Leviathan or The Whale

whales, barely enough to cover the cost of the expedition–and it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the country applied itself seriously to whaling. Once begun, however, Britain excelled, employing the same efficiency it brought to slavery (in which my mother’s own ancestors, living in Bristol, were complicit). On both were built the foundations of empire: the trade in humans, for sugar; and in whales, for oil.
    As a result, London became the best-lit city in the world. By the 1740s, five thousand street lamps were burning whale oil, expunging the primal darkness. The capital itself was a whaling port. Unlike the Yankee syndicates, entire English fleets were owned by one merchant such as Samuel Enderby Thomas Sturge, or Elhanan Bicknell. Their ships sailed from the Howland Great Wet Dock at Deptford, the largest commercial dock in the world, a huge gash cut into the south side of the river, precursor of the time when London would be undermined by its own commerce, its river banks riddled with such inlets. Able to handle one hundred and twenty ships, it was renamed Greenland Dock in honour of its Arctic trade, with quayside bollards made of whale bones. Try-works were established here too, where whales were processed away from the city so as not to offend its inhabitants with the stench. Further rendering was done around the looping bend of the river, on what became the site of the Millennium Dome. Here, where the coffee-coloured Thames widens into the sea, dead whales were brought back to London’s streets. Here, where expensive Docklands flats now preside, blubber was also boiled.
    It was on the eastern coast that British whaling truly prospered, however, from ports closer to the northern whale fisheries; pre-eminently Hull and Whitby. They had long experience of the earliest traditions of whaling: a thousand years before, the Vikings had whaled off Norway–in the saga of Beowulf, the sea is called a ‘whale-road’–and by the ninth century were exporting whale meat to England. Eight hundred years later, in 1753, whaling began in Whitby. Only three animals were taken that season, but over the next eighty years, fifty-eight ships sailed on 577 voyages from the Yorkshire port, harvesting a total of 2,761 whales, 25,000 seals and 55 polar bears.
    It was hardly a safe occupation for the hunters. During its peak years of whaling, Whitby lost seventeen ships–an awful attrition, added to by such individual tragedies as the death of four men when a boat of the unhappily named
Aimwell
was stove in by a whale in 1810. None the less, whaling was now a lucrative British trade, and by 1788
The Times was
reporting munificent catches for the northern ports. In one week alone, the
Albion
brought into Hull ’500 butts of oil and two tons of fins, the produce of seven and a half whales’; the
Samuel
arrived in the same port with ’60 butts of blubber and one ton of fins, the produce of three whales’; and the
Spencer
arrived in Newcastle with ’270 butts of blubber, and five and a half tons of fins, the produce of seven whales’–not including a further four ships bringing the bounty of sixteen and a half whales, and two thousand seals. The ‘great slaughter of the Greenland whale’ was truly under way, as techniques were improved to satisfy Britannia’s need for oil to light her subjects’ way, and for baleen to corset her Prince Regent in a ‘Bastille of Whalebone’.
    Like the Yankee whalers, the British hunted their prey from smaller boats, modelled, in their case, on early Viking craft. Whales were often killed from the ice, too, and dragged onto it to be butchered; unlike the Americans, British whalers did not render down blubber on board, but brought it back wholesale. So many ships were engaged in the business that up to a hundred vessels could be seen along the ice margin, a virtual cordon making it almost impossible for any whale to escape. It was nearly as hazardous for the whalers–one in ten of the ships would never return.
    As war with America forced Britain to find new supplies of sperm oil, the government offered bounties of up to £500 to ships owned by companies such as Enderby and Sons. Samuel Enderby had arrived in London from Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775. He was a British loyalist–his ships had carried the famous consignment of tea into Boston Harbour. In 1776, along with Alexander Champion and John St Barbe, Enderby equipped twelve whalers with American captains and