Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
We thank the following experts for their comments:
Prof. Jeffrey Bolster
Professor of History (retired), University of New Hampshire
Dr. Marina Wells
Assistant Curator of History & Culture, New Bedford Whaling Museum
1 Ancient Sea Masters
Nobody really knows how humans first got the idea of battling whales. Probably ancient coastal people stumbled upon whales stranded ashore. To them, these titans were rare treasure chests overflowing with meat to eat and bones to craft tools. Refusing to leave such fortune to chance, they paddled out and tried their luck.
#Charpentier, A., et al. (2022). What’s in a whale bone? Combining new analytical methods, ecology and history to shed light on ancient human–whale interactions. Quaternary Science Reviews, 284, 107470
#van den Hurk, Y., et al. (2023). The prelude to industrial whaling: identifying the targets of ancient European whaling using zooarchaeology and collagen mass-peptide fingerprinting. Royal Society Open Science, 10(9), Article 230741
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230741
#van den Hurk, Y., et al. (2023). Active Whaling, Opportunistic Scavenging or Long-Distance Trading? Zooarchaeological, Palaeoproteomic and Historical Analyses on Whale Exploitation and Bone Working in Anglo-Saxon Hamwic. Medieval Archaeology. 67(1)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2023.2204674
Towards the 8th century, whaling turns commercial. Along the Bay of Biscay, the Basques build stone watchtowers. The moment a dark shape breaks the surface, signal fires blaze and drums thunder across the coast. Men shove small boats into the waves, armed with hand-thrown harpoons.
#Hennius, A. et al. (2023). Late Iron Age whaling in Scandinavia. Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 18(94)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366416046_Late_Iron_Age_Whaling_in_Scandinavia
#Brito, C., et al. (2016). Digging into our whaling past: Addressing the Portuguese influence in the early modern exploitation of whales in the Atlantic. In: Environmental History in the Making, Volume II: Acting
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-41139-2_3
#Aguilar, A. (1986). A review of old Basque whaling and its effect on the right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) of the North Atlantic. Report - International Whaling Commission (Special Issue 10)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235407504_A_review_of_old_Basque_whaling_and_its_effect_on_the_right_whales_of_the_North_Atlantic
Their target is the North Atlantic Right whale. An 18-meter and 90-ton gentle giant who is gloriously slow and prefers coastal waters. While most whales sink when they die, right whales stay afloat: the right whale to hunt.
#Rice, D. W. (1998). Marine mammals of the world: Systematics and distribution. Society for Marine Mammalogy (Special Publication No. 4)
https://www.marinemammalscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MarineMammalsOfTheWorld.pdf
Their massive mouths contain hundreds of baleen plates, bristly sieves made from keratin. It’s the plastic of its time, shapable into anything from baskets to corset stays and armor. The expensive meat makes up a third of a whale’s weight, while half of it is blubber, a thick oily shield that hides the real prize.
#Charpentier, A., et al. (2022). What’s in a whale bone? Combining new analytical methods, ecology and history to shed light on ancient human–whale interactions. Quaternary Science Reviews, 284, Article 107470
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359842430_What's_in_a_whale_bone_Combining_new_analytical_methods_ecology_and_history_to_shed_light_on_ancient_human-whale_interactions
When heated, the blubber can be rendered into precious whale oil. It’s the Swiss army knife of early industry. It lubricates machinery, waterproofs ships when mixed with tar, and helps make soap and paint. But most importantly, whale oil burns brighter and cleaner than anything else available at the time.
#Whale Hunt. In National Park Service. Retrieved (2025)
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalehunt.htm
#Charpentier, A., et al. (2022). What’s in a whale bone? Combining new analytical methods, ecology and history to shed light on ancient human–whale interactions. Quaternary Science Reviews, 284, 107470
The Basques turn whaling into a finely tuned enterprise. They improve equipment, perfect the art of processing whales and flood Europe with whale products, while other nations watch with envy. By the 17th century, the English and Dutch launch their own whaling fleets. They hire Basque consultants and soon the secrets of whale hunting spread across European powers and into their colonies.
#Schokkenbroek, J. C. A. (2014). Co-operation in Times of War? Basque Expertise and Dutch Entrepreneurship in Arctic Whaling, 1612-1642. Arte Nuevo. Revista de estudios áureos, 2014(1)
https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/6724/672473161006.pdf
Shore whaling becomes their first get-rich-quick scheme. A single good-sized whale earns each crew member as much as a land-based worker makes in six months. But it is unpredictable. Some years, a crew kills a hundred whales, other years drag on for months without a catch. Still, whaling becomes a valuable source of trade.
