Whale oil (or "train oil") is the oil obtained from the blubber of various species of whales, particularly the three species of right whale (Eubalaena japonica, E. glacialis, and E. australis) and the bowhead whale (Balaena mysicetus) prior to the modern era, as well as several other species of baleen whale. Train oil proper is right whale oil, but this term has been applied to all blubber oils and, in Germany and Sweden, to all marine animal oils: fish oils, liver oils, and blubber oils. The most important whale oil was sperm oil, which comes from the head cavities (not blubber) of the sperm whale.
Whale oil flows readily, is clear, and varies in colour from a bright honey yellow to a dark brown, according to the condition of the blubber from which it has been extracted.
Sperm oil is the oil from the head cavity of the sperm whale. (The oil from the sperm whale's blubber is just a common whale oil.) Sperm oil is chemically a liquid wax and not a true oil. A large sperm whale can hold as much as three tons. Stearin and spermaceti may be separated from sperm oil at low temperatures; at under 6 °C (43 °F) these constituents may be almost completely crystallized and filtered out. When removed and pressed, this deposit is known as whale tallow, and the oil from which it is removed is known as pressed whale oil, yet is sometimes passed as sperm oil.
The first principal use of whale oil was as an illuminant in lamps and as candle wax. It was a major food of the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific northwest, such as the Nootka. Whale oil later came to be used in oiling wools for combing and other uses. It was the first of any animal or mineral oil to achieve commercial viability. It was used to make margarine and was the basis of very effective protective paint for steel, e.g. the original (but not current) Rust-Oleum.
Whale oil's predominant place in society was mostly eliminated with the development of kerosene from coal in 1846, and the advances in petroleum drilling in the late 19th century, which led to petroleum-based waxes and oils replacing whale oils in most nonfood applications. With the 1986 International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on commercial whaling, whale oil has all but ceased to be viable, as substitutes have been found for most of its uses, notably jojoba oil.[1]
The pursuit and use of whale oil, along with many other aspects of whaling, are discussed in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In the novel, the preciousness of the substance to contemporary American society is emphasized when the fictional narrator notes that whale oil is "as rare as the milk of queens." John R. Jewitt, an Englishman who wrote a memoir about his years as a captive of the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest Coast in 1802–1805, describes how what he calls train oil was used as a condiment with every dish, even strawberries.
Friedrich Ratzel in The History of Mankind (1896), [2] when discussing food materials in Oceania, quoted James Cook's comment in relation to "the Maoris" saying "No Greenlander was ever so sharp set upon train-oil as our friends here, they greedily swallowed the stinking droppings when we were boiling down the fat of dog-fish."
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