A history of whaling

The history of whaling is one of the longest and most dramatic chapters in the relationship between humanity and wildlife. It spans more than a thousand years, runs through three ages (artisanal, commercial, industrial), saw several species come close to extinction, then all but stopped thanks to one of the first great international environmental moratoria. Today it survives in residual form, often contested, in a handful of countries.

The origins: traditional whaling (antiquity to the 15^th century)

Whaling is probably as old as coastal navigation. Rock paintings in Korea more than 7,000 years old already depict grey whale hunts. The Basques, on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, hunted the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) from at least the 11^th century. The Inuit have hunted the bowhead whale in the Arctic for millennia, as part of their subsistence economy.

Traditional whaling was essentially artisanal: rowing boats, hand harpoons thrown at close range, long pursuits of the wounded animal until it was exhausted. The right whale, slow and buoyant once dead (hence its English name, right whale, the “right whale to hunt”), was the preferred target. Every part of the animal was used: the blubber for lighting, the baleen for corsets and springs, the meat for food.

The golden age of the whalers (17^th to 19^th centuries)

From the 17^th century onwards, whaling became a genuine worldwide maritime industry. Dutch, English and American fleets, later German and French ones, combed the oceans in search of cetaceans.

The great whaling ports

Nantucket (Massachusetts), world capital of sperm whaling in the 18^th century. Its ships ranged across the Pacific. It was from Nantucket that the Essex sailed, the whaler sunk by a sperm whale in 1820, which would inspire Moby Dick.
New Bedford (Massachusetts), successor to Nantucket in the 19^th century, “the town that lit the world” thanks to sperm whale oil.
San Francisco and Honolulu: Pacific bases for the Arctic hunts.
Bayonne, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz: Basque whaling ports, pioneers of right whale hunting.
Sandefjord (Norway), the Norwegian capital of whaling, home port of Svend Foyn (inventor of the explosive harpoon gun).
Grytviken (South Georgia), a subantarctic whaling station, founded in 1904, abandoned in 1965. Today a ghost town and a tourist site.

Sperm whale oil, the light of the 19^th century

The sperm whale became the preferred target from the middle of the 18^th century. Spermaceti oil, extracted from its enormous cephalic organ, gave a smokeless candle, a clear lamp oil, and a sought-after precision lubricant for industry. For a century it was this oil that lit the cities of the West (London, Paris, New York), before being replaced by petroleum kerosene from the 1860s onwards.

Industrialisation and collapse (1870 to 1986)

The invention of the explosive harpoon gun by the Norwegian Svend Foyn in 1864, then the appearance of steam factory ships at the end of the 19^th century, turned whaling into a frighteningly efficient industry. Rorquals, until then spared by the classic whalers (too fast, and they sink once killed), became reachable targets.

The record of the 20^th century is catastrophic. According to the figures compiled by the International Whaling Commission and supplemented by marine historians, it is estimated that nearly 2.9 million great whales were killed between 1900 and 1986. Southern blue whales, which may have numbered 200,000 to 300,000 individuals before whaling, were reduced to fewer than 1,000 in the 1960s. The Atlantic grey whale has disappeared altogether. The North Atlantic right whale now numbers no more than about 360 individuals.

The first attempts at regulation

Faced with this visible collapse, the first international conventions emerged in the 1930s. The Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1931), then the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1946), created the International Whaling Commission (IWC), at first a cartel of hunters seeking to avoid total collapse, then gradually transformed into a conservation body.

The 1986 moratorium

In 1982, after several years of intensive campaigning by Greenpeace and WWF, and under pressure from a world public opinion moved in particular by Roger Payne’s album Songs of the Humpback Whale, the IWC adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into force in 1986. For the first time in modern history, a major economic activity was halted worldwide in order to preserve a species.

The moratorium does, however, provide for exceptions: “scientific” whaling (used in particular by Japan as cover for disguised commercial whaling until 2019), aboriginal subsistence whaling (Inuit of Greenland, Chukchi of Russia, Makah of Washington State, traditional Caribbean whalers), and the possibility for a country to lodge a formal objection.

The situation today (2025-2026)

Four countries continue commercial whaling today, under very different arrangements.

Norway

Norway lodged a formal objection to the 1986 moratorium and legally continues to hunt the common minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) in its territorial waters. The Norwegian annual quota is around 1,000 individuals, of which about 500 are actually taken (domestic demand is falling). It is today the largest commercial hunt in the world by volume.

Iceland

Iceland left the IWC in 1992, then rejoined in 2002 with a reservation. It hunts the common minke whale and, more controversially, the fin whale. Icelandic quotas have fluctuated with successive governments; since 2023, Icelandic whaling has been suspended on a yearly basis on animal welfare grounds, but the legal authorisation remains in place.

Japan

For three decades Japan conducted so-called “scientific” whaling in the Southern Ocean, widely criticised as commercial whaling in disguise. After the ruling against it by the International Court of Justice in 2014, Japan announced in 2018 its withdrawal from the IWC, and since 2019 has resumed official commercial whaling in its territorial waters (common minke whale, Bryde’s whale, sei whale). The Japanese domestic market for whale meat is in free fall, however, and generational demand is collapsing.

The Faroe Islands

The Faroes practise a particular kind of hunt known as “grindadráp”: whole groups of long-finned pilot whales (and sometimes Atlantic white-sided dolphins) are driven into bays, where they are killed with knives. This traditional practice, which can kill several hundred animals in a single day, is not covered by the IWC (pilot whales are not on the list of regulated species). It remains legal in the Faroes, despite strong international condemnation.

The legacy of whaling

The consequences of more than a century of industrial whaling are still visible today in almost every population of great whales. The blue whale, despite the moratorium, numbers only 10,000 to 25,000 individuals worldwide, a fraction of the pre-whaling population estimated at 200,000 to 300,000. The North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered, a victim also of bycatch and ship strikes. The Atlantic grey whale has vanished entirely, and the Pacific population is recovering only with difficulty.

The 1986 moratorium remains a major victory for marine conservation, but a partial one: it stopped the haemorrhage without repairing the past. Several generations will be needed for great whale populations to return, perhaps, to their pre-industrial levels. And that is without counting the new threats (noise, pollution, plastic, climate change) which add to an already very heavy historical burden.