Commercial whaling in Britain began late in the 16th century and continued after the 1801 formation of the United Kingdom and intermittently until the middle of the 20th century.
The trade was broadly divided into two branches. The northern fishery involved hunting the bowhead whale off the coast of Greenland and adjacent islands. The southern fishery was activity anywhere else, including in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and off the Antarctic. The Sperm whale, the Southern right whale and Humpback whale were the main target species in South Sea whaling. The industry went on to become a profitable national enterprise and a source of skilled mariners for the Royal Navy in times of war.
Modern whaling, using factory ships and catchers fitted with bow-mounted cannons that fired explosive harpoons, continued into the 20th century and was mainly focused on the Antarctic and nearby islands where shore stations had been established. The collapse of whale stocks in the 1960s, due to overfishing, saw Britain abandon the industry after three and a half centuries of involvement.
Early history
Stranded whales, or drift whales that died at sea and washed ashore, provided meat, oil (rendered from blubber) and bone to coastal communities in pre-historic Britain. A 5,000 year old whalebone figurine was one of the many items found in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Scotland after that Stone Age settlement was uncovered by a storm in the 1850s. Whalebone weaving combs from the middle and late Iron Age have been found on archaeological digs in Orkney and Somerset.
A charter granted to Hilary, Bishop of Chichester in 1148 gave him the right to “any whale found on the land of the church of Chichester, except the tongue, which is the King's.” The English king had asserted the right to the entire whale by 1315 when Edward II reserved “to himself the right of all whales cast by chance upon the shore.” Whales came to be known as “Royal fish”, the disposal of which was an exclusive right of the monarch, or his local representative. Indeed, to this day, the Crown Estate asserts that "theoretically The king can claim ownership" of beached whales and other "Royal fish".
The first tentative interest in commercial whaling may have occurred in 1576 when a British vessel sailed “to the country called Labrador, which joins Newfoundland, where the Biscay men go in search of whales.” The Basques had whaled in the Bay of Biscay from the twelfth century and by the middle of the sixteenth century were crossing the Atlantic each year to the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland where they established temporary whaling settlements. Sustained British interest in the trade began in 1577 when the Muscovy Company in London was granted a Crown monopoly to hunt whales “within any seas whatsoever.” It may have been further stimulated when in 1579, for political reasons, parliament banned whale oil imports from the Spanish Basque country, the main exporters of whale oil.
The northern whale fishery
A vessel owned by the London-based Muscovy Company discovered in 1610 and began to exploit the Spitsbergen (Svalbard) whaling grounds in 1611. By 1617 at least fifteen British vessels were whaling off Spitsbergen each season. Ongoing participation in the fishery proved elusive. It was due, in part, to costly competition between rival chartered companies as they tried to exclude each other, and their foreign rivals, from the region. In the meantime, the Dutch had entered the fishery and soon became dominant. By the 1660s, there were hundreds of Dutch and German vessels active off Spitsbergen, while in some years not a single British vessel.