July 25, 2025 — International police organization Interpol has removed Sea Shepherd founder and anti-whaling activist Paul Watson from its “red notice” list, which signifies its highest priority targets for capture.
“The Japanese whalers have been after me for 14 years ever since I was first detained in Frankfurt, Germany in May 2012,” Watson said in a social media post. “It has been an incredible pursuit by a very powerful nation using unlimited resources, but finally I am free.”
May 11, 2023 — 19th-century whalers sailed the world’s seas hunting their giant prey for oil-producing blubber. But they were also fueling the New England economy — at its peak in 1880, the industry was bringing in $10 million a year, the equivalent of about $296 million today.
June 1, 2019 — Japan resumed commercial whale hunting on Monday after a hiatus of more than 30 years, defying calls from conservation groups to protect animals once hunted to the brink of extinction.
Now whalers, who have long depended on government subsidies for their survival, face the much tougher challenge of defying basic economic reality: The market for their product is declining while labor costs across the nation are on the rise.
Japanese production of whale meat peaked in 1962, and the taste is generally preferred by an older generation. The government also hopes to start reducing the $46 million in annual subsidies it pays to whale hunters within three years. The value of previous catches, obtained under the auspices of scientific research in the Antarctic, totaled only about a half to a third of that.
“Will whaling succeed commercially?” said Masayuki Komatsu, a former government official who oversaw Japan’s international negotiations on the subject and now works at a think tank in Tokyo. “No way.”
September 17, 2018 — Japan will not be able to resume commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean after losing its bid at the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
Overnight the commission held a meeting in Brazil where Japan’s proposal that would have opened the door to commercial whaling was defeated 41 to 27.
In response, Japan is threatening to quit the commission.
It has been arguing that whale stocks have recovered sufficiently for the ban to be lifted.
Japan’s Agriculture Minister Masaaki Taniai has warned his country will consider its options, if different positions and views cannot coexist.
“Then Japan will be pressed to undertake a fundamental reassessment of its position as a member of the IWC,” he said.
November 15, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — When workers don’t receive what they feel is their fair share, they will often go on strike. New Bedford fishermen took that action in 1985-1986.
Find out the rest of that story, as the Dock-U-Mentaries Film Series continues on Friday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. This month the film “Community Conversation: Remembering the Fishermen’s Strike of 1985-86” will be presented. Dock-U-Mentaries is a co-production of New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park and the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Films about the working waterfront are screened on the third Friday of each month beginning at 7 p.m. in the theater of the Corson Maritime Learning Center, located at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, 33 William St. in downtown New Bedford. All programs are open to the public and presented free of charge.
Read the full story at the Herald News
January 18, 2016 — During the summer of 1871, a mini-armada of American whaleships hunting for bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean gambled against the weather, and lost. As the fleet sailed north, the temperature plummeted, and unrelenting winds pushed massive ice floes toward the coast, which first pinned the whaleships in place, and then began crushing their hulls. In the end, 32 whaleships were destroyed in what became the greatest single disaster in the history of American whaling.
For nearly a century and a half, the remains of those ships were hidden from view, but no longer. This past summer, archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, using sonar and sensing technology, found the hulls of two whaling ships in the same area where the disaster occurred. These ships, whose discovery NOAA only recently made public, are almost certainly part of that ill-fated fleet.
The story of the so-called Lost Whaling Fleet is one of the most dramatic in America’s long and turbulent history of whaling. Since the mid-1800s, American whalers had been pursuing bowhead whales in the Arctic. These massive creatures, which can grow more than 60 feet long and weigh up to 100 tons, yielded as much as 300 barrels of oil, widely used for lighting.
But by the time the whaling fleet headed north in 1871, the whale oil market had been virtually eliminated. After the discovery of petroleum in 1859, an ever-increasing amount of that “black gold” was pumped from the ground and refined into a flood of cheap kerosene that ultimately displaced whale oil and other illuminants.
What the whalers of 1871 wanted from the bowheads was not oil, but the hundreds of strips of baleen that were hanging down from the roof of their mouths. Whales use this keratinous material, which when viewed from the side resembles a comb with hairy fringes on the inner edge, for feeding. Baleen was valuable because it was made into hoops for hooped skirts, and stays for stomach-tightening and chest-crushing corsets, which were fashionable at the time. Bowhead whales were especially prized, because they had the longest baleen of any whale, reaching lengths of nearly 14 feet.
Read the full story at the Providence Journal
January 6, 2016 — NOAA archaeologists have discovered the battered hulls of two 1800s whaling ships nearly 144 years after they and 31 others sank off the Arctic coast of Alaska in one of the planet’s most unexplored ocean regions.
The shipwrecks, and parts of other ships, that were found are most likely the remains of 33 ships trapped by pack ice close to the Alaskan Arctic shore in September 1871. The whaling captains had counted on a wind shift from the east to drive the ice out to sea as it had always done in years past.
The ships were destroyed in a matter of weeks, leaving more than 1,200 whalers stranded at the top of the world until they could be rescued by seven ships of the fleet standing by about 80 miles to the south in open water off Icy Cape. No one died in the incident but it is cited as one of the major causes of the demise of commercial whaling in the United States.