#Vickers, D. (1983). The First Whalemen of Nantucket. The William and Mary Quarterly, 40(4)
https://www.joycerain.com/uploads/2/3/2/0/23207256/first_whalers.pdf
#Dolin, E. J. (2007). Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. W. W. Norton & Company
Meanwhile, London is swelling into one of the world’s great metropolises. And by the 1740s, fifteen thousand street lamps burn with colonial whale oil there.
#O’Dea, W. T. (1951). Artificial lighting prior to 1800 and its social effects. Folklore, 62(2)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1257599
#Dolin, E. J. (2007). Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. W. W. Norton & Company
It takes half a whale per night to turn London’s dark streets into a flickering sea of light.
Note: The following calculation is only a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate. We have to make some radical but educated assumptions here, because exact historical consumption figures vary widely by lamp design, wick size, weather conditions, and maintenance. A useful modern rule of thumb is that oil lamps burn about half an ounce of oil per hour.
If we assume London’s street lamps burned for roughly 12 hours per night (from sunset to sunrise), that comes out to 6 ounces of oil per lamp per night. Now scale that up: with 15,000 lamps, London would consume roughly 16.7 barrels of oil per night. To put that into perspective: during the whaling era, a right whale could yield roughly 25 to 60 barrels of whale oil on average. That means keeping 15,000 street lamps burning for one night could require something like 27% to 66% of an entire whale’s oil yield.
#Bryce, E. (2020). Why was whaling so big in the 19th century? Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/why-whaling-nineteeth-century.html
#Best, P. B. (1987). Estimates of the landed catch of right (and other whalebone) whales in the American fishery, 1805–1909. Fishery Bulletin, 85(3)
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/fish-bull/best.pdf
#O’Dea, W. T. (1951). Artificial lighting prior to 1800 and its social effects. Folklore, 62(2)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1257599
But just like the Basques had learned centuries earlier, the right whales near shore become scarcer with each passing year, just as demand is exploding.
#New Bedford Whaling Museum. Yankee Whaling. (retrieved 2025)
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/research/research-resources/whaling-history/yankee-whaling/
Around this time, a whaling boat is swept far offshore outside Nantucket. Hours drag on in uncertainty, until finally, the crew brings down a new kind of giant: The 18-meter, 45-ton sperm whale. In their heads, these leviathans carry nearly two thousand liters of spermaceti, the highest quality oil on the planet. Milky gold and so pure it burns without smoke. Sperm whales become the ultimate prize monsters.
#Glarou, M., et al. (2023). Estimating body mass of sperm whales from aerial photographs. Marine Mammal Science, 39(1)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mms.12982
#Lydersen, C., et al. (2025). Migration to breeding areas by male sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus from the Northeast Atlantic Arctic. Scientific Reports, 15(7861)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-91266-8
#Wellendorf, M. (1963). Composition of spermaceti. Nature, 198(4885)
https://www.tesble.com/10.1038/1981086b
#Norris, K. S., & Harvey, G. W. (1972). A theory for the function of the spermaceti organ of the sperm whale (Physeter catodon L.). NASA, Washington. Report No. CONTRIB-74
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720017437/downloads/19720017437.pdf
#Irwin, E. (2012). The Spermaceti Candle and the American Whaling Industry. Historia, 21
https://www.eiu.edu/historia/2012Irwin.pdf
#Clarke, M. R. (1978). Physical properties of spermaceti oil in the sperm whale. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, 58
https://plymsea.ac.uk/id/eprint/2029/1/Physical_properties_of_spermaceti_oil_in_the_sperm_whale.pdf
A single large sperm whale can yield oil worth around $200,000 today. That is a fortune in the 1850s and two to three times more valuable than right whale oil.
#Jenkins, J. T. (1921). A history of the whale fisheries: From the Basque fisheries of the tenth century to the hunting of the fin-whale at the present date. London: H. F. & G. Witherby
https://archive.org/details/historyofwhalefi00jenkrich/page/234/mode/2up
One barrel can buy you almost 3 acres of farm land.
