In Star Trek IV, the crew of the Enterprise, after rescuing Spock in the previous movie, set out to head back to Starfleet headquarters when they are stopped by an angry probe who only speaks in whale, a setting not in the universal translator. So the natural solution is to head back in time to the 1980s to bring whales back to the 21st century. But whatever happened to the whales in the first place? In the Star Trek universe, humans hunted whales to extinction and by the time they realized what they had done it was too late. 

Ever since humans have figured out how to get resources out of the water, the ocean has suffered from human use. Whether it is plastics in the ocean, pollution, or overfishing, there is so much damage that humans have caused, especially in recent years. The ocean is having a bit of a rough patch right now. Whales in particular have historically had a problem with being killed by greedy humans. Throughout history whaling has decimated populations of whales, and killed many humans, all for oil and baleen. 

While whaling is mostly considered a bad thing now, thousands of years ago, whaling was done sustainably by many native tribes such as the Inuit, who used every part of the animal and only killed what was needed. Harpoons would keep the whale in place before it was killed with a spear. Whaling remains a part of inuit culture to this day because their practices are sustainable and a massive part of their culture. 

Whaling has been done all over the world, and there are many different ways it has been done. The most common way has been with harpoons or lances to stab the whale repeatedly until it was dead, making a mess of blood and gore and whale. For the sake of clarity and sanity, this author is mainly going to focus on American whaling, specifically originating from the Atlantic coast in places like Nantucket. 

American whaling originated from European whaling, and on a small scale it began when Nantucket, MA and Long Island, NY were settled. Sag Harbor and Greenport were the most popular whaling ports on the island, making them subsequently become very wealthy areas to this day. Nantucket began to be known as the whaling capital of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of the main reasons that whaling took off in Europe and North America was the beginning of the industrial revolution. There proved to be many products that could be made from whales such as soap, perfume, clothing, fish hooks as well as whale meat. But the most important part of the whales to the people of Nantucket and the world was baleen and oil. Baleen is whalebone and it was often used for the making of corsets. Blubber and spermaceti were exploited from the whales for their oil, whalers lifting buckets of it from out of a sperm whale’s head. Whale oil especially made whaling into the profitable industry that it became. 

As said before Nantucket was called the whaling capital of the world. Nantucket’s entire economy was tied to the ocean. An interesting point is that the people of the region were Quakers, who are known for their tolerance of others, but the whaling system fundamentally exploited the labor of the native Wampanoag, and later black people, and decimated the local whale population. Right whales were originally killed because they were the right whales to kill, but they were decimated to the point where whale ships switched to hunting sperm whales which proved to have even more oil. Even though Nantucket was the “whaling capital of the world” most people who lived in Nantucket, unless they had been on a whaling voyage, had never seen a whale because they were hunted to practically extinction in the waters surrounding Nantucket. 

To add even more to the horrors of whaling, it also has certainly had a human toll. Whaling voyages could be extremely treacherous for all involved, and one notable example is the ship Essex, who after already having trouble with lifeboats and a shaky voyage, was stove (sunk) by a giant sperm whale while on a hunt, forcing the surviving crew into three small lifeboats. They could have gone to the nearby Marquesa islands, but fearing cannibalism, they drifted for months hoping for rescue, running out of food quickly. Eventually five of the surviving crew members from two lifeboats were rescued and they admitted to surviving by eating their dead crewmates. The third lifeboat was lost and the other three survivors had left the crew on Henderson Island and were later rescued. This disaster, along with Melville’s own time on a whaling ship, inspired one of the most famous books on whaling, Moby Dick, which had an even higher body count than the Essex, losing every crew member but one, but without the cannibalism. 

Across the world, the 19th century was the deadliest to whales possibly ever. With the invention of new ways to capture and kill whales such as exploding harpoons and steam powered whaling ships, almost three million whales were killed in the north atlantic, north pacific and southern hemisphere combined. The result of this slaughter of the whales throughout history, but especially in the 19th century, was the listing of whales as endangered in the 1970s and finally the banning of American whaling in 1981, as well as in many other places around the world. 

To this day there are still some places where whaling is practiced like Norway, Iceland and Japan, and it is an issue that endangers the humans involved in killing, the ocean in general, and most of all, the whales who are being decimated. The hunting of whales for their oil and baleen is wholly unnecessary with other forms of oil proving to be slightly better, and synthetic alternatives being created for whalebone. Commercial whaling should be banned, with the exception of native tribes for whom it has been an important part of their culture. 

Eventually the Enterprise crew does succeed in getting a pair of humpback whales, George and Gracie to the 23rd century, but suffice to say, we don’t want the world of Star Trek IV to become a reality where there are no whales, do we?