Whaling harpoon full#

Shortly after this the islanders began to build brick furnaces onto the decks of their ships. In order to supply demand the islanders sailed further into the Atlantic and built bigger ships so they could carry more blubber back to the island furnaces. These candles where extremely popular and they where sold and shipped via North America to all over Europe.

Whaling harpoon full#

When the crew cut open the whales head they found it full of oil and a new type of wax.īy the 1750s the islanders where making candles from the new wax, which burned with a brilliant smokeless flame. After Captain Hussey’s ship was blown out to sea he captured a new species of whale, a sperm whale. Eighteenth CenturyĮuropeans had begun whaling off the coast of Nantucket, a small island off the coast of North America, by 1712. By the 1500s they had found a new source of whales off the coast of Canada. Due to their efficiency the Basques wiped out their supply of whales and had to build large sea-going ships in order to continue their hunting.

This was sold to churches and public buildings to be used in oil lamps. The blubber was then boiled in large pots to extract the oil. The men then killed the whales with harpoons and dragged them ashore. A number of wooden boats were used, working together, to herd the whales, cutting off the open sea and forcing them into closed inlets. The Basques used similar methods to the Inuits, hunting the whales off their coast, although they had their own methods of capturing the whale. In the early 1100s, Basques from the Bay of Biscay, on the border between France and Spain, began hunting whales for profit. The bones were used as building materials and tools. The skin, fins, blubber, flesh, tongue, intestines, kidneys and heart were all eaten and oil from the blubber was burnt to provide light and heat. All the villagers would then help drag the dead whale ashore and almost no part of it was wasted. Once the whale tired they would stab it repeatedly with their harpoons. Each spring, as the sea ice melted, they would paddle out in their canoes, called uniaks, and use stone headed harpoons and inflated seal skins to force the whale to surface. The first known whalers were the Inuit people of the far north.