Welcome to the London History Podcast.
I'm your host, Hazel Baker, qualified London tour guide at
londonguidedwalks.co.uk. Today we're stepping back into a
very different London, one that looked outward across the seas.
It's merchant ships pushing into dangerous Arctic waters and
later voyaging as far as the Pacific.
Our focus is whaling, A brutal, perilous yet enormously
important trade that shaped the city's economy, culture and
global reach from the early 1600s right through to the 19th
century. The story doesn't begin in
London. For centuries, Basque whalers
had been hunting in the Bay of Biscay, developing techniques
that would later be carried into the Arctic.
As European powers competed for control of new fishing and
whaling grounds, London found itself joining a race backed by
powerful trading companies, ambitious merchants and a
growing demand for oil. And Berlin whaling was never
just about the hunt itself. Whale oil lit streets and homes,
powered industry, softened leather and lubricated
machinery, baleen, strong yet flexible, shaped fashion,
everyday objects, even the suspension of carriages.
And behind those commodities lay stories of exploration, rivalry
with the Dutch, ventures backed and broken by capital, and
eventually vast southern expeditions led by London
entrepreneurs like the Enderbiz to guide us through this
extraordinary history. From the bays of Biscay to
Spitzbergian's ice, from corsets stays to Arctic disaster.
I am joined once again by historian and fellow tour guide
Ian Mcdermid. Today we'll explore how London
became, for a time, the world's greatest port and why by the mid
19th century, its dominance was already in decline.
All right, so let's get into it. Whaling from London really
begins in the 1600s. But of course, the story doesn't
start there. In places like the Bay of
Biscay, busk whalers had already been active for centuries and
other European powers were also entering the trade.
Well, the this Bay of Biscay is the first documented place where
whaling in the sense of hunting for whales takes place, and it
dates back to the 11th century. So people had caught whales
before them, but they're relying on stranded whales.
Then in the whale caution and narrow confined to water.
They're not going right in boats to craps, which is what the
stones are doing. And the written evidence goes
back to the 11th century for this.
And it's not entirely clear which animal they were hunting.
So the whale that they're hunting is called the Iskayan
whale in Latin Berliner iskayensis.
And from the way they used it, it's obviously similar to what
we were in the 16th and 17th centuries, would later called
the right whale. But it's not at all clear.
And what happens in the Bay of Biscay is a model for what's
going to happen because this is the first place they're they're
hunting whales. It takes a lot longer.
And that is what was stopped to become depleted.
And at the end of the 15th century, there are records of
the people from Biscay going all the way over to the Gulf of
Labrador being hunt for whales. But they also realise that there
are whales further to the north in the Arctic.
But the move to the north is actually going to be dominated
by the English and the dark and the English.
And when we're talking about English throughout this period,
London is by far and away the largest whaling pool throughout
all the English activity. And the English are really
active as whaling in in directly whaling from 1600 to 1850.
The trade itself is very volatile and the English suffer
from competition from the duck and from American colonials.
The really took parts for English whaling in terms of
persistent and sending ships out are the early 17th century and
then the late century and we to the early 19th century.
And one of the extraordinary things, Hazel, is that in that
latter period, from roughly the 1780s to roughly the 1820s,
London is actually the largest whaling port in the world.
In the world. Yes, it's quite extraordinary.
It all comes to a rather grinding halt, which we'll come
into. Essentially, the British
government champions free trade and the importunities on
American oil are cut dramatically.
And this is really this with death of English whaling.
And in the late 19th century the trade will be dominated by the
Norwegians. And then in the 20th century,
things change again with technology, with factory ships,
with modernisation, which allows them to use whale oil,
margarine. And then the biggest buyer for
whale oil in the world in the 20th century will be Unilever.
Christian Salvator is another company.
But in in terms of sending out whaling fleets each year, London
is actually from 1600 to about 1850.
And at this point of period, it's the Dutch and the English.
Those ships are pushing into Arctic waters, developing what
became known as the northern fishery.
A key motivation was the search for the Northeast Passage to a
cafe in the East Indies. But they never found that route.
But they did find an abundance of whales.
Can you explain how this shift shaped whaling and what it meant
for England's role in particular in the trade?
Yeah, the key location here, although they're sailing off the
north and looking for the Northeast Passage, The key thing
for us is what is now known as the Svalbard archipelago, of
which the mainland island is Spitzbergen.
