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The Decline of U.S. Whaling: Was the Stock of Whales Running Out?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Lance E. Davis ,
Robert E. Gallman  and
Teresa D. Hutchins
Lance E. Davis
Affiliation:
Lance E. Davis is Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science, California Institute of Technology.
Robert E. Gallman
Affiliation:
Robert E. Gallman is Kenan Professor of Economics and History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Teresa D. Hutchins
Affiliation:
Teresa D. Hutchins is assistant professor of economics atRamapo College of New Jersey.
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Abstract

Re-emerging from the disruption caused by the Revolution and the War of 1812, the American whaling industry grew to dominate the seas between 1820 and 1860, only to suffer a severe decline during and after the Civil War. In the following article, Professors Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins examine the hypothesis that the U.S. whaling industry collapsed because the stock of whales was being depleted. After investigating the size of the original whale populations, their breeding habits, and the estimates of whales taken during the nineteenth century, the authors conclude that the overfishing of whales of various species occurred either not at all or too late to have been a contributing factor in America's whaling decline.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 62 , Special Issue 4: Resource-Based Industries , Winter 1988 , pp. 569 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

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References

1 Davis, Lance E., Gallman, Robert E., and Hutchins, Teresa D., “Technology, Productivity, and Profits: British-American Whaling Competition in the North Atlantic, 1816–1842,” Oxford Economic Papers 39 (Dec. 1987): 738–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Gordon, The British Whaling Trade (London, 1978)Google Scholar, chaps. 6, 7.

2 Hohman, Elmo Paul, The American Whaleman (New York, 1928), 306Google Scholar; Davis, Lance E., Gallman, Robert E., and Hutchins, Teresa D., “The Structure of the Capital Stock in Economic Growth and Decline: The New Bedford Fleet in the Nineteenth Century,” in Quantity and Quiddity: Essays in U.S. Economic History in Honor of Stanley Lebergott, ed. Kilby, Peter (Middletown, Conn., 1987)Google Scholar.

3 Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “Technology, Productivity, and Profits”; Hutchins, Teresa D., “An Investigation of the American Whale Fishery” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1988)Google Scholar.

4 See Hohman, The American Whaleman, 290, 297–300; Bockstoce, John R., Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle, Wash., 1986)Google Scholar; Bockstoce, John R. and Botkin, Daniel B., “The Historical Status and Reduction of the Western Arctic Bowhead Whale (Baleena mysticetus) Population by the Pelagic Whaling Industry, 1848–1914,” Scientific Reports of the International Whaling Commission, Special Issue No. 5 (1983): 107–41Google Scholar; Burton, Robert, The Life and Death of Whales, 2d ed. (New York, 1980), 132–34Google Scholar; Schuster, George W., “Productivity and the Decline of American Sperm Whaling,” Environmental Affairs 2 (Fall 1972): 345–57Google Scholar; Maran, M. J., “The Decline of the American Whaling Industry” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1974)Google Scholar; Spears, John R., “Introduction” to Davis, William N., Nimrod of the Sea (Boston, 1926), xviiiGoogle Scholar; Dulles, Foster Rhea, Lowered Boats: A Chronicle of American Whaling (New York, 1933), 221Google Scholar; Nordhoff, Charles, Whaling and Fishing (New York, 1895), 161, 162Google Scholar.

5 Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “The Structure of the Capital Stock”; Davis, Lance E., Gallman, Robert E., and Hutchins, Teresa D., “Productivity in American Whaling: The New Bedford Fleet in the Nineteenth Century,” in Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past, ed. Galenson, David (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. The productivity measurements refer to total factor productivity of New Bedford whalers. (New Bedford was the principal U.S. whaling port.) They were derived from a translog multilateral index taken from Douglas Caves, W., Christensen, Laurits R., and Diewert, Erwin W., “Multilateral Comparisons of Output, Input, and Productivity Using Superlative Index Numbers,” The Economic Journal 92 (March 1982): 73–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The form of the index is:

where: the R's are the shares of total revenue produced by the various outputs (sperm oil, whale oil, baleen);

the Y's are the quantities of individual outputs;

the W's are factor shares in income (labor income, property income);

the X's are quantities of factor inputs (man-months, vessel ton-months);

the are average values across all years.