#U.S. Department of Commerce. 1933. Fifteenth census of the United States: 1930. Census of agriculture. Farm real-estate values in the New England states, 1850 to 1930
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021935120&seq=21
Then again, outfitting a whaling expedition costs $30,000, ten times more than an average farm.
#Forbes. 2004. Blubber capitalism.
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/1011/096.html
A third of voyages lose money and some never return. But getting smashed by furious whales is what truly makes sailor’s blood run cold.
#Higgins, M. (2023). The History of Venture Investing in the United States. Financial History
https://static.moaf.org/docs/History%20of%20Venture%20Investing%20in%20the%20US.pdf
#Davis, L. E., et al. (1997). In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906. University of Chicago Press
https://archive.org/details/inpursuitoflevia0000davi/page/14/mode/2up?q=6%25
3 The Hunt
The whale turns into pure, terrified rage. Your boat lurches forward like you've been hitched to a steam engine, spray blinding you as you're dragged across the ocean in what whalers call a “Nantucket sleighride”.
#Grant, G. (1932). Greasy luck: A whaling sketch book (W. F. Payson, Text). Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/74903/74903-h/74903-h.htm#Page_74
You have to get close to stab this giant with a 3-meter lance, going for the massive lungs or heart. Blood starts flowing from the spout like a crimson geyser, but the whale is still fighting. Fifteen blows later, you find the mark. The whale starts swimming in tighter and tighter circles, vomiting half-digested squid, until it finally rolls over in a spreading pool of gore.
And you’re barely getting started.
#National Park Service. (2022). The whale hunt. New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalehunt.htm
4 The Floating Factory
You tow the enormous carcass back to the ship, where the crew slams down chains to secure their prize. The ship creaks as the dead giant bobs in the swells beside you. Now the butchery can begin.
It takes days to process 45 tons of dead whale into liquid money. You leap across the blood-slick blubber to axe through the thick flesh of the head. Within lies the spermaceti chamber, the vault of the most precious whale oil.
Then you help peel away the blubber, 20 centimeters thick and tough as leather. You cut 2-meter wide "blanket pieces", weighing a ton, and haul them up with pulleys that strain the ship's masts. Your ship lurches, as you cut it free to release the weight.
Next comes the rendering. You fire up the tryworks, brick furnaces built right on the wooden deck. In massive iron pots, the blubber gets boiled down into oil. The smoke is so thick you can barely breathe. They say you can smell a whaling ship from thirty kilometers away: burning far, rotting flesh and the stink of death.
The work continues around the clock. Sharks are drawn by the bloody waste you're dumping overboard. Men slip on the greasy decks and break bones, get crushed by swinging chunks of blubber or scalded by boiling oil.
#National Park Service. (2022). The whale hunt. New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalehunt.htm
#Williford, J. (2010). Whaling the old way. Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 31(2). National Endowment for the Humanities
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/marchapril/feature/whaling-the-old-way
It may be one of the most gruesome jobs in existence. The stench, the blood, the endless toil, it wears you down fast. Most who sign on quickly regret it, nearly a third end up deserting.
You are holding on to the dream of coming home rich – but the odds aren't great.
#Hohman, E. P. (1928). The American whaleman: A study of life and labor in the whaling industry. Longmans, Green and Co.
https://archive.org/details/americanwhaleman00hohm/page/64/mode/2up
5 The Business of Blood
When it’s all over, the ship returns with dozens of barrels of the finest oil on Earth. By the 1850s, whaling has become the 5th biggest industry in the US, with 700 whaling ships, three quarters of the world’s fleet, employing 70,000 people.
#McCollough, J., & Check, H. F., Jr. (2010). The baleen whales’ saving grace: The introduction of petroleum-based products in the market and its impact on the whaling industry. Sustainability, 2(10)
#Moment, D. (1957). The business of whaling in America in the 1850s. Business History Review, 31(3)
#Callahan, R. J. (2024). Between whale teeth and the moral uses of the sea: Considering religion in the US whaling industry’s extractive zone. Religions, 15(11)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/11/1296
#Demuth, B. (2023). Overview: Harvesting Light: New England whaling in the nineteenth century. Energy History Online, Yale University
https://energyhistory.yale.edu/harvesting-light-new-england-whaling-in-the-nineteenth-century/
In 1853 alone, American whalers kill over 8,000 whales, making 360,000 barrels of oil and almost half a billion in today’s dollars.