Back in the day, it was just known as Spitzbergen.
Spitzbergen was discovered in 1596 by the Dutch explorer
barons, but nothing really comes of the discovery until around 16
O 71. Important thing to notice that
they've discovered Pittsburgen, but they think it's part of
Greenland. Very interesting, I would love
to go there. It's 78°, not the capital in 78°
latitude. Just to orientate ourselves.
London, the place from which we all orientate ourselves, is 51°
latitude. The most normally point in the
British mainland, John O'Groats is 58.5.
So 78° in Massachusetts for long year of BN.
It's the most normally placed inhabited in the world.
If you want to get there, it's a 3 hour flight from Oslo.
We're talking somewhere quite far north.
If you look. At a map of the Arctic ice cap.
What's significant is the vain theory.
It's free of ice. In the summer the ice extends
southwards down the East Coast of Greenland.
But where Spitzbergen is, it is in theory free of ice.
And every now and then the temperature gets us high in
August degree of centigrade. Can you imagine that an
Englishman, Henry Hudson, discovers this again?
Hudsley makes an unsuccessful attempt to get to the North
Pole, but is blocked by ice, and when he gets back to England, he
reports that the West Coast of Spitsbergen is absolutely with
giant whales. They inhabit the area where the
ice is no longer solid, but breaking up Erie's upper levels
of the ice edge. The waters are very ripped in
plankton which are then fed on by plankton, of which krill are
the best known. The Wales return to the north in
the spring and on the way back they stop off in the bays or
fjords on the coast of Spitsbergen.
I mistakenly use the present tense there there.
There are still some that were historically.
That's what they did before they decimated.
It was the Muscovy company that oversaw these early efforts.
What role did the company play in organising but also financing
England's first ventures into whaling well?
They are vital because they have a monopoly on the areas.
As the name suggests, the Muscovy Company is primarily
interested in trading with Muscovy, initially with the
search for the North East Passage.
There's a famous voyage in 1553 when Willoughby and Chancellor
go off and search the passage. They don't make it.
Willoughby's dip is lost, but Chancellor reaches Archangel,
we'd say, in 1555. The Muscovy Company is founded
with Sebastian Kaboch and a group of London merchants
granted a monopoly on the Russian trade, and the trade
with Muscovy consists of the export primarily of English wool
and cloth, but also the re export of manufactured goods
from the Mediterranean. In return the English are
importing things like hemp, tallow and cordy.
They as I say, as part of the monopoly of trading in Russia,
they organised the first whaling expedition to the Arctic with
two whales shipped under the command of generous Poole.
And very sensibly they take 6 Basque heart primers along with
them and they managed to spill 13 whales.
So this is a very promising start.
But unfortunately, the second ship under acted edge is lost
three eyes and he is subsequently rescued by another
ship. Paul then comes back, finds
them, claims the oil, but as he's loading the oil onto his
ship, he mishandles the ballast and his ship goes over and
sinks. Now all of the sailors are
rescued, nobody loses their lives, but this is obviously a
bit of a financial disaster. However, the company is very
much encouraged by the fact that they managed to kill 13 whales
before everything went badly wrong.
And in 1612 another pair of ships are sent out and they
managed to kill 17 whales plus a number of Walrusters.
However, there's a piece of news and that is that they from this
successful expedition. They cite other ships just off
Spitzbergen, one from the Netherlands and one from the
Basque Country. They drive them off, but this is
a very ominous Pines and subsequently the Dutch and
English will square off against each other using the threat of
violence and occasionally against one another, and
eventually they divide Spitzberg enough so the Dutch are given
the northern part of the island and the English concentrate on
they've. Already mentioned that they were
hunting for what was known at the time as the right whale,
so-called because it was considered the right one to
catch. By the 19th century, zoologists
reclassified it as the bowhead whale.
So can you explain what species were actually being hunted?
Yeah, it is a little bit unfortunate from a historical
point of view. So in the 19th century, they
realised that the right whale, as formerly known, that exists
in the Arctic, is not the same animal, not the same species,
not even the same genus as the right whales that have found off
the coast of America. And the one that we're
interested in is, as you've mentioned, now known as the
bowhead whale. Its Latin name is Beliner, Mr.
Totus, and it is the own within its Venus.
This is a little bit unfortunate because the term right whale is
absolutely term that contemporaries use.