6 Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “The Structure of the Capital Stock”; Tønnessen, J. N. and Johnson, A. O., The History of Modern Whaling, trans. from the Norwegian by Christophersen, R. (Berkeley, Calif., 1982)Google Scholar. The only rorquals that the Americans hunted with success were the humpbacks. The Norwegians concentrated on the blue, fin, sei, and minke whales, although they also took other baleens, such as humpbacks and probably rights.

7 The question is pursued in another context in Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “Productivity in American Whaling,” which analyzes variations in productivity among more than 2,300 New Bedford whaling voyages between 1820 and 1896 by means of multiple regression analysis. The results suggest that changes in the quality of whaling crews may have affected productivity, but that hunting pressures on the whale stocks probably did not. Measures of hunting pressure (essentially lagged indexes of the number of animals killed) were computed for baleens and sperms by hunting ground.

8 See, for example, Rice, D. W. and Wolman, A. A., Life History and Ecology of the Gray Whale, American Society of Mammalogists, Special Publication 3 (Stillwater, Okla., 1971)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, the treatment of the sperm whale model in SirFrost, Sydney, The Whaling Question (San Francisco, Calif., 1979)Google Scholar.

10 Ibid.

11 Gaskin, D. E., The Ecology of Whales and Dolphins (Exeter, N.H., 1982), 319Google Scholar.

12 Allen, K. Radway, Conservation and Management of Whales (Seattle, Wash., 1980), 19Google Scholar.

13 James E. Scharff drew most of his data from draft reports of the Food and Agricultural Organization. Frost and Allen used data from Raymond Gambell (a compilation published in 1976 in Mammal Review) and from the International Whaling Commission, although they apparently filled some gaps with their own estimates. Frost also drew on the work of G. P. Kirkwood. The work of Frost and of Bockstoce and Botkin appears to be particularly careful and well-founded. Frost's estimates are available in great geographic detail, which makes them particularly useful.

Whale stock estimates most often refer to the “exploitable stock” (that is, to mature animals), but sometimes adjustments are made to reflect the size of the full population. The conversion coefficient from “exploitable” to “total” population used to generate the figures in Table 1 (2.0) is taken from Scharff, “International Management,” 332. Scharff uses it to convert both current (i.e., disequilibrium) and initial (i.e., equilibrium) figures, which is a little surprising. Allen, Conservation and Management of Whales, 19, also gives a ratio of 2 to 1 between the original total populations of sperm whales and the original exploitable populations.

14 Starbuck, Alexander, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Waltham, Mass., 1878), 661Google Scholar; Scammon, Charles M., The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America ([1874]; rpt., New York, 1968), 244Google Scholar; Stevenson, Charles H., “Aquatic Products in Arts and Industries,” appendix to the 1902 Report of the Commission on Fish and Fisheries (Washington, D.C., 1904), 187, 192, 204Google Scholar; Peter B. Best, “Sperm Whale Stock Assessments and the Relevance of Historical Whaling Records,” in Scientific Reports of the International Whaling Commission, 45, 46. According to Best, the United States accounted for 77 percent of the total output of the United States, Britain, and the British colonies. The production of all other whaling nations was negligible. The figures for Britain and her colonies are likely to be too low.

15 This capacity was probably never achieved, however, since the whale population never fell far enough below the carrying capacity of the food supply to set off those forces that would have raised fertility to its maximum level. See Frost, The Whaling Question, 256–60; Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “Productivity in American Whaling.”

16 Phoebe Wray and Kenneth R. Martin, “Historical Whaling Records from the Western Indian Ocean,” 226; J. L. Bannister, Sandra Taylor, and Helen Sutherland, “Logbook Records of 19th-century American Sperm Whaling: A Report on the 12-Month Project, 1978–79,” 248–52; and Best, “Sperm Whale Stock Assessments,” 46, all in Scientific Reports of the International Whaling Commission.

