Courtesy of the Right Whale Project Santa Catarina: longboat whaling continued until 1973
Whales seeking warm waters for breeding moved north along the Brazilian coast. They were found in large numbers in Bahia's Bay of All Saints and Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay. Brazilian whaling began in longboats as it did in New England but never progressed to the high seas. Plantation society's disdain for economic pursuits other than growing export crops with slave labor, the lack of investment capital for any venture except land and slaves, and contempt for those who worked with their hands prevented expansion.(1)
A typical longboat crew consisted of six oarsmen, the harpoonist, and the helmsman. The oarsmen were generally slaves or free blacks. Captured whales were towed ashore. Whale oil and other by-products were rendered at land installations such as the one on Bahia's Itaparica Island in the 1750s that had 420 workers - 20 whites, 2 Indians, 55 mulattoes, 71 free blacks, and 272 slaves.(2)
The whaling labor force at sea and ashore included slaves and "escravos da pena" (convicts) who often worked in chains. The latter performed the more hazardous tasks because slaves represented a capital investment to the owner. Whaling represented one of the few fields of activity in Brazil that was open to mulattoes, Indians, and free blacks in a society in which the slave practically monopolized manual labor.(3)
Lighting in homes, businesses, and city streets consumed vast quantities of whale oil. After the Portuguese Court moved to Rio in 1808 a major effort was made to illuminate city streets using lamps fueled by whale oil. "The lamplighters were slaves who slept on the pavement in the dampness of the night with body and clothing always reeking of oil which constituted one of the most melancholy sights of the city."(4)
By the 1750s whaling stations were established in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Santa Catarina. Whaling declined in the last years of the eighteenth century when European and American whalers began operating in the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands, letting fewer whales get north to the Brazilian coast. Competition from British, French, and American ships caused the collapse of the onshore rendering installations. In 1819 twenty-two whalers entered port on the Island of Santa Catarina, fifteen American and seven French.(5) At the time that whaling entered its Golden Age in the United States, it was in sharp decline in Brazil.
NOTES
1. Paulo Moreira da Silva, "O problema da pesca no Brasil," in Paulo Moreira da Silva et al., "Estudos do mar brasileiro" (Rio de Janeiro: Renes, 1972), 9; Myriam Ellis, "A baleia no brasil colonial" (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1968), 199; Henry W. Furniss, "Whaling in Brazil," in the "Bulletin of the International Union of the American Republics," June 1909,1048.
2. Heitor Ferreira Lima, "Formação industrial do Brasil" (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundo da Cultura, 1961), 214-16.
3. Ellis, 110,113-4.
4. C.J. Dunlop, "Rio Antigo" (Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Laemmert, 1955), 18.
5. Ellis, 71-87.
* Excerpted from the book “Early Globalization and the Economic Development of the United States and Brazil (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) by John DeWitt.
