The Transformation of the World (85 page)

Similar stories could be told about many other animals. The nineteenth century was for all of them—as it was for the North American bison—an age of defenselessness and mass slaughter. The rhinoceros was seen as a special challenge by European big-game hunters. But until very recently it was demand in Asia rather than Europe that proved its undoing, since both the Muslim East and the Far East valued the substance of its horn and were prepared to pay astronomical prices to obtain it. The popularity of ostrich-feather hats meant that this African wild bird began to be raised on farms; this at least saved it from extinction. The pattern was the same all over the world: ruthless violence against wild animals in the nineteenth century, then a gradual change of mind among early ecologists, followed by British colonial bureaucrats. In the perspective of human history, the twentieth century is rightly considered the century of violence. From the point of view of tigers and leopards, elephants and eagles, it looks rather more favorable—as the age when humans tried to reach a modus vivendi with creatures that for millennia in the past, before the invention of firearms, they had faced in a relationship of approximately equal chances.

Naturally there were other reasons for hunting, apart from the pursuit of profit. Big-game hunters became cultural heroes. The ability to tackle a grizzly bear in the wild seemed to concentrate the highest qualities of the North American character. Around the turn of the century, President Theodore Roosevelt went to great trouble to present himself as its embodiment; big-game hunts for the benefit of the media took him all the way to Kilimanjaro. Gentlemen hunted, but settlers could profit from their natural surroundings and were nearly always farmers and hunters rolled into one. At least in the early nineteenth century, large predators were still so common in all of the world's settler zones that pioneers were well advised to protect their property.
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Moby-Dick

The fishing of cod or herring was more like sea harvesting than a clever stalking operation, but whaling was one maritime labor in the nineteenth century that did not lack the character of the hunt. One of the epic feats of the age, it was also a kind of industry. The Basques had hunted whales as far back as the Middle Ages, honing special techniques that the Dutch and English adopted in the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the seas near Spitzbergen were so empty of aquatic fauna that whaling had become unprofitable there, and so the attention shifted to Greenland.
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As for the North Americans, they entered the fray in 1715 from the port of Nantucket in Massachusetts, concentrating at first on the great sperm whale in the Atlantic. In 1798 American whalers appeared for the first time in the Pacific, and over the next three decades they pushed into nearly every important whaling ground in the world.
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Whaling reached its peak internationally between 1820 and 1860, with the United States as the leading nation after the War of 1812. By 1846 the US whaling fleet, mostly based in New England ports that vigorously competed with one another for precedence, consisted of no fewer than 722 vessels. Half of these hunted the great sperm whale, whose blubber (
spermaceti
) inside its giant head was needed to produce oil for the world's best and most expensive candles.