17 Frost, The Whaling Question, 19–21 and Appendix 8. See also Matthews, L. Harrison, The Natural History of the Whale (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, chap. 8, but especially 165–66. Matthews points out that the patriarchdominated pod is formed only “during the breeding season when he [the bull] serves an average of fourteen cows.” The bull then leaves, and the pod is matriarchal until the next breeding season. Between breeding seasons, patriarchs travel alone. Pods of socially immature, but physically mature, males travel together, occasionally with socially mature bulls who have yet to win harems. Sometimes several pods join together to travel as a school. Burton gives a similar account in The Life and Death of Whates, 76.

18 That would be the case if the captured bulls were within the normal migration routes of the nursery pods. Bulls sometimes leave these precincts and travel far north to squid-rich, but cow-poor, waters. Since these areas are off the nursery migration routes, the taking of these bulls would not have had a direct and immediate effect on the food supplies of the nursery pods.

19 By the account of Matthews, The Natural History of the Whale, the pod would recruit a bull in the next breeding season in any case, and perhaps even in the same breeding season, if the attendant bulls were taken in that period. There is evidence that whalers have, in fact, taken more males than females. See Frost, The Whaling Question, 103–4, and Friends of the Earth, The Whaling Manual, 153, which show that substantially more than half of the recent sperm whale populations consists of females. These data, however, reflect modern hunting practices and modern rules. It should also be said that females are easier to take, because they are smaller and because they will not abandon their calves. Bull sperms are often pugnacious, as any reader of Moby-Dick is well aware. See the discussion of baleens later in this article.

20 Wray and Martin, “Historical Whaling Records,” 236–39.

21 Leatherwood, Stephen and Reeves, Randall R., Whales and Dolphins (San Francisco, Calif., 1983), 82Google Scholar.

22 Wray and Martin, “Historical Whaling Records,” 236–39. Best's work more or less confirms the reasoning in the text. Best does identify a few cows that yielded more than twenty-five barrels, but his research was not confined to the hunting ground studied by Wray and Martin, the Western Indian Ocean. (According to Wray and Martin, the Indian Ocean sperm whale population consisted of relatively small whales.) Best, “Sperm Whale Stock Assessments,” 52. That yield was an increasing function of weight may be inferred from Best's Table 8. If the fifty-five foot whales in that table were hundred-barrel whales, and if the thirty-foot whales were of a size equivalent to mature cows, then the table also allows one to infer that mature cows averaged twenty-five barrels. In fact, the whales described in the table are mainly bulls. Cows are said to be more slender than bulls. Consequently, the twenty-five barrel average is probably an upper bound on the true average value. Dropping the limit to twenty barrels would raise the share of large bulls in the total of all sperm whales taken to 56 percent.

23 See Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “The Structure of the Capital Stock.”

24 According to Scharff, “International Management,” 332, the ratio of the total population of baleens to the exploitable population is 1.5 to 1. Allen, Conservation and Management, 19, puts the ratio at 1.3 to 1 for humpbacks.

25 Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 244; Stevenson, “Aquatic Products,” 192; Bockstoce and Botkin, “The Historical Status,” 116. Again we assume that the American fishery was responsible for three-quarters of the catch.

26 Frost, The Whaling Question, 19; Gaskin, The Ecology of Whales and Dolphins, 309; Slijper, E. J., Whales, 2d ed., trans. Pomerans, A. J. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), 389–90Google Scholar. Grays and fins bear every other year; blues, slightly less frequently; humpbacks, four years out of five. There is much less information on rights (including bowheads), but Frost's reference appears to cover them. According to Slijper, “Whales”, 384–85, the gestation period for bowheads is 9–10 months and the lactation period 12 months. Rights have the same lactation period. Gaskin, however (D. E. Gaskin, Whales, Dolphins and Seals [Auckland, New Zealand, 1972], 88), puts the gestation period of the right whale at 11–12 months and the lactation period at 56 months. All of these figures appear to be consistent with the delivery of a calf every other year.

