Whale Conservation: What Do We Owe the Whale?
Throughout this exhibition we focus on the men who were involved in and impacted by the whaling industry. The mariners who went on whaling voyages did so for a variety of reasons: to gain fortune, seek adventure, escape from enslavement or learn about an expansive world of which they had limited exposure. Some, like Gilbert Jenkins, Jr., looked to earn money so as not to be a burden on their families. While Old Rouse, revelled in the thrill of the whale hunt.
Throughout all of the primary sources, including letters, logbooks and documents, that we researched, there is no mention of concern for the whale. The whale existed solely as a means of wealth and whale hunting was brutal, bloody and torturous for this magnificent animal of the sea. Some whalers, like Old Rouse whose letter we exhibit, detailed relishing in the blood and fight needed to kill this animal: “It would done you good to have see [the First Mate’s] eyes shone like fire his face covered with blood which the whale had spouted slapping his lance right and left…”
Whale conservation is a global effort to protect and preserve whale populations that have historically been threatened by the whaling industry. We as humans now have more awareness around ethical issues concerning animal rights, including those of the whale. We are also aware of the price such brutality has played in our society. In The Blade Between, a horror novel about the effect on today’s inhabitants of a city that began with such a bloody history, author and Hudson native Sam J. Miller writes:
Blubber and skin and spermaceti are the engine of industry, the bloody gold that has powered Hudson’s rise to power, boiled down and barreled and shipped off to light lanterns as far away as London – the baleen will become women’s corsets, and the bones will be returned to the river — and the teeth will be scrimshawed and sent home to sweethearts, sold to collectors – but what will be done with the rest of these magnificent monsters, the livers as big as cows, the eyes the size of a human head?...Brains bigger than any human’s, and wiser too, with the things they’ve seen, at depths that would crush a man like a baby chick in a fist…
What do we here in Hudson, owe the whale? As a library, we believe, whatever the answer is, the debate is best conducted with all the facts available, and it is here, in the library, that those resources can be found.
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Additional Resource:
“A Picturesque New England Town’s Debt to the Right Whale” New York Times, December 22, 2024 by Parker Richards, this opinion piece asks that Nantucketers recognize the material gain they have gotten and still reap from their whaling past and take measures to protect the right whales that are in their waters. Richards writes:
Treating nature as nothing more than a commodity — or as a regrettable speed bump on the way to material gain — is not only immoral but also an attitude that fundamentally cheapens humanity.