And it feels a little bit odd to me to use the term bowhead,
though I think most people writing about whales use the
term bowhead. Bowhead is actually quite a good
name because it describes very well the shape of the mouth of
these animals, which is like a bow when you see them side on.
And they, as you indicated, they are the right whale.
And I will probably call them right whales from this point
onwards, although I'm referring to the liner Claytus.
And they, there are a lot, as I said, there are lots of reasons
for why they are the correct ones to go over.
The key ones are they are slow swimming, so you can catch up
with them in a rowing boat. And this is one of the the
pieces of technology that marks off our periods.
I was saying earlier that we're going to end in, in around 1850.
Up until 1850, they are hunting whales using rowing boats, which
are known as fellow. So obviously they're limited by
the speed rowers can go at and there are only a couple of kind
of whales that go that slowly and one of them was our whale.
The other key thing for weighing in this period is that the
carcasses float. So that's absolutely crucial in
being able to process them. And they in addition to
producing giving oil as a product, they also have their
baleen. So when we're talking about
whales, there are two broad categories of the whales.
There are the whales with Billy, which feed on the plankton, and
then there are whales with teeth And the whale with teeth that
will be important to us later on is the sperm whale.
But when you have Billy, they are feeding on plankton and
therefore they are geographically circumscribed.
They have to feed where the plankton are.
Whereas the toothed whales like the sperm whales and only
pelagic whales, that means ocean whales that they can be found
all over because the sperm whale feeds on squid and cuttlefish,
which can be example in cherry whales and they are the the
right whales, bowhead whales by by liner mystery pages.
They are amazing animals. And when you start listing of
all all these features of them, they just sound absolutely
incredible and it sounds like a kind of poem to their sublimity.
And these are further reasons why they were the right whale to
Crouch. But obviously to a modern era,
they sound like very good reasons for not killing these
animals at all. So they are masses.
They grow to about 60 feet in length.
They, as I mentioned, you can have it very cold water.
So their bodies have enormous and thick rubber.
On a white whale this can be 12 to 18 inches.
And this is the thickest venue whale.
Their heads are massive. They are about 1/3 of their body
size. And the skulls are massive
partly to accommodate the believe, but also they have
these massive skulls from garden Bruins.
And one other feature of them swimming under the ice is that
the right whale, using it's historical men, has no dorsal
thin so it can swim easily underneath the ice.
And because so much of their body mass is made-up for these
large heads and slubbers, they are extremely slow moving.
They're also slow because it's the efficient way to take in the
maximum amount of food for the minimum expenditure of effort.
And what they do is they move around slowly, grazing
throughout the sea, scooping up the tanks.
And, and the way it works is that they take and release huge
mouthfuls of sea water and expel them through the baleen.
And the baleen is covered in hairs, and the crew in
particular remain in the mouth and then make their way down to
the stomachs. One other amazing thing about
these animals is that they can live for well over 100 years.
Some people think that they can live up to 200 years.
Amazing animals. Whales split into two broad
groups, those with baleen and those with teeth, and with the
right whale you're getting 2 valuable commodities.
Have these uses changed? Yes, but in the Middle Ages
they're mainly using them for lighting, but also for a
lubricant in the processing of textiles.
So all of that continues. But the key thing in the early
17th century, from your English point of view, is the use of
whale oil in the manufacture of soap.
Later on, there's a House of Commons reporting to the
industry because they're getting into tub or and the must leak
company reports that 95% of its oil had been used for the
manufacture of soap. And the oil is very good because
it's it's not quite odorless, but it's very close to that.
And so it's a very good ingredient to you and.
Of course, Berlin was used in, well, most importantly in
corsets, giving it that strong, flexible light.
I remember learning about corsets being made with
whalebone, but it's actually a misnomer, isn't it?
Yeah. Whalebone.
When people say whalebone, I normally mean Berlin.
These are the sheets that grow out of the upper door of the
whale and they in turn incredible that they can grow to
13 feet in length, about 15 inches across.
They are amazing. And as you were saying, the
corsets are the most important part of demand.
And I was going to say how I thought this worked, but I
correctly correctly because I think far more about this than I
do So I think the corsets become fashionable in the end of
Elizabeth's reign, of course. And when you look at those
paintings from the end of Elizabeth's reign to into the
other part of James's reign of women, they very often have
impossibly slender waist. And the corsets remained in
fashion for most of the 18th century.
But the market is growing incredibly.
It's not as osteocratic women were to wear in them.