Whaling was a global business, with a complex geography and chronology determined by, among other things, the large number of whale species. In the South Seas, sperm whaling grounds were found off the coast of Chile, where the great white whale Mocha Dick (the inspiration for Herman Melville's literary monster) sowed terror in the years around 1810.
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At that time, international whaling centered on a stretch of ocean between Chile and New Zealand and in the seas near Hawaii. The discovery of new grounds triggered “oil wars,” reminiscent of the Californian or Australian gold rush, between individual ships or whole fleets. Australia was especially successful for a time in 1830.
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In the western Arctic (Alaska, Bering Straits, etc.) in 1848, the location of the now almost vanished Greenland whale was one of the most important finds of the century, since no other species produces such high-quality whalebone. It led to the commercial entry of the United States into the maritime North, mainly from New
Bedford, Massachusetts (Nantucket's rival), and the backup port of San Francisco; the American territorial interest in Alaska would scarcely have developed without this background. A turning point came in 1871, when the greater part of the US Arctic whaling fleet was lost in pack ice.
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At the same time, the main grounds were already approaching exhaustion, and the 1870s were generally a decade of crisis for American whalers. Temporary relief—though not for the whales—was provided on the demand side by the new wasp's tail ideal of feminine beauty, which popularized elastic corsets stiffened with whalebone stays. This made it worthwhile to sail even farther out to sea.
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Whaling was not an Anglo-American specialism. New Englanders did certainly hunt in the South Pacific, to keep Parisian ladies supplied with candles and girdles. But until the late 1860s Frenchmen pitched in too, operating mainly from the port of Le Havre. Their hunting grounds stretched as far as Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand—regions where as late as the 1840s whalers lying at anchor were sometimes set upon and killed by the locals. Nor was that the only danger. Between 1817 and 1868, French whaling expeditions ended nearly 6 percent of cases with the loss of a ship, mostly during a storm, yet caught no more than 12,000 to 13,000 whales (a fairly modest total if one considers that, before the Second World War, 50,000 whales a year were being slaughtered).
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The Moby-Dick age of the duel between man and whale, in which the animal opponent still stood at least a minimal chance, ended with the introduction of harpoon guns and rockets. By the 1880s open-boat lancing was a thing of the past. Kept up by only a few romantics, it had become especially difficult because the clever sperm whale avoided coming too close to the boat. The Norwegian Svend Foyn ushered in this post-Ahab whaling era in 1860, when he invented the onboard harpoon gun capable of firing 104-millimeter shots that exploded in the body of the whale—more an artillery weapon than a hunting device.
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The steamships deployed after 1880, though initially doubling construction costs, added a further element to the unequal contest. But even from the whaler's point of view, the new killing techniques were a dubious advance, since numerous grounds were totally depleted by 1900.
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Many whale species were close to extinction, while others had withdrawn to more remote parts of the oceans. In any case, new plant and fossil oils had come into use, making obsolete the demand for many whale products. (As early as 1858, farsighted people in the New Bedford whaling business had founded a factory for the distillation of petroleum.
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) How whaling soon recovered from this trough is another story.

The only non-Western nation that pursued whaling independently of Western influences was Japan. Activity began there at more or less the same time as in the Atlantic, and toward the end of the sixteenth century many coastal villages were literally feeding themselves off it. From the late seventeenth century, there was a switch from harpooning to the method of catching whales (mostly of the smaller and faster species) in large nets off the side of boats. The processing of the whale, none of which went to waste, took place ashore rather than onboard (as it
did in the United States). After American and British whalers in 1820 discovered rich hunting grounds between Hawaii and Japan, hundreds of Japanese whalers were soon putting out to sea, and in 1823 it was reported that Japanese officials had boarded a foreign whaling ship. In 1841, in a case that became known all over the country, a shipwrecked fisherman's son, Nakahama Manjirō, was rescued by an American whaling ship; the captain took the boy home with him and looked after his education. This first Japanese student in the United States excelled at college, specializing in navigation and eventually (in 1848) becoming an officer on a whaling ship. After various adventures, homesickness led him back in 1851 to Japan, where the authorities, eagerly taking the rare opportunity to learn more about the outside world, questioned him for months on end. Nakahama became a teacher at the clan school in Tosa, and some of his students would later become leaders of the Meiji Renewal. In 1854 the shogun used him as a translator in the negotiations with Commodore Perry, the commander of the American flotilla that “opened up” Japan. Nakahama also translated a number of foreign books on navigation, astronomy, and shipbuilding and acted as a government adviser for the construction of a modern Japanese navy.
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The rapid expansion of whaling was a key element in the opening of Japan in 1853–54, after centuries of self-imposed isolation. The US government was eager to protect American whalers stranded there from official sanctions, as well as to provide for the bunkering of its ships in Japanese waters.
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The Japanese were among the first to adopt Svend Foyn's unsporting methods of shooting whales, but it was the Russians, not the Americans or Norwegians, who brought them to the attention of people in Japan. This, too, would eventually have foreign policy implications, since it was only Japan's victory in the 1905 war with Russia that drove this major rival out of its territorial waters and handed Japanese whalers a monopoly in the grounds between Taiwan in the South and Sakhalin in the North.
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Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick
(1851), one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, rooted the world of whaling deep in the minds of Western readers at the time, and even deeper in those of posterity. The work contains long, exhaustively detailed passages about whales; Melville knew them inside out. Having spent four years on whalers as a young man, he had firsthand experience of their social world, and there were real-life models for the White Whale, Captain Ahab, and various whaling tragedies. The most famous case, which Melville had closely studied, was that of the Nantucket-based
Essex
that was rammed and sunk by a raging sperm whale on November 20, 1820, thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. Twenty crew members managed to escape in three small boats, and eight of them survived for ninety long days by eating the flesh of seven comrades. In 1980 a newly found report by one of the men in question confirmed and supplemented the eye-witness account of Owen Chase that Melville had used in
Moby Dick
.
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The drama occurred four years after a similar incident of cannibalism, when only fifteen men had survived out of the 149 shipwrecked off West Africa from the French frigate
Méduse
, immortalized by the
painter Theodore Géricault who finished his famous
The Raft of the Medusa
only three years after the event.

