Humpback and fin whaling in the Gulf of Maine from 1800 to 1918

Opportunistic vs. Dedicated Whaling

Some of the records of "whaling" listed in Table 3 refer to instances in which whalers or fishermen, who were either idle or engaged in nonwhaling activities, chased and attempted to kill whales that they encountered opportunistically. Interpretation of the historical record must therefore attempt to discriminate evidence of purposeful whaling activity directed at particular target species ("dedicated whaling"), from evidence that indicates the less deliberate search for and pursuit of such species ("opportunistic whaling").

There is also some ambiguity associated with incidents involving entanglement or entrapment in fishing gear. For example, in cases where minke whales were reported as being "captured" (Allen, 1916), it is probably more likely that they were "by-caught" in fishing gear than harpooned while freely swimming. In fact, of the 25 minke whale records mentioned by Allen (1916) from 1849 to 1913, no fewer than 9 explicitly involved capture in fishing weirs.

Removals of Humpback Whales by Whaling in the Gulf of Maine

No good time-series of catch data exists for the Gulf of Maine. The available data are often equivocal concerning numbers and species taken. Nevertheless, there is sufficient anecdotal information on whaling activity to conclude that humpback whales were hunted at least on a small scale throughout the 19th century. Small-scale, shore-based whaling enterprises existed along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts from the early 1800's to the 1860's, but their combined annual catches of humpback whales may not have exceeded 10-20 animals. Whale ships, as opposed to whaleboats, from Provincetown and Nantucket are known to have conducted short cruises on Nantucket Shoals and elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine from time to time, but the evidence for such whaling is sporadic and essentially anecdotal. Again, catch levels for these vessels appear to have been in the single digits or low tens, at the most, in any single year.

The introduction of bomb-lance technology in the 1850's and 1860's made it easier to kill both humpback whales and fin whales, and by the 1870's the scale of removals of fin whales would have increased greatly. The same may also be true of humpback whales, but there is no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Schooners were outfitted to hunt rorquals in the late 1870's and 1880's, and they probably took a few tens of humpback whales in some years.

In about 1880, fishing steamers began to hunt whales in the Gulf of Maine. This steamer fishery grew to include about five vessels by the mid 1880's but quickly dwindled to only one vessel after menhaden returned to the Gulf in large numbers in 1886. Fin whales constituted at least half of the catch by the steamers, and the total number of humpback whales taken in any year (including secured and shot/lost whales, combined) was probably fewer than 100. Inferences about changes in whaling effort and catch could be confounded by the fact that newspapers and other printed sources were themselves expanding with time, perhaps thereby increasing the likelihood that whaling activities would be recorded. As noted in Table 2, few Provincetown newspapers published between 1880 and 1904 were available for review. If those materials could be found and examined, it might provide better documentation of catches during that period. Otherwise, however, there is no obvious approach to improving our current fragmentary state of knowledge.