Stranded assets

Captain Woods gazed at the waters lapping at his ship. Nantucket was three days’ sail behind, and the brine in front of him extended to infinity. The waters, blandly extending in a uniform sheet up to the horizon, concealed horrors that had killed countless sailors before him – and which also concealed leviathans, leviathans that he would heroically stab at from his frail wooden boats, stabbing with iron harpoons; leviathans that we would battle, and defeat, and then transmute into lamplight.

He took pride in the grime and foul odours he would accumulate over the course of his whaling expeditions. Those high minded gentlemen ashore, with their polished boots and silk top hats, smelling of soap and with not a callous on their hands; how could they claim to do work that was as manifestly godly as battling sea monsters for the light that was borne upon their backs?

Woods and his whalers spent their days attacking the oceans with but a few planks of oak separating them from the endless saltwater: deadly cold saltwater that could turn a man blue within minutes, and filled with deadly, godless monsters living in the hateful darkness of the depths. That was a man’s work; pitching his life against the whales for their precious oil, oil that cast light: beautiful, affordable light for landsmen to read stories to their lovers in the gloaming; light for mothers to gaze upon their sleeping babies in the dark evenings; light that would let children learn their letters even after the sun had set.

On his last trip to shore, Woods had heard a rumour that some slick silk-hatted city boy with soft hands had invented a new type of lamp, one that was fueled not by honest whale oil but instead by some evil liquid coaxed from lumps of coal. Faugh! He who had heard the death rattles from countless whales, who was he to be scared by ghost stories of lamps powered by the spirits of rocks?

No, he wasn’t scared by the tales of kerosene lamps. The only thing that did cause him a moment of disquiet was the increasingly difficult task of finding whales. He had to sail further and further to see a spout; but faugh and faugh again, the infinite ocean would doubtless yield whales if but he put in more honest toil. If God wished to test him with ever more elusive whalefishes, he’d stand up to the test: he’d invested in larger stores to handle longer whaling missions; he’d invested in a faster ship; he’d invested in stronger harpoons that would strike true every time. Of course the whalefishes would continue to light the lamps of the landsmen.

Pah, why was he thinking these maudlin thoughts? Of course the whales wouldn’t disappear – the infinite ocean was too vast to be emptied of these mindless beasts. And he would continue to do God’s work: extracting from the cold, dark depths of the murderous ocean the blubber that would yield golden light.

No new technology would ever replace whale oil; and only fools would claim that the whaling industry, deriving oil from off shore, could ever be replaced by some newfangled, unproven technology.

(This post is of course meant to be a parable about industries that don't adapt as the world around them changes. It includes a generous dose of creative license with respect to the history and economics of the decline of whaling; a more academic treatment can be read at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023117739217

I'll leave it to literary critics to comment on the merit of the creative writing; but I'd be happy to discuss the relevance to Turquoise Sustainability. Feel free to leave a comment or to get in touch).