April 17, 2012 • 35 mins
Despite its embattled status as brutal and illegal, commercial whaling is a tradition that dates back 1,000 years and served as the economic engine of the Industrial Revolution. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the whaling life then and now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to you? Stuff you should
know from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I can't believe we're
doing this again. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant doing one again? Yes,
(00:23):
the show? Yeah? What did you think we were done?
I'm so tired, are you? I'm so tired. I'm discouraged
to know that you hate Tom Petty. I hate them,
Mr Petty. I'm sure you're a genuinely nice guy, but
I can't stand your music. Oh I love Tom Petty.
That's great. I hope you love them enough for both
(00:44):
of us. That's fine. I just I'm not surprised because
you don't dig a lot of that sort of classic
rock stuff. That's not true. Born and raised thirty special
fan buddy, Are you really okay? I like plenty of
classic rock except led Zeppelin. Uh Um. I don't hate
(01:08):
a C. D C. I just don't really whatever you know?
Uh what else don't I like? Wait, let's do this
the other way. Here's the classic rock. I do like
the doors your I just twitched did it. Jim Morrison
does that to me? Um, let's see. Uh, I guess
(01:28):
that's about it. The doors. Yeah, I used to like
the Grateful Dead, as you know, sure, but I don't anymore. Well,
this has been a scintillating start. Do you want to
record over this? No? No, I think it's good. So
um ahoy chuck. Um, we're gonna be talking like that
a lot like Scarby Sea dogs. Um, not pirates, it's
(01:52):
Scarby Sea dogs, big difference. Um, that was a Scotsman
they sailed. They definitely did. Um. I have an intro.
Let's hear it. And it was a gift from you.
So thank you for this? Oh the news recently? Yeah good,
let's talk about that. So the Japanese, Um, we're very
sad when they came back to Japan from Antarctica and said,
(02:16):
we only caught two hundred and sixties seven whales, which
is way less than the nine we planned to catch
this season. Yeah. Um, they left. They left Japan in
December and came back very recently, um at the beginning
of March, because whales season was virtually over in Antarctica.
(02:40):
Even though there's a couple of weird things here. Uh,
Antarctica is one of the places in the world where
whales are protected internationally supposedly, and number two, whale hunting's outlaw.
This isn't like gb year zero where you can just
go and whale commercially. Um. Instead, it's two thousand twelve
(03:05):
and Japan still managed to kill two d and sixty
seven whales. Now, um, for people who are fans of whales,
I'm a fan of whales. Isn't everyone who's like stupid whales?
They deserve it. I'm sure whalers no. I think they
just have a you know, an industry that they're trying
to keep going. Um. And I want to clarify, uh.
(03:28):
When we say whaling, we're talking about whale killing expeditions,
not whale watching expeditions. Just to clarify to people like
my wife. Um so Uh. The the Japanese whaling season
ended prematurely, right, It packed up their harpoons and went home,
thanks to the efforts of a group known as Sea Shepherds.
(03:51):
Then the sea Shepherds. Sea shepherds sell sea shells by
the sea shore. They're militant. Uh. They're described as a
militant environmental group. Have you seen their boats? Are they
the ones that are painted like death from Above style?
They have They have the logo Jolly Rogers skilling cross boats,
but one of the bones is a triadent and the
(04:12):
others like a shepherd's hook. That's pretty cool. But even
cooler it's painted on the side of boats that look
like batmobiles. Yeah, that's the ones. I yeah, pretty cool.
I believe they have a show on our our parent
mother company, Discovery, who keeps us warm in her embrace
and suckles us from her teeth. Whale Wars. Yeah, that's
(04:34):
gotta be it, right. Yeah, that's time I've never seen that.
I don't say that. I love that show every night.
I love that show too, and all of its commercial sponsors.
So they show up, they say, we're gonna throw our
ropes in your propellers, and we're gonna launch stink bombs
at your boat and to to to thwart your whole
(04:56):
operation in the Japanese retaliated using water cannons, throwing harpoons,
grappling hooks, bamboo spears. Yeah, but what's crazy is the
sea shepherds. They came out on top. I mean there
were at least six hundred and change whales that didn't
lose their lives this year. Um, because in the Japanese
(05:17):
said they call them sabuteurs, not activists. Um. But because
these they were harassed the whole time. So it's working.
That's a huge victory. But um, whaling, I'm out there.
I'm putting us out there, dude, because I think for
most of our listeners in America, there's a lot of
sympathy for whales. This isn't a whaling country. Although, um,
(05:39):
there is whaling in the US by indigenous groups Alaska, way,
there's still are they grandfathered in? Yeah, there's about three
hundred a year. Roughly they take about three hundred whales
a year or no, I'm sorry, less than a hundred.
I mean, I feel like a jerk saying that's not bad.
But compared to the old numbers, that's really not bad
(06:01):
exactly right. Um, So I think there's a lot of
sympathy for whales. Yeah, apparently in Japan, even the younger generation,
they're having a hard time talking them into being on board.
Even though Japan, which we'll talk about, is is skirting
some of these laws to continue to whale, and Japan
is a whaling country, has been a whaling country since
(06:22):
the seventeenth century. Um. So, yeah, the idea of killing
a whale has gotten more and more stomach churning over
the year. Agreed. So let's talk about how to do it. Okay, Uh,
should we go the history first. I didn't talk to
you about this beforehand like we normally do. Sometimes we do,
so we never do. Yeah, we can talk about history.
(06:44):
I think that's a good idea. Okay. Where did whaling start?
