Chapter 3 focuses on the earliest sources of anti-whaling protests in northeastern Japan in the late seventeenth century. It analyses a conflict between Kii whalers and local fishermen that occurred in 1677 and shows how whales and proto-industrial fishing were intertwined in the early modern period. The observation that whales would bring fish, such as sardines, closer to the shore played a key role here. Without whales, the local fishermen believed, fish would stay out in the open sea, and they could not catch them. While fishermen made use of stranded whales and even ate whale meat occasionally, they saw the active hunting of whales as a danger to the sardine and bonito proto-industries. Moreover, hunting whales also caused environmental pollution, threatening the fauna and flora near the coast, the economic foundation of the fishermen who relied on gathering coastal flora and fauna. It was in the interest of the locals to protect the community from outside threats such as whaling.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.