Whales and Whaling in the Caribbean - Part 2
According to the World Council of Whalers, “The United Voice of Whaling Peoples”, representing whaling countries around the world, whaling by islands in the Caribbean began in 1875. For over 130 years prior to 1875, American whaling ships plied the waters of the Caribbean killing hundreds of whales each year.
The first Caribbean whaling station was established by a Bequian named Bill Wallace who left the island at the age of 15 and returned 20 years later bringing along dozens of harpoons used during his years at sea. Shore whaling, another name for island whaling, took hold about the same time in Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and other islands in the Lesser and Greater Antillean chain. As the American whaling fleets began to decline, former whalers from those fleets migrated to the Caribbean bringing along their ‘expertise’ in various methods of killing which they passed along to island peoples.
There is some evidence that the early inhabitants of the Caribbean islands incorporated whale meat in their diets as demonstrated by whale bones found in Amerindian middens on Barbados and on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. However, anthropologists believe that the Amerindians, the Caribs and Arawaks, simply availed themselves of dead and dying whales washed ashore since they did not have the equipment necessary to hunt whales at sea.
During the heyday of whaling in the Caribbean by American whaling fleets from the mid 1700s followed by the appearance of shore whaling in the mid to late 1800s, Humpbacks and Sperm whales were the prized catches. Early ship logs report that both species were quite plentiful in the waters of the Lesser Antilles with one account of a very large Sperm whale bull taken in a bay filled with ships docked for reprovisioning. Based on logs, correspondence, and journals kept by those early sailors, the Lesser Antilles were so ripe with whales that large whale populations in the Greater Antilles were passed by in the rush to more fertile hunting grounds further south.
Whaling in the Lesser Antilles reached its peak before the turn of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1927 the islands’ whale processing plants were forced to close due to the depletion of Humpbacks and Sperm whales caused by both the American whaling fleets and the shore whaling industries. Interviews with elderly former whalers on Caribbean islands in the early 1940s confirm the demise of the whaling industry due to the depletion and resultant disappearance of whales. Scientists believe that more numerous populations of whales in the Greater Antilles today is a direct result of the early whalers ignoring those populations as they sailed to the Lesser Antilles where almost 2 centuries of rampant hunting decimated Humpback and Sperm whale populations.
Whether killed by an American whaling ship or taken by islanders during hunting expeditions, and although equipment varied from island to island, processing generally began with the whale’s beheading. Once the head was removed, the whale’s body was “flensed” by huge saws that stripped off the fatty tissue or blubber which was then boiled to produce oil. The oil was used to fuel lamps and to make machinery lubricants, ink, makeup and lotions, soaps, conditioners for wool products, detergents, and tanning fluids for leather. Spermaceti, found only in Sperm whales and thusly named for its resemblance to sperm, was used to make candles as well as lamp oil. Having attended school for several summers on Penobscot Bay in Maine I spent many hours traveling the back roads and perusing out of the way antique shops. In a small shop in a very old home along the coast I found a hand blown brown glass medicine bottle still filled with whale oil and decorated with an aged, crumbling paper label touting the contents as a cure-all for most any human ailment.
Because Sperm whales were so widely sought by the early whalers, they did keep rudimentary population records based on sightings during their far ranging hunting trips that carried them from the eastern shores of Canada and the U.S. to the coasts of South America, being at sea sometimes for 2-3 years. Reviewing those early records, scientists believe that the Atlantic Sperm whale population numbered over 330,000 at the beginning of the 19th century.
Sperm whales range throughout the world’s oceans and the total global population today is estimated to be approximately 300,000, down from some 2,000,000 worldwide before whaling took its toll; and globally less than what was once the Atlantic population alone. Whaling between the 1740s and 1880s in the Atlantic killed some 1,000,000 Sperm whales and current estimates of both the North and South Atlantic population puts them at less than 5,000 individuals. Humpback whales have faired little better with pre-whaling Atlantic population estimates ranging about 150,000 to fewer than 15,000 remaining today.
Some of those remaining Humpbacks whales will soon be traveling from their winter calving and mating grounds in the Caribbean to their feeding grounds off the coasts of the United States and Canada. While we cannot fault those early ship and island whalers for their belief that our oceans were endlessly bountiful, we now know otherwise. The numbers do not lie and what one dead whale will bring in revenue is far exceeded by the dollars generated by protecting them and developing tourism based on watching them as they ever so gracefully swim through the seas and nurture their young.
Yet, whaling does continue in the Caribbean though through limited, aboriginal permits granted by the International Whaling Commission while the world’s most powerful and moneyed whaling nation pushes to return commercial whaling to our waters.
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