Whaling

Whaling was among the most economically significant and visually dramatic of all maritime industries, and the antique prints documenting it form one of the most compelling bodies of maritime illustration in the history of printmaking. The pursuit of the great whales — the sperm whale of the Pacific and tropical oceans, the right whale of the Arctic and southern seas, the bowhead whale of the high Arctic — took men into the most remote and dangerous waters on earth, and the images produced in connection with this enterprise capture both the physical reality of the whale hunt and the extraordinary human world of the whaling ship with a vividness that no other source can match.

The Dutch and British Arctic whale fisheries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were among the most important commercial enterprises of the period, supplying the whale oil that lit the cities of Europe and the baleen that gave structure to the fashionable dress of the era. The Dutch published extensively illustrated accounts of Arctic whaling from the early seventeenth century, and the prints produced for these publications — showing the whaling grounds around Spitsbergen, the methods of capture and processing, and the extraordinary landscape of the Arctic ice — are among the most important in the history of whaling illustration. The Dutch whaling prints of the Golden Age combine genuine documentary information with the visual drama of scenes that had no equivalent in the European experience of the time.

The American sperm whale fishery, which dominated world whaling from the late eighteenth century through much of the nineteenth, generated a distinct illustrative tradition associated with the ports of New Bedford, Nantucket and Sag Harbor. The sperm whale — larger, more dangerous and more valuable than the right whales of the Arctic fishery — required a more hazardous hunting technique in which the whale was approached and harpooned from small open boats launched from the whaling ship. The images depicting this encounter — the boat poised alongside the thrashing whale, the harpooneer in the bow, the line running out — are among the most dramatic in the entire maritime illustration tradition, and they underlie the literary imagination of Melville’s Moby-Dick as directly as they do the visual tradition of whaling art.

The southern whale fishery — in the waters around South Georgia, the sub-Antarctic islands and the Antarctic Peninsula — developed through the nineteenth century and reached its most intensive and destructive phase in the early twentieth, when steam-powered whale catchers and factory ships made possible the slaughter of the great baleen whales on a scale that quickly reduced their populations to commercial extinction. The prints documenting this later phase of whaling are important historical documents of an industry that transformed the ecology of the Southern Ocean in ways whose consequences are still being measured.

Australian whaling has a particular historical significance: the southern right whale fishery operated from colonial ports from the earliest years of European settlement, and the whale oil industry was one of the first commercially significant exports of the New South Wales colony. The prints documenting Australian whaling — views of whaling ships in Australian ports, scenes of the southern fishery — are important documents in the economic and maritime history of colonial Australia.

For collectors of maritime history, the history of exploration or the natural history of the great whales, antique whaling prints offer material of exceptional historical depth and visual drama. They document an industry that shaped economies, opened oceans and transformed the world’s understanding of its own marine biodiversity, in images whose power has not diminished with the passage of time.