In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

More Scarce Than the Milk of Queens In Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick, Ishmael, the narrator, describes what a visitor might see if he or she descended below the deck of the whaling ship Pequod, to the forecastle where the off-duty crew were sleeping. “For one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. . . . The whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light.”1 Whale men lived in light because the holds of their ship were full of whale oil, “the food of light,” a substance Melville has his narrator call “more scarce than the milk of queens.” Whale oil, in its time, was the premium source of illumination in the world. It produced a bright, clear flame, with less smoke than coal oil, less smell than lard oil, and more illumination than camphene (a mixture of camphor, turpentine, and alcohol.) While the middle class and poor burned lesser fuels, the wealthy chose whale oil for their lamps, or smokeless candles manufactured from whale oil. The sperm whale, in particular, was the source of the highest-quality oil, which could be used for candles, lamp oil, soap, machine oil, and cosmetics. The very highest-quality oil, congealed into a waxy form called spermaceti, could only be harvested from the head of a sperm whale. Severed heads would be lashed to the sides of whaling boats to return to port. If that was not possible, a sperm whale head would be brought on deck, a hole would be cut in it, a sailor would climb in and hand out bucket after bucket of oil and spermaceti to be held in the ship’s holds. It was a brutal process that nearly spelled the end of sperm whales. nine the substitute 129 T h e S u b st i t u t e In 1846, the American whaling fleet had 735 whaling boats in it. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States. In the early decades of the 1800s, American whalers killed perhaps 8,000 sperm and right whales a year and possibly as many as 15,000 a year, all in the search for whale oil. The nineteenth century saw the deaths of as many as a quarter million sperm whales in the quest to satisfy consumer appetites.2 Whales breed. They are, in principal, a renewable resource. Yet they breed slowly. A sperm whale gestates in its mother for 14 to 16 months, and then nurses for two to three years, during which time both mother and calf are extremely vulnerable. A female sperm whale will only give birth to a single calf every three to six years. Newly born sperm whales won’t reach sexual maturity for a decade, or almost two decades in the case of males. The damage the American whaling industry did to sperm whale populations proved long lasting.3 Across a few decades, whalers killed off an estimated one out of every three sperm whales on Earth. The remaining sperm whales, many of them survivors of pods that had been decimated, became wary of humans and aggressive when approached. Melville’s inspiration for Moby-Dick, indeed, was the sinking of the Essex, a 283-ton whaling ship that attempted to harpoon a pod of mostly female whales. As the Essex approached, it was rammed and sunk by a large and enraged bull sperm whale who struck the ship once, turned, dove, and came up to ram them again below the water line, caving in the hull before swimming away.4 The combination of fewer whales in the sea, more fear of human boats on their parts, and the occasional aggressive reply from a bull sperm whale made whaling a harder and more expensive proposition. Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, whaling boats had to sail farther and longer, with heavier armaments, to bring home their catch.* While sperm whales (and their relatives, right whales) became more difficult and more expensive to catch, demand at home and abroad continued to grow. The result was a surge in prices. In 1820, whale oil sold for $200 a barrel (in 2003 prices). In the mid-1840s, prices rose sharply as demand increased. While production was also increasing, it could not keep pace with the...

Share