page_title: Whaling in the United Kingdom
section_title: The southern whale fishery
hierarchical_section_title: Whaling in the United Kingdom / The southern whale fishery
caption_attribution_description: English: South Sea Whale Fisher. Ships Amelia Wilson and Castor off the Island of Buru
context_page_description: Commercial whaling in Britain began late in the 16th century and continued after the 1801 formation of the United Kingdom and intermittently until the middle of the 20th century.
  The trade was broadly divided into two branches. The northern fishery involved hunting the bowhead whale off the coast of Greenland and adjacent islands. The southern fishery was activity anywhere else, including in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and off the Antarctic. The Sperm whale, the Southern right whale and Humpback whale were the main target species in South Sea whaling. The industry went on to become a profitable national enterprise and a source of skilled mariners for the Royal Navy in times of war.
  Modern whaling, using factory ships and catchers fitted with bow-mounted cannon that fired explosive harpoons, continued into the 20th century and was mainly focused on the Antarctic and nearby islands where shore stations had also been established. The collapse of whale stocks in the 1960s, due to overfishing, saw Britain abandon the industry after three and a half centuries of involvement.
context_section_description: Sperm whale oil - a valuable commodity worth two or three times more than northern right whale oil - had been imported from Britain’s New England colonies till the American War of Independence curtailed supply. This prompted British entrepreneurs, particularly those who had previously imported the oil, to send their own ships into the South Seas to obtain this high-value commodity. Ten whalers left Britain in 1775, including nine from London, and crossed the equator into the South Atlantic in search of sperm whales. London alone sent 76 whaling vessels into the south Atlantic between 1776 and 1783. British vessels went on to make around 2,500 voyages whaling and sealing voyages to the South Seas between 1775 and 1859. These voyages were made by over 930 vessels owned by 300 principal shipowners. Some of these vessels in the South Atlantic also engaged in clandestine trading on the coast of Brazil. A group of American Quaker whalers, led by William Rotch, senior (1734-1828) of Nantucket, then the hub of the American whaling industry, sought to evade British naval blockades of American ports, and the high duty on imported foreign whale oil, by relocating, first to France, and then to Britain. The Rotch family owned at least ten British South Sea whalers between 1775 and 1794.
  The British ships initially “fished” in the mid and south Atlantic, spreading into the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the 1780s. The government bounty of forty shillings a ton paid to northern whalers was extended to the southern fishery in 1776. A heavy import duty that applied to oil imported from other countries was not lifted even after hostilities between Britain and America ceased in 1783 and was an additional incentive for shipowners to remain involved in the trade. The first British whaler to enter the Pacific was the Emilia, owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons and commanded by Captain James Shields. This vessel sailed from London in September 1788 and fished the Peru Grounds before returning to London in March 1790 with 139 tuns of sperm whale oil.
  International conflict became inevitable, spilling over all the continents of the New World. Spain resented the intrusion of British vessels into the Pacific, especially when they engaged in clandestine trading at Spanish colonies in South America. In 1789, rising tension over the issue saw Spanish warships, thousands of miles away on the west coast of what is now Canada, seize British vessels engaged in the maritime fur trade in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. The resulting Nootka Crisis was an international incident that brought both nations to the brink of war. War was averted but tensions remained high. Australia was also in their sights. In 1793 a Spanish naval captain with recent knowledge of the area submitted a plan to invade New South Wales, destroy Sydney and carry away the 7,000 colonists to labour in Spain's own South American colonies.
  British whaling continued in the Pacific, with occasional setbacks along the way. These include the Anglo-French War (1778-1783), the Anglo-Spanish War (1796-1808) and the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. These conflicts forced vessels to travel to and from the whaling grounds in convoys protected by Royal Navy warships. This was not always enough and in 1797 a number of the British whalers were captured when they called at ports on the coast of Chile and Peru for supplies, unaware that war had broken out between Spain and Britain. The US warship Essex captured a dozen British whalers in the Pacific in 1812, the loss in ships and cargo estimated at $2.5 million. As well as a problem, these conflicts also presented opportunities for British whalers. Many of them sailed for the Pacific with Letters of Marque obtained from the government, allowing them to attack, capture and plunder enemy-owned trading vessels.
  Another significant barrier to expansion were Crown monopolies granted to the East India Company and the South Sea Company which restricted British maritime activity in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to ships owned or licensed by the Comp
caption: "South Sea Whale Fishery, Amelia Wilson and Castor off the Island of Buru," a coloured acquatint engraving by T. Sutherland of a painting by William John Huggins, 1825.
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