Faust: Land Reclamation

If whaling and deep-sea fishing involve an aggressive relationship to the ocean and its animal inhabitants, as well as representing a maritime way of life centered on fish and whales, the opposite extreme of a defensive attitude to the sea may be found in land reclamation projects. The taming of great rivers, such as the Upper Rhine beginning in 1818
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or the Mississippi a century later, was spectacular enough. A source of even greater fascination was the “Faustian” project of wresting land from the sea for permanent settlement. It caught the attention of one of the world's greatest poets. Goethe, who had already made a study of hydraulic engineering in Venice in 1786, kept himself
au fait
with the Bremen port works in 1826–29 and turned the aged Faust into a land reclamation entrepreneur on a grand scale:

Kluger Herren kühne Knechte

Gruben Gräben, dämmten ein,

Schmälerten des Meeres Rechte

Herrn an seiner Statt zu sein.

Clever Lords set their bold servants

Digging ditches, building dikes,

To gain the mastery of ocean,

Diminishing its natural rights.
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The poet also saw that such projects required the sacrifice of workers' lives (“Human blood was forced to flow, / At night rose the sound of pain”). Dike construction, the draining of swamps, and the digging of canals were among the harshest exertions of the early modern period, usually organized by government departments and often performed by armies of convicts or prisoners of war (Turks, for example, in some of the German lands). The twentieth century had a special passion for dam construction and drained as much as a sixth of the wetlands on the earth's surface.
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It also witnessed a continuation of major coastal projects, such as the land reclamation in Tokyo Bay (begun in 1870) and the mouth of the Yangtze, as well as the enclosing of the Zuiderzee, planned in 1890 but tackled only after 1920, which would eventually expand the territory of the Netherlands by more than tenth.

In the nineteenth century too, people were active in many parts of the world on this ecological frontier. In France, for instance, all of the major fens had been drained and converted to pasture by 1860—a prerequisite for the rise in meat consumption as its society grew more prosperous. Flood defenses and land reclamation remained an existential necessity, especially in the case of the Netherlands, where drainage had been organized since the Middle Ages and a protection
system had been in place since the early sixteenth century. Here farmers were required to pay taxes, not to perform labor services. This promoted the commercialization of agriculture, while also helping to form a mobile proletariat of dike laborers. The decisive technological advances dated back to the sixteenth, not the nineteenth, century; the high point of drainage activity between 1610 and 1640 was rarely surpassed. Between 1500 and 1815 a total of 250,000 hectares were obtained in the Netherlands—one-third of the land under cultivation.
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Windmill improvements raised pumping efficiency. Whereas efforts in the eighteenth century focused on controlling the flow of the Rhine and the Waal, the nineteenth century saw a new burst of land reclamation. All in all, 350,000 hectares were brought under cultivation between 1833 and 1911, of which 100,000 hectares were gained through dike construction and drainage.
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In 1825, as a result of devastating floods, coastal defenses and the upkeep of dikes gained priority for the first time over land reclamation.
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Another novelty was that—as in China for the past two thousand years—hydraulic engineering became a central government responsibility, instead of being left to provincial authorities and private individuals.