But then I think in the 18th century, although the market's
still vast, it's no longer growing.
So to some extent it's saturated.
And then at the very end of the 18th century, going into the
early 19th century, you then get this.
What do France will be? The empire law inspired by
fashions for naturalism, for which Rousseau is a big impetus.
And they abandoned the corset. And that is bad news for people
hunting for Berlin. But then it comes back again
with Dean Vic. Yeah, so my understanding with
the terminology, corsets that can be stays would have been the
earlier use really. So you're about right.
So swap the word corset for stays and yeah, you see some
really extreme silhouettes even in the late Elizabethan
portraits. Of course, we've got that effigy
bodice with the stays for Elizabeth the 1st that are in
Westminster Abbey. You can see these really and
possibly narrow waists that could only be achieved with
stiff support. And then through the 17th
century stays considering them to be a precursor for corsets
became a standard, absolute standard of women's dress,
regardless of what level of society.
And that gave you the long rigid torso and that in portraits of
the Stuart court as well. But by the 18th century,
corsetry was really embedded in fashion.
No respectable woman would not be wearing a corset.
And it was a social expectation. And though as you say, the early
decades of the century were probably then heighted demand,
but by the early 19th century and moved to a more natural
classical style and those high waisted muslin gowns, we think
the Regency period inspired by ancient Rome and Greece, corsets
fell somewhat out of favor. And you had short stays and also
long stays, but they moved the waist to a different place.
But then of course, corsetry returned with force in the
Victorian years. And then that's where you get
the tight lacing, which became a part of a very.
Different ideal of femininity. And so you can have an overview
there from what is the main source of demand to Berlin.
But it has lots of uses. I don't particularly like
Return, but it's often referred to as the kind of 19th century
plastic. The key thing is that it's
light, it's flexible, and it's got very tight tensile strength.
It can be used for all kinds of ornamental uses like hair
brushes and the rest of it. It's slightly out of our period,
but in the 19th century they learned to bend it a lot in
which includes Dean. Hair on the balline itself can
also be used for the bristles for hair brushes.
It's used in the manufacture of umbrellas until replaced by
steel in the mid 19th century. It comes in different grades so
it comes with different physical qualities and one of the mains
is for the stronger, heavier type of balline for the
suspension in carriages. I don't really want to know, but
I need to, and this is by no way supporting whaling whatsoever,
but how did they hunt the whales?
Yes, it's it's pretty grim and prayed.
So as mentioned earlier, we're talking about a period when
they're hunting them in rowing. The initial method is often
called Bay whaling. It's pioneered in the Bay of
this day and this is the method which is then transported up to
Spitzbergen. The whaling ships themselves are
not really involved in the capture of the animals.
The wave and ships are basically just transports, taking
equipment out in the spring and returning before winter.
And eventually the English and the Dutch will realise that
actually it's more efficient just to leave your equipment on
Spitzberg and so they build huts and leave all of the heavy stuff
there. The Dutch actually tried the men
on Spitsbergen as well over the winter, but that had rather
unfortunate results. They tried it twice and they all
died. So you have men primarily on the
coast, but they could sometimes be on a ship, a male on the
lookout for whales. When the whale is sighted, they
launch these rowing boats. These are very heavy rowing
boats known as stellots, which is a corruption of the Basque
word chamupa. And these are heavy rowing boats
with perhaps 6, maybe 4 oarsmen on them.
This is incredibly physically arduous work because they've got
to pursue the whale, and they can be out there for hours and
hours. And the very specified jobs
within the bone that are finally specialized and very, very
skilled. And one of them is that of the
houndsman, who has to try to predict where the whale is next
to them to come up through green.
In addition to him, you also have the harpooner who has to
launch by hand the harpoon into the back of the whale, again
requiring immense strength and skill.
And then you also have the blind man who's managing the rope.
The harpoon is attached to a rope, and the rope might be as
much as a mile long and put made into a coil in the back of the
boat. It's then fed over to the front
of the boat. And once the harpoon is put into
the back of the whale, the whale will dive to try and get away,
and the rope goes flying after it.
And one of the jobs of the lineman is to make sure that the
rope and also the boat don't catch fire as the rope goes over
the boat and it causes great friction.
The harpoon isn't going to kill the whale, it's just embedded in
the whale, but it's hooked and it means that the whale is in
effect dragging the boat along. Once a harpooner has got the
harpoon in the whale, that boat will then alert the other
shallots who will come up to hell.
