Did 19th-century whalers already recognize declining whale populations? Dr. Harrison Croft explores historical records and works like Moby-Dick by Herman Melville to reveal early voices of concern within the whaling industry.

Did the harpooners, captains, and administrators involved in the whaling industry in the nineteenth century notice declining whale populations? And if so, what did they have to say about this? In this talk, Dr Harrison Croft will apply an environmental history lens to a range of sources — from Nantucket’s annual reports of the whale oil yields and sympathetic shipboard accounts of whaling voyages, through to contemporaneous popular fiction including Herman Melville’s epic, Moby-Dick — to build a case for including these and other historical interventions among the corpus of more recent and more direct anti-whaling campaigning in the present.