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The Whaling Disaster of 1871. Plate 1, portrayed by John Perry Newell. The whaling disaster of 1871 was an incident off the northern Alaskan coast in which a fleet of 33 American whaling ships were trapped in the Arctic ice in September 1871 and subsequently abandoned. It dealt a serious blow to the American whaling industry, already in decline.
Commercial whaling in the United States dates to the 17th century in New England. The industry peaked in 1846–1852, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, sent out its last whaler, the John R. Mantra, in 1927. The Whaling industry was engaged with the production of three different raw materials: whale oil, spermaceti oil, and whalebone.
Catching peaked in 1902, when 1,305 whales were caught to produce 40,000 barrels of oil. Whale hunting had largely declined by 1910, when only 170 whales were caught. A ban on whaling was imposed by the Althing in 1915. In 1935 an Icelandic company established a whaling station that shut down after only five seasons.
Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of whales. [1] Oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train-oil , which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear drop"). Sperm oil , a special kind of oil obtained from the head cavities of sperm whales , differs chemically from ordinary whale oil: it is composed mostly of liquid wax .
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. [1]
To the left, the black-hulled whaling ships. To the right, the red-hulled whale-watching ship. Iceland, 2011. Number of whales killed through time. Whaling is the hunting of whales for their usable products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that was important in the Industrial Revolution.
Flensing is the removing of the blubber or outer integument of whales, separating it from the animal's meat. Processing the blubber (the subcutaneous fat) into whale oil was the key step that transformed a whale carcass into a stable, transportable commodity. It was an important part of the history of whaling.
Oil spill. An oil spill is the release of a liquid petroleum hydrocarbon into the environment, especially the marine ecosystem, due to human activity, and is a form of pollution. The term is usually given to marine oil spills, where oil is released into the ocean or coastal waters, but spills may also occur on land.