Chapter 8 - The End of the Northern Fishery in the late Nineteenth Century

Summary

With the run-down of both Northern and Southern fisheries, the second half of the nineteenth century experienced the same sort of marking-time as had occurred in the late seventeenth century. As a consequence the period is relatively unimportant compared with the great exertions before 1840 and the vast expansion after 1900, and it is only necessary here to outline the main lines of development. None of them led on to the modern industry, and important though British whaling may have been to individual persons and places, it had already departed from the mainstream of whaling and was sailing up a backwater as dangerous and ruinous as any in Baffin Bay. No amount of incentive, capital investment, technical advance or human bravery could save the Arctic trade, but it fought its painful death-struggle for three-quarters of a century, periodically encouraged by remissions that eased the pressure and sometimes brought a measure of prosperity.

Although whaling never actually ceased, except when frustrated by appalling conditions, there was no improvement on the position obtaining in the mid-1840s. Changes favouring the trade were slow to appear, and for a long time most developments worked against rather than for the whaling men. The final triumph of gas lighting in towns was self-evident; the eventual triumph of mineral oil in domestic lamps and industrial usage was inevitable. There were few industrial processes for which whale oil was uniquely suitable, and the forerunners of applied chemistry were already turning their attention to substitutes even for these. Against this sort of background entrepreneurs in the middle of the century withdrew their capital and their ships, following the lead of men such as the Gees of Hull, who made their mark and some of their money in whaling before going into general shipowning and steamship-owning in particular. In the years following the American Revolution shipowners had seen whaling as a valuable employment for ships. Now, with huge changes taking place in the shipping world, it seemed a sensible time to move in the opposite direction, and one after another of the Hull owners withdrew from the trade and came to terms with their port's position as the centre of the seed-crushing industry.