#Bryce, E. (2020). Why was whaling so big in the 19th century? Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/why-whaling-nineteeth-century.html
Voyages grow longer and months turn into years as ships push into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Each voyage demands bigger investments and whaling turns into a venture-capital industry. Crews work for shares instead of wages, while forced to buy overpriced supplies on credit. Many come home in debt and a lucky few rise through the ranks. It’s the American dream, they say, but it feels like an illusion. The real money flows upward to ship owners, and merchants.
#Saunders, L. (2004). Blubber capitalism. Forbes, 174(7)
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/1011/096.html
#Coleman, J. L. Jr. (1995). The American whale oil industry: A look back to the future of the American petroleum industry? Natural Resources Research, 4(3)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02257579
#Ôsaki, A. (2005). Study on American Whaling by Sailing Vessels in the 19th Century. Journal of Geography, 114
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jgeography1889/114/4/114_4_561/_pdf
Fishing villages turn into global commercial hubs. In New England, the port of New Bedford rises as one of the richest towns in America.
#Dolin, E. J. (2007). Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. W. W. Norton & Company
#National Park Service. (2024). New Bedford’s whaling heritage. New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park.
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalingheritage.htm
Whaling is unusually diverse for its time but deeply exploitative. Much of the labor comes from Native Americans and Black sailors. Native communities become dependent on English goods, while crews of color are pushed into the hardest and lowest-paying work. This pattern of inequality still echoes today.
The blood of whales helps fuel the rise of American industrial power.
#Clark, T. P. (2022). Racial capitalism and the sea: Development and change in Black maritime labour, and what it means for fisheries and a blue economy. Fish and Fisheries, 23(3)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/faf.12639
#The Whaling Museum Society. (retrieved December 2025). Colonial: The Shinnecock & colonial whaling companies. The Whaling Museum & Education Center
#Hannan, C. W. (2001). Indian land in seventeenth century Massachusetts. Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 29(2). Institute for Massachusetts Studies & Westfield State University
https://www.westfield.ma.edu/historical-journal/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Hannan-Summer-2001-complete.pdf
6 The Machine Age of Killing
Until in 1859, a breakthrough changes everything. Steampowered rigs start commercially pumping petroleum. Suddenly, kerosene, lamp oil refined from crude oil, is cheap and seemingly limitless. Over the following decades, the whaling industry faces dramatic changes.
#Luong, T. (2012). U.S. oil reserves and peak oil. Undergraduate Journal of Mathematical Modeling: One + Two, 4(2), Article 1
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272659875_US_Oil_Reserves_and_Peak_Oil
#McKirdy, D. M. (2024). Mawson’s archival specimens from the birthplaces of petroleum exploration in Australia and North America: Their historical and modern significance. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 148(2)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/03721426.2024.2406787?needAccess=true
Nantucket, once the heart of global whaling, sees its last ship limp home in 1870. The Age of Sail is ending. The Age of Engine has begun - and it's ushered in by blood: In the 18th and 19th centuries, 300,000 sperm whales alone were slaughtered. And they still cannot catch a break.
#Rocha, R. C., Jr., Clapham, P. J., & Ivashchenko, Y. V. (2014). Emptying the oceans: A summary of industrial whaling catches in the 20th century. Marine Fisheries Review, 76(4)
Although kerosene conquered lighting, whale oil is still one of the best lubricants on Earth. Never freezes, spoils or quits. The machinery powering the industrialization needs it, so ironically, petroleum soon increases demand for whale oil.
#York, R. (2017). Why petroleum did not save the whales. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023117739217
Norwegians seize the opportunity with cheaper labor and new technology. They set up whaling stations on islands at the edge of Antarctica.
Hand-thrown spears are gone and now, explosive-tipped harpoons fire from steam-powered catcher boats for instant kills. The fast ships can chase down even blue whales, the largest animals that ever lived. Normally most dead whales sink, but now air compressors pump them full of gas, so even the biggest ones float like massive buoys. No whale is safe anymore.
#Brown, S. G. (1976). Modern whaling in Britain and the north-east Atlantic Ocean. Mammal Review, 6(1)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2907.1976.tb00198.x
#Rocha, R. C., Jr., Clapham, P. J., & Ivashchenko, Y. V. (2014). Emptying the oceans: A summary of industrial whaling catches in the 20th century. Marine Fisheries Review, 76(4)
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/MFR/mfr764/mfr7643.pdf
In the arms race leading up to World War 1, whale oil is also used to produce explosives.
