Online trove charts Scots whaling industry voyages

Opportunity to gain insight into perils and rewards of life of ‘Arctic cowboys’

For more than 130 years, “Arctic cowboys” sailed uncharted seas and risked their lives to hunt whales and seals.

Now the full details of thousands of whaling voyages from Scottish ports have been made available online.

Whalers travelled to places barely on the map in the Arctic and helped oil the wheels of industry. Whale oil for a time was indispensable and used for lighting and heating, soap, and for softening the raw jute fibres that Dundee made into sacking in the city’s mills.

Whale bone could change hands for up to £3,000 a ton and had scores of uses, from whips to chair backs to the bristles of brushes, but its main use was corsets in the female fashion industry.

In the whaling heyday almost 20 whaling ships sailed from Dundee, and the townsfolk abandoned desk, bench and loom to wave them farewell, throwing oranges and pennies on to the decks for luck as the boats left the quays.

By the late 1830s overfishing had seriously affected the industry, and Aberdeen vessels gradually abandoned the trade.

After the mid-1880s Dundee was the only remaining whaling port in the UK, and by the 1890s lost ships were not being replaced.

Vegetative and mineral oils, which were a great deal cheaper, had started to take whale oil’s place. This was a factor in the decline of the whaling industry, which came to a close in Dundee just before the First World War in 1914.

One student who grew up in Newfoundland in Canada, where life was geared to the rhythms of the sea, made the journey to Scotland in 1977 to spend a sabbatical in Dundee.

The work he carried out during his stay 43 years ago included spending several months looking through old copies of newspapers in Dundee, Aberdeen and Peterhead.

The research conducted will now give people the chance to find out more about the roles their ancestors played in the development of Scottish and global whaling.

Chesley W Sanger, professor emeritus, department of geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, said: “It was perhaps natural that as a geography graduate student at the

Memorial University of Newfoundland in the 1960s my focus would become the major changes that occurred in the local seal fishery after 1862,” he said.

“That year two Dundee whaling steamers, Polynia and Camperdown, joined the local sealing fleet at the ice fields for the first time.

“Their superior ice-navigation capabilities were such that within less than a decade the local industry was transformed from sail to steam.

“While my research revealed ‘how’ the Scots had triggered significant changes in the Newfoundland and Labrador seal fishery, it did not examine in any detail ‘why’ they turned up when they did.

“Given an opportunity to pursue advanced studies in 1977-78 while on sabbatical leave, I decided to make this the focus of my PHD studies at the University of Dundee.

“To my surprise, however, I discovered that very little research had been conducted on Scotland’s century-and-a-half involvement in Arctic whaling. I consequently changed my original plan and set out to fill this gap.”

The statistical profile compiled became the base of a doctoral thesis in historical geography at Dundee University, 16 academic journal articles and a summary book, Scottish Arctic Whaling, published in 2016.

These publications, especially the book, attracted considerable interest.

The materials he collected were deposited at Memorial University’s history archive in St John’s, and so were difficult to access.

“Given the growing attention in this little known but important Scottish industry, I decided to digitise the data to make it more easily accessible,” he said.

“The full details of the 3,641 whaling voyages which cleared variously from 16 Scottish ports between 1750 to World War One are now available on the web at whalinghistory.org”

In total, Scots brought back the blubber of more than 20,000 whales and four million seals to their home ports for rendering into oil.

They did so under demanding and hazardous environmental conditions.

More than 100 ships were lost, while the return of others was delayed when they became entrapped in ice, causing whalemen to suffer starvation, disease, scurvy, frostbite and death.

Professor Sanger, 79, said: “Translating the pencil and paper info into a more easily usable and accessible web dataset has been an end-of-career project – a last hurrah, so to speak.”

Research into thousands of whaling voyages from Scottish ports between 1750 and 1914 can now be accessed online.