How Humans Fought The Biggest Creature On Earth

There she blows, over there! The scream cuts through the salty air as your ship transforms into a war machine. Three fragile boats are lowered into the waves, each packed with six men. You're on a hunt and your sweaty hand clenches the harpoon. An enormous shadow bursts through the waves. It rises above you and comes crashing down towards the boat. You're not hunting for food. You're risking your life for a liquid treasure worth $200,000. Whale oil trapped inside the largest animals to ever live. Ancient sea masters Nobody really knows how humans first got the idea of battling whales. Probably ancient coastal people stumbled upon whales stranded ashore. But to them, these titans were rare treasure chests overflowing with meat to eat and bones to craft into tools. Refusing to leave such fortune to chance, they paddled out and tried their luck. Towards the eighth century, whaling turns commercial. Along the Bay of Biscay, the Basques build stone watchtowers. The moment a dark shape breaks the surface, signal fires blaze, and drums thunder across the coast. One shoved small boats into the waves armed with hand thrown harpoons. Their target is the North Atlantic right whale, an 18-meter and 90-ton gentle giant who's gloriously slow and prefers coastal waters. While most whales sink when they die, right whales stay afloat. The right whale to hunt. Their massive mouths contain hundreds of Berlin plates, brisly sivs made from keratin. It's the plastic of its time, shapeable into anything from baskets to corset stays and armour. The expensive meat makes up a third of a whale's weight, while half of it is blubber, a thick oily shield that hides the real prize. When heated, the blubber can be rendered into precious whale oil. It's the Swiss army knife of early industry. It lubricates machinery, waterproof ships when mixed with tar, and helps make soap and paint. The most importantly, whale oil burns brighter and cleaner than anything else available at the time. The baskets turn wailing into a finely tuned enterprise. They improve equipment, perfect the art of processing whales and flood Europe with whale products, while other nations watch with envy. By the 17th century, the English and Dutch launch their own wailing fleets. They hire bass consultants and soon the secrets of whale hunting spread across European powers and into their colonies. Americans hijack wailing. Life in colonial New England is as harsh as its winters and stony soil, but in the Atlantic enormous shadows glide along the coast as right whales follow their migratory roots. And the settlers know the old world pays handsomely for such treasures. Shore wailing becomes their first get rich quick scheme. A single good sized whale earns each crew member as much as a land-based worker makes in six months. But it's unpredictable. Some years, the crew kills 100 whales, other years drag on for months without a catch. Still, wailing becomes a valuable source of trade. Meanwhile, London is swelling into one of the world's great metropolises. And by the 1740s, 15,000 street lamps burn with colonial whale oil there. It takes half a whale per night to turn London's dark streets into a flickering sea of light. But just like the Basques had learned centuries earlier, the right whales near Shore become scarcer with each passing year, just as demand is exploding. Around this time, a wailing boat is swept far off shore outside Nantucket. Hours drag on in uncertainty until finally, the crew brings down a new kind of giant. The 18-meter 45-ton sperm whale. In their heads, these Leviathan's carry nearly 2,000 litres of spermaceti, the highest quality oil on the planet. Milky gold and so pure, it burns without smoke. Sperm whales become the ultimate prize monsters. A single large sperm whale can yield oil worth around $200,000 today. It's a fortune in the 1850s and 2-3 times more valuable than right whale oil. One barrel can buy you almost 3 acres of farmland. Then again, outfitting a wailing expedition costs $30,000, 10 times more than an average farm. A third of voyages lose money and some never return. But getting smashed by furious whales is what truly makes sailors blood-run cold. The hunt. Before we tackle the beast, let's briefly interrupt ourselves and shout out to our great sponsor, Odo. Odo is an all-in-one management software that offers more than 45 applications designed to help you run your business every day. From home, no sharp knives or danger to life necessary. You can, for example, manage your projects, create a website, send invoices, all your applications are centralized on one single platform, no more switching between different softwares. Plus all the apps communicate with one another, your work just flows and you get more done. When you're ready to scale up, Odo adapts to your needs and you can simply add applications. You get access to all available applications starting at $24.90 a month. With Odo, you can stay flexible and focus on what you love most, your business. Just try it out. The link is in the description. We'll wait but don't take too long. The hunt is about to begin. The planks grow as your shipmates strain at their ores, rowing straight towards the beast. The plan is simple and absolutely insane. Row close enough to touch this monster, hurl a harpoon into its flesh and hope it doesn't take it personally. You recognise the creature from its scars and it remembers you. The harpoon bites deep into blood. The whale turns into pure, terrified rage. Your boat lurches forwards like you've been hitched to a steam engine, spray blinding you as you're dragged across the ocean in what whalers call an end-tucket sleigh ride. It goes on for an hour, then four. Your knuckles are white, gripping the gunnel as waves crash over the bow. The men pray and curse. Eight hours into the hunt, your exhausted eyes lose focus. The ropes lash across the deck like they're alive. The ones let get caught and they yanked into the ocean, swallowed by the waves. You hope it's quick. Sailors tell stories of other whales rushing in to defend their kin, dragging men down where lungs are crushed like tin cans. But you're still here and the whale is finally slowing, exhausted from pulling your floating death trap across the ocean. Now comes the killing. You have to get close to stab this giant with a three-meter