Shallots will then put their attach their ropes to the rope
around the whale and between them they will try and get more
harpoons in the whale. And what happens is that the
whale dives down, then off the wild.
The whale has to come up to breed and as it comes up they
will bring the rope in gradually.
So it's a bit like angling, not that I've ever been angling, but
our sense this is the way it probably works.
And then the hunt goes on and the hunt can last for ages.
So the quickest death that the whare is going to have is 2
hours. But the process from putting the
harpoon in the back to the death of the whale could take as many
as 40 hours. And I'm thinking reciting this
as modern people were just horrified by the suffering of
the whales. But one has to imagine also, as
I say, how arduous this is for the men involved.
You're talking Arctic waters. They're rowing like Hells for
hours on end. It's extremely dangerous because
the the right whale can easily slip a boat over with it's tail.
Actually I should mention one of the sad things about this that
another reason why the right whale is the right whale is that
they are very Pacific animals. Their only natural predator I
think is the killer whale. And the killer whale until very
recently has been much to the South of them.
They have no reason to fear man, and so they're quite Placid
animals as well, but they can easily overturn and smash up one
of the goodies. Rowing, though, eventually the
whale is exhausted. It comes to the surface and then
the men throw Lancers or Spears into it and they're trying to
get a vital organ and to kill the whale lot.
And this works OK later on, the sperm whales, but with the right
row, they're ruined. Thick rubber.
It doesn't normally happen and the whale will eventually expire
through normally spoon blood loss and exhaustion.
The key thing is it floats. They row it onto the beach.
The blubber is removed with these huge and extremely sharp
knives in big sections. It's then cutting to smaller
sections and they often use the whales flukes, the fins on its
tail to do this and then it's put in the Tri works which are
huge cauldrons and it is all boiled in water and then the oil
is scooped off the top and whilst this is happening other
men removed the baleen from the whale's head.
In 1637, the House of Commons had appointed a committee to
enquire into the Trace decay. Why was English whaling industry
at that point struggling? In part the struggles are those
of the Greenland company itself because it finds it very hard to
enforce it's monopoly and in particular as well as from other
ports are going out, in particular Hull and Yarmouth.
In the case of Hull they have a reasonable case because they go
to law. After this.
The whalers from Hull argued that actually they had sent
boats to this area before. The starter of the Muscovy
Company has been concerned. One of the big problems that
English have is that they are unable to sell the oil and the
Bolin abroad. They are restricted to the
English market and this is because the Dutch can prevent
them. Basically, the Dutch are just so
much more efficient than the English.
They can undersell them in time and this is partly because the
Dutch are just better technically at Wyman.
It's probably also the case that the monopoly of the green
company, the Muscovy Company, is in itself not a great way to
organise. One of the things that they do
is to start for competition. This may well have prevented the
English from becoming a bit technically better than they
were. Spitzbergen declined.
So, as mentioned earlier, this is a perennial problem.
They find new fisheries, as they call them.
They then exploit them, destroy the stocks and the whales become
progressively harder to find. The Dutch, from their northern
vantage point on Spitzbergen, they realise that if they sail
directly north they can then drift SE and they come to new
fisheries just off the coast of Greenland.
This is something that the English don't really get into.
Once you go onto the coast of Greenlands, it's well that is
Icebound and the instead of doing Bay whaling, they're now
whaling inside areas where there's lots of they call it ice
fishing. You need to make sure your ships
are strengthened in case they get crushed by the ice.
You need superb seamanship to navigate in between all these
difficulties when the Harper whale swims underneath the ice
and how to deal with that. In addition, there is a huge
problem because the Tri works they've been using on
Spitzbergen to process the blubber are far too big to have
on a ship. Later the Americans will
innovate and have Tri work to put on ships and they are
dealing with the sperm whale, not the right whale.
And the sperm whale is much, much smaller animal diseases,
much, much less oil. And this innovation will work.
You just can't do it with the right whale.
And the Dutch, they take the blubber off.
They, they cut, they, they normally will haul the whale
onto the ice, but sometimes they, they tie it alongside the
ship. They crack the blubber off and
then they put the blubber into butts, which are then eventually
taken to shore. But the problem is that the
blubber contains bits of flesh and blood and this rots and as a
result of the whale oral gets a really nasty smell to it and
it's stopped being used in the manufacture of soap.
