oil. It came from the workshop of an old man who had died - was probably bought in the 1960s. At the rate I’m using it, it should last another 50 years at least.
It would be interesting to hear evidence that they were actually in the business of hunting sperm whales (which had by 1925 become highly specialized and capital intensive). It would make more sense that they bought their supplies of this from companies (probably Norwegian) who were.
I remember editorials in the early 80’s or late 70’s promoting jojoba oil as a valid substitute for whale oil. i guess they did a good job selling cultivation of jojoba, sson it was also promoted as a hair-care product.
The argument was that there were very few sources for the very fine (?) oil for specialized critical mechanical applications. Some people complained the whale oil was needed for some parts in nuclear submarienes.
My book published by Nye Lubricants, The Last American Whale Oil Company, is at home, but the last whales they were using were not sperm whales. They were “Black fish” or pilot whales, primarily from the India Ocean. I’ll have to double check to see whether they were financing the hunts themselves or subcontracting it.
As I type this, I’m sitting in the Fairhaven Visitors Center, directly across Main Street from the home of William F. Nye (1824-1910), who founded the company. Nye Lubricants is about a mile away on Howland Road.