lance, going for the massive lungs or heart. Blood starts flowing from the spout like a crimson geese, but the whale is still fighting. Fifteen blows later, you find the mark. The whale starts swimming in tighter and tighter circles, vomiting half-digested squid until it finally rolls over in a spreading pool of gourd. And your belly getting started. The floating factory. You tow the enormous carcass back to the ship where the crew slammed down chains to secure their prize. The ship creaks as the dead giant bobs in the swiles beside you. Now, the bushery can begin. It takes days to process 45 tons of dead whale into liquid money. You leap across the blood-slick blubber to ax through the thick flesh of the head. Within lies the spermaceti chamber, the vault of the most precious whale oil. When you help peel away the blubber, 20 centimeters thick and tough as leather. You cut two-meter wide, blanket pieces, weighing a tonne and haul them up with pulleys that strain the ship's mass. Your ship lurches as you cut it free to release the weight. Next comes the rendering. You fire up the try-works, brick furnaces built right on the wooden deck. In massive iron pots, the blubber gets boiled down into oil. The smoke is so thick you can barely breathe. They say you can smell a whaling ship from 30 kilometers away, burning tar, rotting flesh and the stink of death. The work continues around the clock. Sharks are drawn by the bloody waste you're dumping overboard. Men slip on the greasy decks and break boats get crushed by swinging chunks of blubber or scalded by boiling oil. It may be one of the most gruesome jobs in existence. The stench, the blood, the endless toil, it wears you down fast. Most who sign on quickly regret is nearly a third end up deserting. You are holding on to the dream of coming home rich, but the odds aren't great. The business of blood. When it's all over, the ship returns with dozens of barrels of the finest oil on earth. For the 1850s, whaling has become the fifth biggest industry in the US, with 700 whaling ships, three quarters of the world's fleet employing 70,000 people. In 1853 alone, American whalers kill over 8,000 whales, making 360,000 barrels of oil and all by-- half a billion in today's dollars. Voyages grow longer and months turn into years as ships push into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Each voyage demands bigger investments and whaling turns into a venture capital industry. Crews work for shares instead of wages while forced to buy over-price supplies on credit. Many come home in debt and a lucky few rise through the ranks. It's the American dream, they say, but it feels like an illusion. The real money flows upwards to ship owners and merchants. Fishing villages turn into global commercial hubs. In New England, the port of New Bedford rises as one of the richest towns in America. Wailing is unusually diverse for its time, but deeply exploitative. Much of the labor comes from Native Americans and Black sailors. Native communities become dependent on English goods while crews of colour are pushed into the hardest and lowest paying work. This pattern of inequality still echoes today. The blood of Wales helps fuel the rise of American industrial power. The machine age of killing. Until in 1859, a breakthrough changes everything. Steam-powered rigs start commercially pumping petroleum. Suddenly caracene, lampole refined from crude oil, is cheap and seemingly limitless. Oh, the following decades, the wailing industry faces dramatic changes. Nantucket, once the heart of global wailing, sees its last ship limp home in 1870. The age of sale is ending. The age of engine has begun. And it's ushered in by blood. In the 18th and 19th centuries, 300,000 sperm whales alone were slaughtered. And they still can't catch a break. Although caracene conquered lighting, whale oil is still one of the best lubricants on earth. Never freezes, spoils or quits. The machinery powering industrialisation needs it, so ironically petroleum soon increases demand for whale oil. Norwegians seize the opportunity with cheaper labour and new technology. They set up wailing stations on islands at the edge of Antarctica. Hand-throened spears are gone, and now explosive tipped harpoons fire from steam-powered catch-a-boats for instant kills. The fast ships can chase down even blue whales, the largest animals that have ever lived. Normally, most dead whale sink, but now, air compressors pump them full of gas, so even the biggest ones float like massive boys. No whale is safe anymore. In the arms race leading up to World War One, whale oil is also used to produce explosives. But the true carnage comes after World War Two when Japan and the Soviet Union also join the slaughter. They called it the Whaling Olympics. The same industrial might that once built tanks and bombers now build factory ships. The largest one is 210 meters long, capable of processing dozens of whales in a day. In 1964, 82,000 whales are reported killed, the largest animal slaughter by tons in human history. The war we almost won. The ocean couldn't sustain this mechanized assault. Sperm whales fall from around 1.5 million to 800,000 and the even larger fin whales from almost 800,000 to 100,000. Blue whale populations, which had numbered around 340,000 before industrial whaling, collapsed by 98% to less than 5,000. It isn't until 1975 that the reality of industrial whaling hits the global spotlight. In the North Pacific, environmental activists steer tiny inflatable boats straight between Soviet whaling ships and their targets. The images of fragile human bodies standing in the path of steel harpoons spread like wildfire. Over night, the public turns against the commercial slaughter. Across America and Europe, people support a new cause, save the whales. Finally, the International Whaling Commission votes for a global moratorium on commercial whaling. Only Norway, Iceland and Japan never sign the global ban that takes effect in 1986, basically ending 400 years of industrial whale hunting. It's a different world now and looking back, the story of whaling seems bloody and barbaric, but it also lit homes, powered machines and built the scaffolding of modernity. A staggering and also concerning display of what humanity is capable of. The power to reshape the world with progress and destruction always side by side. [Music]