Biological information on whales is most full for those species recently hunted, both because many specimens were available to researchers and because strong efforts were made to enumerate these groups regularly. Of the populations that have not been hunted recently, scholars have the best information on the California gray whale, because the grays are particularly easy to observe. They breed in a few shallow-water areas off the coast of California and their migration route is within sight of land. Thus their breeding practices are relatively easily monitored and they are also easily enumerated. Bowheads and rights, however, are more difficult to observe and, since neither group is hunted extensively today, biologists have few specimens with which to work.

27 Henderson, David A., Men and Whaling at Scammon's Lagoon (Los Angeles, 1972), 36Google Scholar.

28 Rice and Wolman, Life History. The text statement about large baleens is based on Frost's evidence concerning sperms. Rates for these two groups are likely to have been similar.

29 Allen, K. Radway, in The Whale Problem, ed. Schevill, William E. (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 356–57Google Scholar; D. W. Rice, ibid., 189.

30 Much of what follows is drawn from Henderson, Men and Whaling.

31 Ibid., 256–57.

32 Spears, John R., The History of the New England Whalers (New York, 1908), 190–91Google Scholar.

33 Bockstoce and Botkin, “The Historical Status,” 137. But see also Michael F. Tillman, Jeffrey M. Breiwick, and Douglas G. Chapman, “Reanalysis of Historical Whaling Data for the Western Arctic Bowhead Whale Population,” 145, and J. M. Breiwick and E. D. Mitchell, “Estimated Initial Population Size of the Bering Sea Stock of Bowhead Whales (Baleena mysticetus) from Logbook and Other Catch Data,” 150, 151, both in Scientific Reports of the International Whaling Commission, 145.

34 Slipjer, Whales, 395.

35 Bockstoce and Botkin, “The Historical Status,” 130, 131. The total factor productivity index displayed. in the figure is described in Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins, “Productivity,” and in footnote 5, above. Among the developments almost certainly affecting productivity importantly were a deterioration in the quality of seamen in whalers and various technical improvements, such as the darting gun and the steam-powered whaler (the latter influencing the Bockstoce and Botkin estimates, but not the Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins figures, which cover only sailing vessels). The former tended to reduce productivity, the latter to raise it. The Bockstoce and Botkin average weighted kill-per-unit-of-effort indexes are: 1849–59: .179; 1860–69: .147; 1870–79: .111; 1880–89: .159; 1890–99: .083. Dropping 1849 and 1850 reduces the average for the first period (now 1851–59) to .120.

36 For accounts of humpbaeking, see Dulles, Lowered Boats, chap. 20; Nordhoff, Whaling and Fishing, chap. 10; Ashley, Clifford W., The Yankee Whaler (Boston, 1938), 65Google Scholar. According to Dulles, it was common for New London whalers to spend two summers and a winter at Desolation Island, hunting rights and humpbacks.

37 Ferguson, Robert, Harpooner: A Four-Year Voyage on the Barque Kathleen, 1880–1884, ed. Stars, Leslie Dairymple (Philadelphia, Pa., 1936), 130–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 145–48. The accounts in these pages apparently refer to hunting humpbacks in deep water.

38 According to Edward Mitchell and Randall R. Reeves, “Catch History, Abundance, and Present Status of Northwest Atlantic Humpback Whales,” 160, 161, in Scientific Reports of the International Whaling Commission, 4,053 humpbacks were killed in the western North Atlantic (including Iceland) in the forty-one years 1850-1890, and 4,810 in the next period of like duration, 1891–1931.

39 Tønnessen and Johnson, Modern Whaling, 736, 751.

40 Scoresby, William, An Account of the Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery, vol. 2: The Whale Fishery (rpt.; Newton Abbot, England, 1969), 172–73, 183Google Scholar; Bockstone and Botkin, “The Historical Status,” 118, 119; Wray and Martin, “Historical Whaling Records,” 226. Biologist Haven Wiley, of the University of North Carolina, Chape; Hill, writes (personal letter of 12 Dec. 1986): “Ecologists interested in predation worry a lot about whether prey densities correlate with prey availabilties, and clearly they often do not. With specific reference to whaling it is perhaps important to consider whether increasing wariness by the whales might have had a significant impact on their availbility to whalers in sailing vessels.”