NANCY SHOEMAKER

IN DECEMBER 1620, before deciding to settle permanently at the place they named Plymouth, the Mayflower Pilgrims were still exploring Cape Cod and debating its potential when they had their first encounter with American Indians. The colony's chroniclers recalled how "As we drew near to the shore we espied some ten or twelve Indians very busy about a black thing." Upon seeing the English, the Indians fled, carrying something away with them. Later, as an expeditionary party of Pilgrims made their way on foot to where they had first spotted the Indians, they came across "a great fish, called a grampus, dead on the sands." Two more dead grampuses lay visible in the shallows. At the place where the Indians had been seen "busy about a black thing," there it was, or what was left of it, yet another grampus, cut "into long rands or pieces, about an ell long and two handfull broad." Saddened that they lacked the resources and time to load up on the dead grampuses, some of which were "five or six paces long, and about two inches thick of fat, and fleshed like swine" and which "would have yielded a great deal of oil," the Pilgrims turned away and followed the Indians' tracks into the interior.	1
The Pilgrims' descendants later dubbed the vicinity of this landing "First Encounter" beach to commemorate the English settlement's first meeting with native peoples, but this particular first encounter also marked New England colonists' entry into the oil business. The "grampuses" that washed up periodically on the shores of Cape Cod Bay were blackfish, or what marine mammal scientists today call pilot whales—to be precise, long-finned pilot whales (globicephala melaena).To the Pilgrims and other seventeenth-century Europeans, pilot whales meant oil, the oil that would come from boiling, or trying-out, the pilot whales' two inches of swine-like fat. In truth, the Pilgrims did not covet the oil but the money that the oil would bring once sold. Earlier, when the Mayflower had first entered Cape Cod Bay, its passengers had witnessed an even greater bounty than a few dead grampuses strewn along the beach: "every day we saw whales playing hard by us; of which in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a very rich return; which, to our great grief, we wanted. Our master and his mate, and others experienced in fishing, professed we might have made three or four thousand pounds' worth of oil." The whales cavorting in New England's waters were probably right whales and justly recognized by those aboard the Mayflower as "the best kind for oil and bone."
Aware of whale oil's marketability as lamp fuel and lubricant, English settlers in New England soon launched a whaling industry that quickly surpassed that of the Dutch, British, and other Europeans. Up until the twentieth century, all such ventures—American and European—focused on producing oil and "bone," which was not bone at all but whalebone, better known today as baleen, the plastic-like plates found in the jaws of baleen whales such as right whales, bowheads, and humpbacks. Initially targeting right whales easily reached from shore stations, the New England oil-and-bone industry peaked more than 150 years later, in the 1830s and 1840s, with large ocean-going vessels embarking on three-year voyages; annual catches of more than a thousand sperm whales; a deep harbor at New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capitol of the world; and the great American novel. As whales in one location became scarce and shy, the oil-and-bone industry moved on, restlessly searching for those places where whales congregated thickly, from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic to the South Pacific to the North Pacific. By the early twentieth century, the New England whale fishery had all but withered away, while other whaling peoples, Norwegians in particular, ushered in a new era of industrial whaling. Steam-powered factory ships bedecked with harpoon guns and bomb lances chased the largest whale, the blue whale, and other rorquals; expeditiously killed them; and hauled them aboard for processing or took them to land-based stations. In this ultra-modern stage of commercial whaling, all parts of the whale found a purpose and were sold, even whale meat, which occasionally was processed for human consumption but most often ground into meal for fertilizer and animal food.	3
For most Americans, and undoubtedly for many other people around the world as well, the history of whaling is the history of the oil-and-bone whaling industry and its associated imagery: Ishmael boarding the Pequod out of Nantucket, whalebone stays in women's dresses, scrimshaw, and "Thar she blows!" But only a few Americans can say what whale meat tastes like or have ever contemplated the prospect of eating whales. The same could be said for many other meats that Europeans encountered in the age of expansion. While Europeans came to love the American potato and tomato, the experience of eating buffalo or guinea pig remained a curiosity.For Euro-Americans, eating whale meat was similarly extraordinary and, to this day, appears even more extraordinary than eating buffalo. Buffalo appears occasionally on American restaurant menus or behind the meat counter at grocery stores. However, whale meat and other "whale products" are banned in the United States, except for use by certain aboriginal peoples who are permitted to hunt whales, albeit for subsistence only.	4
Thus in the United States today, a small minority eats whale and a huge majority does not. Globally, the same dichotomy prevails, producing tensions and shaping relations among the world's peoples. To some observers, the fracture between whale-eaters and non-whale-eaters might seem a fitting companion to the other, more familiar dichotomies that have served as analytical categories for understanding and managing human diversity—dichotomies such as industrialized and nonindustrialized, civilized and primitive, commercial and subsistence-oriented. However, whale-eating cannot easily be twisted to conform to these other dichotomies because two industrialized, capitalist nations—Japan and Norway—rank among the most vocal and prominent defenders of the right to eat whales, along with the Inuit, Makah, and other indigenous peoples.