Free Big Miracle by Tom Rose

outside really had a good sense what life was really like before the explorer’s arrival, the benchmarks for measuring decline could only start from the early nineteenth century.
    Whaling was America’s first great global industry. The explosion of commercial whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was no cheap trick, changing and shaping the development of the young United States like no other single industry. Whaling ships were state of the art, and played a central role in America’s war of independence. Whalers provided products that profoundly improved the lives of everyday Americans, generating the huge capital required to fuel America’s burgeoning Industrial Revolution.
    The environmental narrative, increasingly accepted as the only narrative, accepts almost as a given that all our modern ailments derive from the changes spawned by the Industrial Revolution, namely the move from water to coal as the economy’s primary source of fuel. But like most stories, this one has two sides, and in this story, equating the bad with the good is being generous to the bad. The benefits of industrialization far outweighed its costs and not just to humans but also to the environment. The Industrial Revolution’s success was in no case more vivid than the story of the whale itself.
    The Industrial Revolution saw both the expansion of commercial whaling and also the end of commercial whaling. In nearly destroying the species, the Industrial Revolution paved the way for whales not just to recover but to flourish as never before. When the Industrial Revolution started in the late eighteenth century whales were to humans what they had always been: an animal hunted for its food, its fuel, and the countless other products developed over the centuries. The whale’s oil came from the blubber that sheathed its body, with the oil of each whale species varying in both quality and use.
    The most prized of all whale oils was that found in the nose of the sperm whale used to make what experts even today contend were the finest candles and perfumes ever made. Whale parts were used to make everything from fertilizers to fishing rods and umbrellas to piano keys. But by the closing days of the Industrial Revolution, the first third of the twentieth century, the great mammals had become something entirely new to humanity—a magnificent and endangered creature to be protected and enjoyed.
    While whaling was a major industry in the nineteenth century, and the United States was the preeminent whaling nation, the industry was so competitive it was never particularly profitable for those actually in it. Even as prices for whale products rose, profit margins seemed always to fall. By the middle of the 1800s, one out of ten whaling ships failed each year. But no matter how much trouble the industry had eking out its own share, they never lacked demand for their products. That demand reached such extraordinary heights that the richest New England whaling companies plowed millions of dollars into new ships that could spend years at sea looking for whales in waters stretching to the farthest corners of the globe.
    By the second half of the nineteenth century, commercial whaling had become the world’s first major global industry and it was dominated by the United States. From heating oil to cosmetic products, the whale was a veritable gold mine to any group of men intrepid enough to hunt and kill one. Giant fleets of whaling vessels incorporating then state-of-the-art seafaring technology plied the high seas in search of fortunes for captain and crew. They enriched the New England towns which they built, housed, and maintained these great fleets.
    The whales’ last great sanctuary was under attack almost as fast as the sleek new vessels could make it up Alaska’s uncharted coast. Its waters were the richest yet. They proved so fertile, in fact, that some companies established whaling stations along isolated