And as mentioned earlier, when the muscly company testifies,
they say that 95% of their demand came from soap
manufacturer. So there's been a big, big
problem. The English they'd lost their
source of whales and also the the oil which they've been so
interested in is no longer great from the manufacturers.
While Spitzbergen is declining, to them the English thing just
stop whaling and give up. No, they don't.
They're always there, but the activity is minimal.
However, within this period, late 17th and early 18th
century, there are two concerted attempts by the English to get
back into whaling. And the first of these, who is
led by a man named Sir William Scaven, who is granted a charter
in 1692 for the Company of Merchants of London trading into
Greenland. And he raises initially 40,000
lbs to equip the largest fleet to sail from England to the
Arctic in 50 years. And that capital is then later
increased to 82,000. So it's a huge, huge venture.
And the reason she thinks that there's an opportunity for it is
that the Dutch are in all kinds of problems.
They dominate the train. But in the 1680s and 1690s,
they're having lots of trouble because of the war with France.
And unfortunately the Dutch for Scaben are actually able to
revise his venture is not particularly well managed and
all of the capital is even out well before the 14 year charter
expires. The second attempt to really
seriously revine the English way in trade comes about because of
the South Sea companies. So we did a podcast on the South
Sea company and one of the key things about the South Sea
companies, you have the bubble 1720, the share price collapses
and what's left of the company is looking for and a quick way
to turn things round. And there's a very persuasive
man by in the name of Henry Elkin who applies to persuade
the board and eventually is successful in saying, look, the
problem with Scaven and the problem with the previous
attempts at English whaling is that they've just not been taken
on serotin. They've not been managed well
enough and he persuades them to invest a huge amount of money to
a venture. And one aspect of this is the
development of Greenland Dock. If you walk around that area
today, you can still see the basin of Greenland Dock.
It becomes Greenland Dock because the Saudi company take
out a large lease on it, long lease on it, and they use that
dock to fit out this expensive new fleet.
They also build new boiling houses for the blubber.
They build warehouses, they build accommodation for staff.
It's all hugely expensive and in the first year of activity
they're able to catch 25 whales, which is pretty good.
But in the second year that goes down to 16 whales and then
losses. And in 1731 they've ceased the
activity and in 1733 all of the ships and stores are sold off
and indeed Greenland Dock is then minced out to somebody
else. In the early 18th century,
leadership in whaling then passed from the Dutch to the
Americans, and there was also a shift in both the location of
whaling and the species targeted.
What drove change and how did it reshape the industry?
Well, in a way it's pure good fortune from the whalers point
of view. So the American colonists pretty
much from the beginning are interested in whaling and
they're catching the American virtue of the right whales.
Nantucket, which is a small island off the coast of
Massachusetts, is the main centre for this, the 1712 A Oat
room. Nantucket is blown off course by
a storm and the captain approaches a then unknown
species of whale, kills it. This is the first time that
they've caught and captured and indeed processed a sperm whale.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the two things about sperm whale
is it's a toothed whale, which means that there's no baleen
process, but the oil from its blubber is worth several times
as much as the oil from a right whale.
It's paler, it's got much better quality.
There's less of it we should say, because the spermware is
smaller. And then in addition you get the
so-called spermaceti, which is liquid wax or contained in the
case, which is a gravity from the skull of the whales and
called spermaceti because of initially people discovering
thought it was the whale's sperm.
Biologists don't understand it, aren't quite sure what it is
actually there for, but the assumption is that it's probably
help the whale with echolocation.
But this liquid wax is of enormously high quality and they
start using it for candles and spermaceted candles just take
off London from. Certainly.
From the 1750s, probably a bit earlier than that, are are
illuminated by spermicetti candles which give out a very
bright flame and is completely odorless.
There's so much less of it on the sperm whale.
You can process it on Tri works on the ships.
This is an extremely efficient way of processing Guerrero and
the English, because of the success of the Americans are
doing this. They're operating close to home.
The English ships aren't going after the sperm whale.
What the English ships are doing is they're crossing the Atlantic
and then buying the oil from the American whalers and then taking
it back. And England over this period is
importing 4 times as much whale oil from it's New England
columnies as it is from its own Greenlands fleet.
After 1750, the English and particularly the London whaling
trade saw a revival. What factors lay behind this
resurgence? First of all, the northern
fishery, which is the traditional Arctic one, there's
a deliberate government attempt to encourage it.