But the true carnage comes after World War 2, when Japan and the Soviet Union also join the slaughter. They call it the Whaling Olympics.
#York, R. (2017). Why petroleum did not save the whales. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2378023117739217
#Kock, K.-H. (2010). Whaling and whale management in the Southern Ocean, and German participation and interests therein. Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 33
#Ivashchenko, Y. V., & Clapham, P. J. (2010). Too much is never enough: The cautionary tale of Soviet illegal whaling. Marine Fisheries Review, 76(1–2)
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/mfr761-21.pdf
#Burgess, C. (2016). “Killing the practice of whale hunting is the same as killing the Japanese people”: Identity, national pride, and nationalism in Japan’s resistance to international pressure to curb whaling. The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus, 14(8)
https://apjjf.org/2016/08/burgess
The same industrial might that once built tanks and bombers now builds factory ships. The largest one is 210 meters long, capable of processing dozens of whales in a day.
#Ivashchenko, Y. V., Clapham, P. J., & Brownell, R. L., Jr. (2008). The truth about Soviet whaling: A memoir. Marine Fisheries Review, 70(2)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291858597_The_truth_about_Soviet_whaling_A_memoir
#Lutsenko, V. (2025). Sovetskaya Ukraina type whaling factory vessel. In Fishing fleet of communist and post-communist countries
https://soviet-trawler.narod.ru/pages/ussr/sovetskaya_ukraina.html
Note: Exact length figures vary slightly depending on how you measure the ship, and which technical standard a source uses.
In 1964 82,000 whales are reported – the largest animal slaughter by tons in human history.
#OWID (2022): Number of whales killed, World
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/whale-catch?time=earliest..2018
Data based on: Rocha et al. (2014) & the International Whaling Commission (IWC): https://web.archive.org/web/20220613153315/https://iwc.int/public/downloads/8sXJb/Total_catches_since_1986.pdf
7 The War We Almost Won
The ocean couldn't sustain this mechanized assault. Sperm whales fall from around 1.5 million to 800,000 and the even larger Fin whales from almost 800,000 to 100,000. Blue whale populations, which had numbered around 340,000 before industrial whaling, collapse by 98% to less than 5,000.
#Rocha, R. C., Jr., Clapham, P. J., & Ivashchenko, Y. V. (2014). Emptying the oceans: A summary of industrial whaling catches in the 20th century. Marine Fisheries Review, 76(4)
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/MFR/mfr764/mfr7643.pdf
#OWID (2022): Global whaling peaked in the 1960s
https://ourworldindata.org/whaling
#Whitehead, H., & Shin, M. (2022). Current global population size, post-whaling trend and historical trajectory of sperm whales. Scientific Reports, 12, Article 19468
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-24107-7#Sec16
It isn’t until 1975 that the reality of industrial whaling hits the global spotlight. In the North Pacific, environmental activists steer tiny inflatable boats straight between Soviet whaling ships and their targets. The images of fragile human bodies standing in the path of steel harpoons spread like wildfire.
#Burton, E. (2024). Ten times Greenpeace has fought to protect whales over the past fifty years. Greenpeace Australia Pacific
#Global Nonviolent Action Database. (2010). Greenpeace campaigns against whaling, 1975–1982. Swarthmore College
https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/greenpeace-campaigns-against-whaling-1975-1982
#Sherriff, L. (2024). The 'mind bomb' photos that led to a global whaling ban. BBC
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241002-how-greenpeaces-mindbomb-photos-stopped-the-commercial-whaling-industry
Overnight, the public turns against the commercial slaughter. Across America and Europe, people support a new cause: Save the Whales. Finally, the International Whaling Commission votes for a global moratorium on commercial whaling.
Only Norway, Iceland and Japan never sign the global ban that takes effect in 1986, basically ending 400 years of industrial whale hunting.
#Global Nonviolent Action Database. (2010). Greenpeace campaigns against whaling, 1975–1982. Swarthmore College.
https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/greenpeace-campaigns-against-whaling-1975-1982
#Stoett, P. (2011). Irreconcilable differences: The International Whaling Commission and cetacean futures. Review of Policy Research, 28(6)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1541-1338.2011.00529.x
#Sakaguchi, I. (2013). The roles of activist NGOs in the development and transformation of IWC regime: The interaction of norms and power. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 3(2)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-013-0114-3
#UN (2022). The secret life of whales.