ON 2 December 1853, Orson Shattuck set sail from his home port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to hunt for whales. Over the next three years, he and the crew of the Eliza F. Mason would travel as far afield as the south Pacific, the Arctic Ocean and the Sea of Japan. During that time, Shattuck witnessed fighting, flogging and desertion. There were accidental fires on board, and a sail-ripping collision with another boat. One man had his leg amputated after breaking it in a fall. Another got a bucket of water thrown in his face for sleeping on the night watch. A sperm whale tried to eat one of the whaling boats. On 12 May 1856, Shattuck himself very nearly died when his steering oar broke and he was catapulted into the sea.
We know all this because Shattuck was the ship’s log-keeper. More than 5000 logbooks and journals exist from the era of North American commercial whaling. They give a remarkable insight into life at sea, but also meticulous detail on which whale species were present where and when. By digitising some of these treasures, a new project aims to use the hunters’ records to shed light on historical populations and migration patterns – and so inform conservation efforts today.
European settlers began whaling off North America’s east coast in the mid-17th century, moving into deeper waters from the 1720s as coastal whale numbers declined. In the 1860s, the US whaling industry began to shrink in the face of foreign competition and reduced demand for whale oil. But continued unsustainable hunting eventually pushed some species to the brink of extinction, prompting a voluntary moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
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From the 1700s to 1920, a period that covers the heyday of large-scale whaling, there were some 15,000 voyages, typically with 20 to 35 men aboard each ship. The logbook, in some instances illustrated to detail individual hunts, was the official record. “Every single voyage has some element of drama to it,” says Michael Dyer at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Sickness was rife and accidents were common. “People were forever dying,” says Dyer. Often, logbook entries recounting deaths are outlined in black, or have a coffin symbol stamped in the margin.
“Every single whaling voyage had some element of drama to it“
When whales were spied, crew members would lower up to five small boats into the water, with six people commonly aboard each: five to row and one to steer. The steerer often harpooned the whale. Sometimes the log-keeper noted that the crew “struck and drew” or “struck and sunk”: the harpoon didn’t hold fast and the whale either swam away or sank, fatally wounded, to the sea floor. Other times the animal “took the line”, swimming off with harpoon and rope still attached. If a whale was successfully harpooned, it would be drawn alongside the main vessel, where the crew would begin cutting it into pieces to bring on board. By the late 18th century, on-board cauldrons were used to boil blubber into oil for storage in casks. Whalebone, if kept, was cleaned and bundled up for sale.
Logbooks and journals began to attract the interest of collectors towards the end of the commercial whaling era. Some were eventually donated to museums or historical societies, including the New Bedford Whaling Museum. There, archivists and volunteers have painstakingly digitised more than 3300 logbooks dating right back to the 1600s, allowing researchers to mine their riches.
Independent researcher Tim Smith is a pioneer of this approach. A member of the International Whaling Commission’s scientific committee off and on since the 1970s, he came to doubt the methods being used to derive historical population estimates. So, in 2000, he began volunteering for a subgroup of the IWC focusing on historical ecology, and collaborating with the international Census of Marine Life to see whether whaling logbooks could help. They proved to be a huge untapped resource – but one with inherent limitations.
“You have to look at the data as minimalist,” says Smith. Some logbooks only record whales that were killed, whereas others include whales sighted. Ships were not routinely equipped with devices that could precisely measure longitude until the 19th century, so logbooks from before then are of limited use. However, locations in the later records have proved to be quite reliable. We know this because when ships met at sea, log-keepers on both vessels recorded the locations. That has allowed Smith and others to cross-check coordinates found in multiple logbooks and estimate any errors. “It’s the first time we’d really had a sense of how good the navigation was,” says Smith, “and .”
Using these estimates, he and his colleagues have generated of sperm whales, right whales, bowheads, humpbacks and grey whales from the 18th to 20th centuries (see “Where the wild things were”). The logbooks have given us a particularly valuable window, however, on the fate of the three species of right whale – north Atlantic, north Pacific and southern – which were all devastated by centuries of whaling.
Right whales were easy targets: they earned their name because they were considered the “right” ones to kill. Unlike some other species, they floated conveniently after death. Females used sheltered bays for birthing and swam slowly with unweaned calves, making them a focus for hunts.
Mysterious movements
Before the 1830s, North American and European whalers mainly hunted in the Atlantic. As populations dwindled there, they shifted their attention elsewhere. The logbooks reveal that between 1830 and 1850, right whale numbers declined precipitously first around New Zealand, then in the eastern north Pacific, followed by the western north Pacific, and finally in the Gulf of Alaska.
Smith and his team have been able to reconstruct a surprising . Previously, only the locations of kill sites were known, but by analysing logbooks and other sources, the researchers have identified unexpected migratory patterns. Instead of making long journeys as assumed, the whales undertook a local seasonal migration from the Auckland Islands south of New Zealand to waters north of the country, then east to oceanic ridges before circling back.
Using Bayesian statistics to account for uncertainties in modelling population dynamics, Smith and his colleagues have also of these whales. Their analysis suggests that before widespread commercial whaling, southern right whales around New Zealand numbered somewhere between 29,000 and 47,000 – a range corroborated by the genetic diversity we observe today. Following 19th-century harvesting, they almost disappeared, with mature females plummeting to 40 or fewer individuals in the early 20th century. None were seen between 1928 and 1963. And although numbers are now slowly recovering, the population still hovers at no more than 12 per cent of pre-exploitation levels.
Morgana Vighi at the University of Barcelona, Spain, has also used logbooks to track the fate of southern right whales in the south Atlantic. Looking at entries from whaling grounds off the coast of Argentina and Brazil, she charted a decline between 1776 and 1923, as well as seasonal north-south and inshore-offshore movements. “In the early period of whaling, the sightings were spread along the coastline of South America,” says Vighi. Now things appear different. Chemical signatures she has found in modern bone samples from whales living off Brazil and Argentina suggest that , splitting what was a single population into northerly and southerly groups.
At the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, Ana Rodrigues and her colleagues have estimated . “The logbooks are an amazing data source,” she says. Her team has concluded that before commercial whaling, the former numbered between 9000 and 21,000, and the latter between 15,000 and 34,000. So intensively were north Pacific right whales hunted that the population crashed after 1840. “In 10 years, they nearly exhausted the entire stock,” says Rodrigues.
“It’s hard to fathom the devastating success of whaling,” says Vighi, “when you think about the technology – a few men with a very small boat, managing sometimes to take three whales in a day.” The logbooks lay bare the scale of the slaughter, and Smith, Vighi and Rodrigues hope that these records will aid in today’s conservation efforts. Information about regions that were historically important to whales, former numbers, and clues to their migratory patterns could help calculate target population sizes, protect critical habitats and assess progress towards recovery. Perhaps the devastation of the past can inform the recovery of the future, as whale populations begin to rebound after centuries of hunting.
Frozen in time
Historical logbooks from whaling ships don’t just hold unique information about their quarry (see main story). In the 19th century, with whale populations declining coastally and in warmer waters, many whaling expeditions voyaged to the frigid waters of the Arctic. While doing so, their crews carefully noted weather, wind and sea ice – observations that are now being tapped to model historical sea ice, probe its ecological role over time, and understand weather variability in the past.
The project, called Old Weather: Whaling, is providing valuable information to help forecast the effects of climate change. And it’s not just scientists and historians who are contributing to the effort. Human eyes are far superior to digital readers in making sense of the handwritten logs, so researchers are seeking the assistance of citizen scientists. Many of the logbooks are online at for anyone to view and transcribe.
This article appeared in print under the headline “There she blew!”
