Whaling Era

The whaling era runs from medieval Basque coastal hunting through the open-boat Yankee whaling of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth-century pelagic factory fleets that nearly exterminated the great whales. Sperm-whale oil lit lamps and lubricated machinery, and baleen stiffened corsets, sustaining ports such as Nantucket and New Bedford. Steam catchers and the stern-slipway factory ship industrialized the kill after 1900 until the 1986 IWC moratorium. Its material culture survives in museums and in scrimshaw.