Whale oil’s cautionary tale

The crew on board the Waterloo were surprised when they scraped past a rock in the Marlborough Sounds. It was 1828. A year earlier, Australian ex-convict and shipwrecked mariner John Guard had been blown into the Tory Channel by a southerly.

He had noticed before that the water ‘‘swarmed with whales’’ but was shocked when the

‘‘rock’’ they had hit, was not all it seemed. It was a whale, trying to rid itself of barnacles by scraping against the ship.

So began almost 140 years of shore-based whaling in New Zealand. It started on rowboats with muffled oars and handthrown harpoons. The chase and capture of a whale was dubbed the ‘‘supreme moment’’ in a whaler’s life. The brief trip required the effort of a sports match, induced the thrill of biggame hunting, and was accompanied by a sense of everpresent danger.

When the flurry was over, exhausted men lay on the oars, before the long tow home.

‘‘Fires glared through the darkness,’’ wrote one traveller on seeing the huge iron cauldrons, called try-pots, on top of flames, used to melt the blubber of southern right whales down to oil.

Whale oil was hailed as an odourless lighting fuel, far superior to lard oil and camphine. It was said New Zealand whale oil once helped light the world’s lamps.

But the golden year in whaling came more than 100 years later, when using motorised whale chasers – aided by the fuel which would one day contribute to the industry’s end – hunters landed 226 whales in one season. It was 1960 and they had turned to humpback whales after southern right whales were mined to the brink of extinction.

Humpback oil was mainly used for margarine, with the whale meat turned into pet food.

These were the glory days of one of New Zealand’s oldest, most ruthless and important industries. Half a century after its demise, this practice by our predecessors seems barbaric.

It raises the question, how will we reflect on the hunt for energy sources from this age?

Climate change scientist Professor James Renwick suggests that 50 years from now, we will remember the fossil fuel industry as ‘‘primitive’’.

How we looked back on oil and gas would largely depend on how much the climate changed but Renwick thought it would be within the realm of ‘‘unsophisticated, unsustainable and a bit ignorant’’. ‘‘Digging up carbon that has been under the ground for a few million years and burning it – it is not exactly sophisticated technology.

‘‘But that is not really the problem. The problem is, if you burn this stuff, you put the waste gases into the air and it turns out that changes the climate.’’

Whaling shows how attitudes to an established industry can change. Today, even the whalers themselves, once revered as heroes and charged with slaying the slow swimming ocean mammals, say their memories are tinged with regret.

In many ways, the whale oil industry of a past age was akin to the thirst for mineral oil in this day – both ‘‘extractive industries’’, both a natural resource. But there were obvious differences. Whale populations were able to reproduce, while there were only so many minerals in the ground, Renwick said. ‘‘Neither is particularly sustainable,’’ Renwick added.

Another key difference was the government approach to each industry. When humpback populations were decimated, which some put down to a Russian whaling fleet in the Antarctic, J A Perano and Company started going after sperm whales. Sperm whale oil was sold as a high quality engine lubricant, praised for its lubricity and heat stability.

The Marine Department and Royal Navy came on board under the guise of ‘‘scientific research’’ and government guarantees were secured to cover operating costs.

But by January 1965, company director Gilbert Perano announced their decision to close, saying they had been operating ‘‘far from economically’’. The government offered further aid to the whalers but they stuck with their decision to close.

It was not the lack of whales which ended the industry, nor was it conservationists, government policy or international law – it was market forces. The world price for sperm whale oil had dropped from £68 a tonne, to £45, put down to a flooding of the market by international whaling fleets.

Perano said at the time: ‘‘If we could break even, it would be all right but we cannot even do that.’’ About 30 men were made redundant, and the Picton community mourned the death of an industry which was woven into the fabric of the port town.

New Zealand supported the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling, which came into effect in 1986.

The Government’s approach to fossil fuels has been wildly different to the approach of their predecessors to whaling.

In 2018, all new offshore exploration was banned with only existing permits allowed to proceed until 2030.

There are still 27 fields in New Zealand producing oil and gas.

Global conventions had already been made to address climate change, in the form of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015. The purpose of this agreement was to keep the global average temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, while strengthening the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.

The New Zealand Government has also pledged to reduce emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

But despite the Government’s support to move toward cleaner energy, Renwick said, the shift would be challenging as the fossil fuel industry was ‘‘the most profitable business in history’’. ‘‘It pervades everything. There is a big push to move away from them but there is an awful lot of resistance as well, vested interests and money, tied up in the status quo.’’ Unlike whaling where the decision to close came from economic reasons, a ‘‘different driver’’ was in play here.

‘‘It is harmful for the climate. ‘‘It is something we have to do, rather than it just being practical and cheaper to do something else.’’

Jon Perano, of the whaling family, urged the Government and industry to take action on climate change.

The transition away from fossil fuels was moving ‘‘too slowly’’, he said.

In this case, it was not only the whale population at risk.

‘‘It is all the inhabitants of the planet that are in dire straits.’’