They increase the bounty on oil. This goes up to 40 shillings a
ton ton spelt Tun for ships over 1000 tonnes and this means that
away you ship is averaging about £600 in terms of Earth, a
government bounty. Secondly, there is a gradual
decline in the Dutch presence that's opening the door to
English and then French hostility and unofficial war
breaks out between Britain and France in 1754 over essentially
over Canada means that the American fisheries are directly
threatened. And in addition, the English
whaling activity is now in the hands of independent merchants
and ship owners. So we say, we're saying in the
earlier period it's the Muscovy company and then you have these
monopolistic companies like the South Sea Company who tried to
barge in. Now the the trade is organised
by independent merchants and ship owners who have got much
more sightings the creature, but they've got much more skin in
the game. They're much more agile, they're
much more entrepreneurial. And then perhaps key is that
there's huge rising domestic demand for the products of the
whales due to industrialisation and the concomitant development
of expanding towns and cities. And whale oil, one of the key
uses for it is the cleansing of the wool and through.
And when we're talking cheap wool and cloth, one huge market
for this is all the military uniforms.
Mills and mines use lubricants for their machining, so they're
using whale oil. Whale oil is used for the
manufacture of paint, varnishing patties.
So all of that building work, that's going on huge demand.
And then also you see the emergence of the big markets for
illuminations. SO5000 St. lamps are installed
in London in the 1740s. They are burning whale oil.
And then finally, we should perhaps mention that the cotton
mills are using lamps for working after dark.
Another major development is the American Revolution.
This is probably the biggest development, actually.
First of all, this damages the American competition hugely.
Much of the American Wailing Fleet is wiped out.
But then crucially after the war, the American colonies are
no longer American colonies and as such they are no longer part
of imperial preference and they have to pay 18 lbs per tonne on
oil that they export into Britain.
Were they able to do And in addition the British become
wider ranging in their whaling activity.
So we were saying earlier on that in the 1630s or
thereabouts, the Dutch March by moving into new fishery off the
coast of Greenland. The British do a similar thing.
They move on to the other side of Greenland, the western coast.
This time they move through the Davis Straits and into Baffin
Bay. And here the Wales are to begin
with extremely common. And also in the open water on
that side of Greenland, the weather is actually better than
on the other side most of the time.
And as a result of this success, by the mid 1780's the British
whaling fleet is twice the size of the entire whaling fleets of
Europe. It declines a bit in the 1790s
but then revives, and the most prosperous period for British
whaling and for London whaling begins around 1795.
And this is the age of expansion then going southwards.
Yes. So up to this stage the British
have been restricted to the so-called northern fishery.
This has a legal definition. It's north of 59° latitude and
there's legal definition because this is where the bounty is
payable. The British will then subsidized
to some extent the southern fishery, but it's done through a
system of premiums, and those premiums are much, much fewer,
much harder to come by than the bounty payable in the northern
fishery and the. Trade.
Rose because of various entrepreneurial figures who have
often been deeply involved in the American trade before this.
And the key figure here really is Samuel Enderby.
He's also joined by other, other men, St.
Barb and Champion. These men developed the southern
fisheries, but they're also very important in lobbying the
government. Enderby in particular is the
first person to send a whaling voyage round the Cape of Good
Hope. Now there's a problem here,
because once you get beyond the Cape of Good Hope, you've got
the East India Company, which in theory has monopoly over sailing
there, and you also have the Spanish Empire, which is hostile
to British incursions into Enderby lobbies heavily, and
he's able to finally get permission to go into the
Pacific Ocean. One of the.
Key developments here is the gradual development of the
colony in Australia. 1 of the things that the whalers are able
to do to some extent is to pay for the outward, outward voyage
to Australia for carrying convicts out there, and then
proceed on whaling. And one of the key developments
here is that Enderby is the first man to send a ship round.
The first ship that does this is the Amelia which he owns in
1789. The Amelia returns with a full
cargo, encouraging other ships to do it.
The Enderby's are a whaling dynasty.
The Samuel I'm talking about is Samuel enderby #2 There was #1
his father #3 was one of his sons.
Melville makes some jokey comments about the number of
Samuel Enderby's when Samuel Enderby dies.
The business is then taken on by his three sons, of whom Samuel
is one, but the main name is Charles and Charles is a
founding member of the Royal Geographical Society.
