To coincide with the start of International Whale Watching Week, today’s picture is a gory demonstration of how the species came to be endangered in the first place. Whaling off the Islands of Flores and Pulo Komba in the Flores Seas, Indian Ocean, by the English amateur artist William Lewis Roderick, is signed and dated 30 July 1858. A rare and unusual relic of the nineteenth-century whale trade, it belongs to the National Library of Australia.

William Lewis Roderick was ship’s surgeon on the Adventure, a London-registered three-masted barque of 278 tons prominently depicted in the centre-right of the picture. By the late 1850s international trade in Sperm whales was a large and flourishing business. The animal’s blubber had been found to produce a lamp oil greatly superior to ordinary whale oil (which came from smaller baleen whales), while a chamber in its head was a rich source of spermaceti wax, from which the finest candles were made. These commodities were much sought after in the expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution. As suppliers made every effort to meet rising demand, the seas ran red with blood – a process neatly encapsulated by Roderick, who depicts this small stretch of the Indian Ocean as a watery killing field crowded with boats and whales, seeping or spouting vermilion as they die.

Whaling at the time was dominated by North American vessels, the Adventure being one of the last commercial whalers to operate from London. She had set out in 1856 on the journey commemorated by Roderick in this picture. It was not the first time he had been whaling. During his prolonged absences from home the surgeon-turned-amateur artist had taken up the hobby of “scrimshaw”, a craft developed by whalers in the early nineteenth century who took to inscribing...

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