whalers and whales essays

whalers and whales essays Imagine a creature roughly ten times as long as your height, and about five hundred times your weight. Now imagine attempting to kill this animal with nothing more than a stick and with a sharpened steal tip while it violently dashes through the ocean beneath your feet. This sort of event was not uncommon for an ordinary man aboard and American whaling ship. They lived a life of unbearably long fits of boredom, of which could be broken up momentarily by life-threatening danger. The life style of whaling is so startling, that a classic American novel was written about the subject called Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. The book is fictional, but tells many truths about the lives of sailors, and the lives of the whales they hunted. Although whales are often mistakenly thought of as fish, whaling should never be compared to fishing. In truth, whaling was not just a job, but a war fought not only against giant beasts, but against fierce elements and time. American whaling did not begin with the colonists, but rather with the people who already inhabited the region prier to colonization. Native Americans are the people responsible for the beginnings of whaling in America. They only hunted whales inside the bays however, and did not share the more modern uses for whales. The Indians used them more for food, and their bones for tools (Currie 8). The English began hunting whales in America as early as the sixteen hundreds (Stimac). The whaling industry was an extremely profitable business, and this was due to how valuable whales actually were. Whales were hunted for many reasons, but the chief reason was for their oil. The oil produced by whales is created by melting the layer of blubber that covers their body. Once melted, the oil is a very precious fuel that was used to make candles and power lamps. Sperm whales were the most prized of all, because of the more wholesome oil found in their heads, called spermaceti. Whal...