The Whale in History and Culture
The Whale in History and Culture
rom the Arctic to the Antipodes, people have celebrated and sung of whales and dolphins for centuries, but the first person to write about them was the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC. He described whales, dolphins, and porpoises as cetaceans and distinguished them from fish: "The dolphin, the whale and all the rest of the cetacea, all that is to say, that are provided with a blow-hole instead of gills, are viviparous...The dolphin has been asleep with his nose above water and when asleep he snores...". Aristotle also described how fishermen who caught dolphins would "nick their tails and set them adrift again and by this expedient their ages are ascertained". Thus, it could be said that the Greeks carried out the first non-lethal or benign research on marine mammals. Greek poets and artists celebrated the sea, thalassa, as the source of life, as it is in many creation myths. Apollo, Greek god of the sun (who turned into a giant dolphin), and Poseidon, god of the sea, protected marine mammals. The oldest images of whales are found carved into rocks in Scandinavia and date from the Stone Age, around 5000 BC. The colourful dolphin frieze at Knossos Palace on the island of Crete is the earliest known picture of a dolphin, painted around 2000 BC.
Whales and dolphins were revered not only by early inhabitants of the Mediterranean, but also by a number of coastal communities on every part of the globe. Upon finding a whale washed ashore, the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest mourned its death. They "prayed" or chanted over the body.
At the opposite end of the world, in what is now New Zealand, one Maori legend describes how the original settlers followed the migratory paths of the whales as they travelled across the great water from the mythical Pacific island of Hawaiiki. Some say they descended from a man who rode in from Hawaiiki on the back of a whale, to the "Land of the Long White Cloud" around 1,500 years ago. At the landing place of the pair, a Maori meeting house has been built in their honour. A large wooden carving of a man riding a whale adorns the house's gabled roof.
In Asia, other types of temples and shrines have been built to commemorate the souls of whales killed in the nets of fishermen, most notably in Japan and in Vietnam. On a small island in the Sea of Japan, an annual requiem is held in spring at a Buddhist temple to honour the souls of dead whales. In the 17th century, whales were caught in nets near the island. During butchering, the fishermen collected whale embryos from female whales, wrapped them in straw mats, then took them to a temple where the monks gave them a human burial. Every time a whale was hunted and killed, it was given a Buddhist name, and its exact date of capture (and death) recorded in the temple. Not far away, on the coast and on islands in the South China Sea, similar temples and shrines were also built, beginning in the 18th century. In Vietnam, a fisherman who accidentally drowns a marine mammal in a fishing net, or finds one washed ashore, follows a centuries-old tradition and gives it an elaborate human burial. He honours the whale or dolphin as if it were his own father. Three years to the day after a cetacean dies, its bones are dug up, carefully washed by fishermen's wives, and the skeleton reassembled. These are then transported on an elaborate wooden litter — one used for human burials — by a group of pallbearers to the Temple of the Whale. Only two temples of this type remain in Vietnam today, but they are considered to harbour sacred souls, "the mandarins of the sea" who, when they die, ascend to heaven, where they become "Angels of the Sea in the Sky".
Factory ships and exploding grenades
While some cultures and countries were celebrating whales, others were developing methods that would begin to decimate them. In Europe, the Basques began whaling in the 11th century, soon followed by the Dutch and the English. The first target of commercial whaling was the northern right whale, Eubalaena glacialis, which is now the most endangered of all the great whales with some stocks near extinction. The profitable and unregulated business of commercial whaling spread to the American colonies, with right, humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae, and sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus, being the next targets. In the 19th century, steam-powered catcher boats and the exploding grenade attached to a harpoon revolutionized whaling. Factory ships added to the toll on the whales: more were killed in four decades than in the previous four centuries. This technological leap allowed the whalers to kill fast-moving species such as the blue, Balaenoptera musculus, and fin whale, Balaenoptera physalus.
By the early 20th century some whale stocks were showing signs of overexploitation. In 1925, the League of Nations recommended that the whaling industry be regulated in order to protect whales from overhunting. As a result, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea established the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics in 1930. A year later the first international regulatory treaty, the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, was signed by 22 nations in Geneva. This treaty gave full protection to right whales, immature whales, and females with calves. Unfortunately, Japan, Chile, Argentina, the USSR, and Germany, important whaling nations, were not party to the agreement.
The same year the treaty came into force, over 43,000 whales were hunted. Since blue, fin, and sperm whales were among those killed, meat and oil production from these animals was at its highest peak ever. In a little over 10 years, since 1920, whale oil production had increased 20-fold. In an attempt to limit whale oil production, the whaling nations initiated the Blue Whale Unit system as a means of regulating the market. But as a conservation measure it failed miserably. For example, whales were hunted according to their whale oil potential, while their age, size, population dynamics, and distribution were unknown or ignored. One blue whale was equal to two fin, two-and-a half humpbacks, or six sei whales. During the 1930s regular meetings were held in an attempt to restrict whaling even further. Finally, in 1937, eight years after the first whaling treaty came into force, total protection was conferred on gray whales, and minimum size limits were set for fin, blue, humpback, and sperm whales. In addition, the 1937 convention acknowledged the differences between factory-ship whaling and coastal whale hunting and established separate seasons for each.
In 1946, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling came into effect, and in 1949 it established the International Whaling Commission (IWC), with 14 member nations. The IWC revived the Blue Whale Unit catch quota, consistently adopted the highest estimate for whale quotas recommended by the IWC scientists, and re-opened whaling of Antarctic stocks of humpback whales, protected since 1939. Some whaling nations exceeded quotas set by the IWC, failed to report also the number of whales actually killed (as WWF and other NGOs have learned and reported on over the years), objected officially to hunting bans on blue whales and killed them anyway. In short, they ridiculed the convention, until the treaty nearly collapsed. In 1961, the whaling nations hunted more whales than ever and killed over 66,000.
Gray whale extinct in the Atlantic
In the following years, catches began to decline because the whalers could not find enough whales to kill. By the time the blue whale was given full protection in 1965, it was virtually gone from the Antarctic. At up to 30m long, the blue whale is the largest animal ever to have lived on earth, and is scattered throughout all oceans. In 1989, scientists estimated that the blue whale, whose numbers could have been as high as 250,000 in Antarctic waters before commercial whaling began there, could be as low as 210 to 1,000. The fin whale, second in size to the blue, was severely reduced in numbers in all oceans, especially in the Southern Ocean.
Probably the most well-known whale, immortalized by Herman Melville in the novel Moby Dick, is the sperm whale. It was heavily exploited, mainly for its oil, right up until 1988. Unlike edible baleen whale oil, sperm whale oil was used for lighting fuel and various industrial purposes. Over the centuries, the gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus, was the first to suffer extinction of a stock. Of the original three populations, one was probably wiped out by early whalers in the North Atlantic. A second stock was nearly eradicated in the mid 20th century in the western North Pacific. However, the eastern North Pacific population has recovered from very low levels after being heavily exploited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When WWF was founded in 1961, it accepted the challenge of working with governments and other NGOs to help reverse the drastic population declines in the world's great whales.
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