A New England whaler. Photo: US Library of Congress.
A real whale of a time: Paul Hodgkin on an uncomfortable moment in Quaker history
‘This story of Quaker ecocide and genocide holds multiple identities.’
The island of Nantucket is fourteen miles long and lies twenty-five miles off the coast of Massachusetts. From 1690 until the 1840s, Nantucket supplied most of the whale oil that lit the industrial revolution. People – mostly white, mostly European people, that is – worked longer, and studied harder, because of lamps filled with Nantucket whale oil. Beethoven performed his sonatas, and Jane Austen wrote her novels, by it. The story of Nantucket is the story of a spreading light enabled by daring sea faring, early feminism and Quakerism. It is also a story of genocide and ecocide.
Before 1659, when the first white settlers arrived, Nantucket was home to the Wampanoag, who taught the new arrivals how to harvest oil from beached whales. Among the first settlers were Mary and Nathaniel Starbuck. Nathaniel ran the local store; Mary ran the island. For twenty years she refused to allow any minister of religion onto Nantucket. Then, in 1702, she was converted to Quakerism, and one of the richest communities in the early USA became Quaker. By 1770 2,000 people worshipped in the South Meeting House.
With the land exhausted, whaling became the main economic activity on the island. The Wampanoag, devastated by disease and debt, became a victim of the growing North American genocide of indigenous tribes, joining the ninety-five per cent of the indigenous population of the Americas who died following the arrival of Columbus.
With voyages lasting two to three years, women came to dominate island society and control the local whaling business. Lucretia Mott, later one of the leading US Quaker abolitionists and suffragettes, was born in Nantucket, and it is likely that her passionate support for women’s rights was at least partly rooted in her experience of Nantucket’s woman-led society.
Whales were harpooned from twenty-five-foot rowing boats, which would then be dragged along at twenty miles an hour on the ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. When the whale was exhausted, the man at the bow used a twelve-foot lance to rupture the arteries near the whale’s lungs, converting its spout into a fifteen-foot geyser of gore as the whale suffocated in its own blood and vomit (1).
Nantucket whalers preferred sperm whales as prey, because their echolocation organ is filled with up to two tons of spermaceti, a waxy liquid that burns more brightly, and with a less fishy smell, than blubber oil. Sperm whales weigh up to eighty tons and have the biggest brains on earth, weighing five times more than our own. They live in pods of females and young whales. Older females stand guard over the young while mothers feed on squid up to two kilometres deep. Males are solitary, returning only briefly to the female-dominated society to mate before heading off to the open sea again – not unlike like the whalers who hunted them.
It is entirely possible that cetaceans are intelligent. Current interspecies comparisons of intelligence are measured by combining brain size and complexity into a measure known as the associative ability. A rat has an associative ability score of ten, a chimpanzee thirty-five, while we score 100. Sperm whales have a score of 2,000. Like most cetaceans, they also have a fourth cerebral lobe (in contrast to our three), which is derived from the same part of our own brains that contains the ‘mirror’ neurons responsible for our ability to empathise. These beings hold more wonder than we can ever know.
I find it hard to know what to do with all these facts. It seems we have episodes of both genocide and ecocide falling to our name. But just to see these as deeply regrettable consequences of progress is to miss the point. Like us, the Nantucket Quakers actively participated in a capitalism that repeatedly over-exploits the world’s resources, usually with great violence. This exploitation continues to this day: to our shame, total wealth flowing from south to north still outweighs that from north to south. Extinction of other life forms is not an accidental by-product of past capitalism, it is an intrinsic and ongoing feature – witness the loss of seventy per cent of all vertebrate life in the last seventy years. The Nantucket ecocide did not happen because Quakers were bad people, but because they, like us, were governed by a capitalism whose growth depends on exploitation.
‘I find it hard to know what to do with all these facts.’
Quakers played an outsized role in the development of capitalism. In the 1820s British Quakers owned around ten per cent of the productive capacity of the British economy and were the equivalent of the Amazons, Googles and Facebooks of our day (2). At times, Quakers have exercised industrial leadership with care and foresight, but, all too often, they, like us, built their wealth without regard to the needs and capacities of other species and other peoples.
Nathaniel Philbrick (the author of the Smithsonian article from which I learnt about Nantucket (3)) writes that ‘Nantucketers perceived no contradiction between their source of income and their religion. God himself had granted them dominion over the fishes of the sea. Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires, the whalemen of Nantucket were simply enacting the Lord’s will’. In this we can see how much we have changed. When we confront episodes like this I think we do so with many selves: the guilty self (another thing to feel bad about), the irritated self (nothing to do with me), the depressed self (how the world cries out), the sorrowful self (how awful), and the modern self (how could it be otherwise?).
Part of being discomforted by our pasts is that there is never any one single answer. As we awaken from our fossil-fuelled dreams of progress, the past becomes restless and we have to make peace many times over with each of these multiple selves.
This story of Quaker ecocide and genocide holds multiple identities, some good, some bad. Sonatas got written, operations got performed, children were read to, all bathed in the light of dead whales killed by the Quaker men risking their lives in the seas off South Georgia. In the past we might have found this calculus comforting (regrettable of course, but the price of progress, surely?). But if we used this rationalisation in relation to slavery, its self-serving nature immediately becomes clear. And, unlike slavery, our complicity in a damaged Earth sits right at our elbow.
To live these times of Earth crises fully is to hold all these different aspects in oneself. It is to breath the pain of the Earth in, and then breathe it out again. This is what bearing witness looks like in a time of change and collapse. Climate change, its hour come round at last, slouches towards us. Somewhere between the whales we did not kill, and the glorious enduring Earth, we can only hope some deep renewal is waiting to be born.
(1) A Nantucket whaler might kill and process forty to fifty whales on each trip. At its height, in the 1840s, the whaling industry as a whole killed thousands of whales per year. In the 1960s, our fossil-fuelled whaling ships were killing 250,000 whales annually, largely to make margarine.
(2) My great grandfather, John Wilson, owned half of the Quaker chemical firm Albright and Wilson. The inherited wealth that flowed through the Quaker side of my family came mainly from a phosphorus plant in Birmingham that supplied the match industry. But who, I comfort myself, would have not welcomed matches in the mid-nineteenth century? I would certainly have. In 1916, as phosphorus became more and more important in munitions, my family, as good Quakers, sold their share of Albright and Wilson. As good Quakers, this was also at a considerable profit.
(3) ‘How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World’, online at <a href="http://www.bit.ly/4e1k0es.
">www.bit.ly/4e1k0es.
