Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of .[ Oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train-oil, which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear drop").
]
Sperm oil, a special kind of oil used in the cavities of , differs chemically from ordinary whale oil: it is composed mostly of liquid wax. Its properties and applications differ from those of detergentized whale oil, and it was sold for a higher price.
Source and use
Emerging industrial societies used whale oil in and to make soap. In the 20th century it was made into margarine. There is a misconception that commercial development of the petroleum industry and saved whales from extinction.[ Column: Markets and consumers, not president, control oil's future] In fact, the development of petroleum accelerated the whaling industry,
Whale oil was obtained by boiling strips of blubber harvested from whales.
were a major source of whale oil. Their oil is exclusively composed of , whereas that of contains .
Chemistry
Whale oil has low viscosity (lower than olive oil),
Applications
The main use of whale oil was for Lighting and machine lubrication.
In the United States, as demand for whale oil increased at the end of the 18th century, the whaling industry expanded until its peak around the 1860s,
Steam power allowed the acceleration of whaling in the 1900s, with the United Kingdom and then Norway becoming the dominant whaling nations.
In 1986, the International Whaling Commission declared a moratorium on commercial whaling, which has all but eliminated the use of whale oil today. Aboriginal whaling, part of the subsistence economy, is still permitted. Groups such as the Inuit of North America are granted special whaling rights, integral to Inuit culture, and they still use whale oil as a food and as lamp oil in the ceremonial qulliq.
Whale oil was used as a cheap illuminant, though it gave off a strong odor when burnt and was not very popular.
In the United Kingdom, whale oil was used in toolmaking machinery as a high-quality lubricant.[Norman Atkinson, Sir Joseph Whitworth (Sutton Publishing 1996), p161.]
After the invention of hydrogenation in the early 20th century, whale oil was used to make margarine,
Whale oil was used to make soap. Until the invention of hydrogenation, it was used only in industrial-grade cleansers, because its foul smell and tendency to discolor made it unsuitable for cosmetic soap.
Whale oil was widely used in the First World War as a preventive measure against trench foot. An infantry battalion of the British Army during World War I on the Western Front could be expected to use of whale oil a day. The oil was rubbed directly onto bare feet in order to protect them from the effects of immersion.
Gallery
File:Stripping blubber from a whale.jpg|Whalers stripping blubber from a whale
File:Whaling Trypot (Blubber Pot), Simon's Town SA.jpg|Try pot or Blubber Pot seen in Simon's Town in South Africa
File:New Zealand whalers cutting up whale blubber.jpg|Māori people cutting up the blubber of beached pilot whales (Te Arai, New Zealand, 1911)
File:New Zealand whalers boiling whale blubber.jpg|Men boiling the blubber of a beached blackfish at Pongakawa. (New Zealand, 1911)
File:Qulliq 1999-04-01.jpg|An Inuk woman tending a qulliq, a traditional whale, or seal, oil lamp (Nunavut, Canada, 1999)
File:Tranoljelampa, Lyse socken, Bohuslän, 1800-tal.JPG|Whale oil lamp in brown-glazed earthenware with candle bowl for the wick and base drip pan. Lyse parish, Bohuslän – now in the Nordic Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
Literature
The pursuit and use of whale oil, along with many other aspects of whaling, are discussed in Herman Melville 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. The novel's narrator is sometimes misquoted as saying that whale oil is "as rare as the milk of queens".
According to the rest of the paragraph, sailors onboard the Merchant ship had to sleep, dress, and maneuver below decks in the dark as opposed to the whalers who used the oil for light.[
]
John R. Jewitt, an Englishman who wrote a memoir about his years as a captive of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), an Indigenous Pacific Northwest people on the British Columbia Coast, from 1802 to 1805, claimed whale oil was a condiment with every dish, even strawberries.
In Robert Browning's Pied Piper (§ VII), the Piper's piping leads the rats to imagine the sound of "breaking the hoops of train-oil flasks".
Friedrich Ratzel in The History of Mankind (1896), when discussing food materials in Oceania, quoted Captain James Cook's comment in relation to the Māori people: "No Greenlander was ever so sharp set upon train-oil as our friends here, they greedily swallowed the stinking droppings when we were boiling down the fat of dog-fish."
See also
Further reading
-
Whale oil and its uses, an overview with illustrations
-
, Includes descriptions, photographs and statistics.
-
, by James S. Robbins
External links