And it is under his aegis that Antarctica is circumnavigated
for the first time in 1830 by one of his captain, John Bisco
in the Brig Tula. And if you look at a map of an
Atlas of Antarctica, there is a huge area of it called Enderby
Land. And the Endebys are based
initially at Saint Paul's Wharf under the the third generation
of Endebys. They also develop important
works at Greenwich. So in Great East Greenwich there
is today an area called Endebys Wharf, which has been
redeveloped as modern flats. And within that modern
development there's a restaurant where they have kept something
called the Octagon Room. And the Octagon Room was part of
Enderby House, which was the Enderby residence there.
And Enderby House was built at about the same time as the
Enderbys constructed a factories for making sales and rope and
all of that there in East Greenwich.
But unfortunately most of this was destroyed by fire in 1845.
But as mentioned, Octagon Room does survive.
If we're talking about the whale trade, there was a rapid decline
in the 1820s. Why was that?
One of the reasons for the decline is the gradual spread of
ideas of free trade, and there are two elements to this.
One is economic liberalism. The idea that free trade is is
the rational way to go. Another one is evangelical
religion which thinks that you should breathe the economy of
the man made obstruction so that you can see divine Providence
working through. Both of these feed into the
gradual elimination. Of.
Duties on a whole range of goods, of which the most famous
one obviously is the Corn Laws, but one early symptom of this is
the reduction and the bounty on a tonne of whale oil from the
northern fishery to 20 shillings.
There is also a dramatic fall in oil prices and partly because
the good times were dependent on demand for whale oil for the
manufacture of military uniforms, and with the ending of
the Napoleonic Wars that is gone.
Another big problem is that whale oil is increasingly being
substituted by rape oil and the duty on rape oil imports is also
being reduced. And then the final the key thing
is that with free trade, the duty on American whale imported
whale oil is reduced and it is the competition of the Americans
and the Australians that already put paid to London as a whaling
centre. Also there is substitution of
whale oil from gas. So this is the beginnings of the
period of gas lighting and then surprise surprise we got that.
The age-old problem of the Davis Straits getting harder and
harder to fish in their terms as the whales are gradually
eliminated. 1 aspect of this is that they have to get further
and further north to capture the whales.
This then becomes increasingly dangerous and it leads to public
outcry at the fate of the whalers.
The big crisis here is an 1835 which leads to a big change in
public attitudes towards Arctic whaling. 6 ships were sunk and
some 600 men were caught in the ice and a lot of them suffer
from frostbite and scurvy. The Royal Navy sends a mission
to rescue these men in 1835 and and and they get them out, but
the following year another six ships are blocked in by huge ice
fields. As is a result, by the 1840's
the number of British ships active in the Arctic is tiny.
But these problems mentioned above also affect the southern
fishery. And perhaps the key symptom of
Britain's and London's decline is when Charles Enderby, the son
of the Enderby family, decides to pack his bags and leaves
Britain for New Zealand. And in the 1820's the number of
ships, British ships going to the Pacific fell by 50%.
And by 1843 there are only 9 whalers in the southern fishery
carrying the British flag. And then as mentioned earlier, I
think in after 1850 there's a big change in technology.
They get steam whalers, they get these mechanised harpoons.
And this is a period which is dominated by the Norwegians.
Wow, fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us
on today's episode. We've traced London's remarkable
and at times dramatic journey through the world of whaling,
beginning with the medieval Basque hunters and the Bay of
Biscay, and following the city's rise is a global whaling
powerhouse. With the expertise of Ian
Mcdermid, we've explored the fearless expeditions into Arctic
waters, the commercial manoeuvres of monopolistic
companies and the industry's transformation as it expanded to
the distant Southern Oceans. We've seen how whale oil and
Berlin powered the growth of industry and shaped the fashions
of entire eras, from Elizabethan courtly corsets to the Victorian
craze. Along the way, intense
competition with the Dutch and ingenuity of London's merchants,
and market shifts brought from boom to bust.
Ultimately, technological changes, new alternatives and
the risk in hardship faced by crews lead to London's slow
retreat from whaling, marking the end of a defining chapter in
the city's maritime story. If you'd like to know more about
the Southsea bubble that we discussed, then you can listen
to Episode 27 to learn more about end of is in Greenwich.
Then Ian offers an alternative Greenwich walking tour.
Thank you Ian for guiding us through these details.
My pleasure, Hazel. I'm Hazel Baker.
This has been the London History Podcast from
londonguidedwalks.co.uk. Until next time.