It started in uh Spain and northwest Spain and southwest
France by the Basques. Well that's commercial whaling. Oh well
you're you're talking about just uh Nanook of the North
out there with this harpoon, sure, yeah, indigenous folks yeah,
or Sandtok of the south. Yeah. Um, there's a good
(07:05):
whale in down Antarctic away what still is yeah? Um,
but not just them. The Norwegians have long been whaling cultures,
same with the Icelandic. Yeah, true, Russians and they still
ice in Iceland and Norway. Right, they're still at it. Yeah,
now not so much these days. Were there at the
(07:26):
very least getting a little more aware alright. So getting
back to the Basques, the first commercial whaling operations UM
as early as one thousand in the Bay of biz
K and then of course everyone else saw what was
going on, jumped on board England in UH in North
(07:47):
America in the early sixteen hundreds, Japan six. The US
finally off Nantucket sevent twelve. So this this article kind
of skirts over some really big stuff here, Like it
basically goes from Nantucket to ven Foyn And when you jump,
make that jump, you leave out the entire Golden Age
(08:09):
of whaling right in fifty year. So when you reach Nantucket,
the you you encounter UM and there's this awesome ken
Burns like two part series on UM whaling. If you're
ever interested, it's definitely worth checking out this one. But
Nantucket became like the whaling capital of the world and
(08:33):
thereby also became the commercial um engine of the world
because whaling and whale oil uh came about at a
time when the Industrial Revolution hit, and whale oil was
to the world what fossil fuel oil is today. Pre petroleum,
(08:54):
it was petroleum. Yeah, like it literally is what the
world ran on and what we lit artificially our world with. Right,
So UM New Bedford specifically in Nantucket or like the
what Saudi Arabia is today, and whales out there in
the ocean were basically like floating pieces of oil rich
real estate that anybody with the ship could go claim.
(09:15):
Is that why that area is so still so dollar heavy?
Probably is that what got them going to begin with?
Wer Yeah, and from like seventeen fifty to eighteen fifty
it was like one of the richest places in the world.
So you can't quite skip over that. It's definitely worth mentioning.
That's right, Those cold uh Atlantic waters up there, fertile
(09:39):
ground for whales, I imagine. Yeah, And they started out
by just um harvesting whales that washed up ashore. But um,
that would have been a nice way to just keep
it that way it was, But then the industrial revolution
hit and they're like, oh, whale, it really burns. Well,
we can make candles out of it. If I dabbed
some behind my ears, I'll use as a perfume, well,
(10:00):
like a stinky whale. Yeah. But it isn't uh perfuman
cosmetics and stuff like that, right it is. I think
it probably still isn't something in Japan, all right, So
are we ready for spin? Sure? The Norwegian Pioneer sven Foyn,
which is a great name. Uh. He launched the first
(10:21):
steam powered whaling ship in eighteen sixty three and then
invented a little something that really changed everything called the
harpoon cannon, which is pretty awful. It's not you know,
your harpoon a whale by hand up until that point,
and then now all of a sudden you could shoot
a harpoon with a cannon that would explode inside the whale.
(10:43):
Crazy sven Foyn is pretty much single handedly the reason
why we have such depleted and endangered whale stock today.
And I guess it didn't mess up the whale too
much with the explosion, and hopefully it was over because
prior to that, um, killing a whale is very cult
when you are hand throwing a harpoon, right sure, And
that's how they did it. UM. So you had a
(11:05):
bunch of guys in little tiny boats like all throwing spears,
not necessarily harpoons, because the harpoon was used to towe
the whale back whence it was dead, but like a
spear UM and the only way to kill it was
to spirit in its gills, so that eventually it was
stabbed enough that it would um aspirate and choke on
its own blood. And it took a while, and it
(11:27):
would swim about pretty pretty heavily for a little bit,
is called a flurry, and then it would just go
on its side finn up. And that's how you knew
the whale was dead. And you harpooned it, and all
the whale boats towed it back to the boat for processing.
So hopefully that explosion just killed it immediately. But I'll
but it didn't. Yeah, but at the very least it
must not have messed it up for harvesting processing, or
(11:49):
else they probablyn't have done it. Um Well, you mentioned
the threshing about very dangerous job back then. Definitely imagine
it still is to a certain degree. But back then
those little boats, large whale, much larger than your boat
thrashing about. It's gonna capsize you. You could drown, You
could slip on the boat with the blubber and the
(12:10):
blood everywhere. Yeah, because I mean, we'll think about this.
You have a whale ship, right, and that's where like
everybody lives in stays. But to go hunt the whale
when you're actually killing the whale, you're in a whale boat.
And that's basically like the size of a rowboat. And
that's what you're in with with a whale, Like, get
off of me, get exactly. So lots of dudes died, uh.
And then there's the disease of course, going to exotic
(12:33):
and gross sports of call tuberculosis, what else, yellow fever, malaria,
pretty much I would imagine the whole gambit, the whole
gambit of sea board disease, scurvy, ricketts v D. Let's
get real, yeah, um, And like you said, seven had
a direct hand in leading to the depletion of the population,
(12:53):
and starting in the early nineteen hundreds, things really started
going south for the whale. Yeah. Numbers wise, yea, you
want to rattle off a few of these, So like
this is sven point everyone, this is fin Foin's work.
I'd lay this clearly at his feet. In nineteen o four, UM,
A hundred and eighty four whales uh were killed off
(13:15):
of the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, right right
within ten years UM. It jumped to four right within
ten years UM. Just blue whales alone, thirty eight were killed,
hundred and seventy six fin whales and twenty one thousand
(13:37):
eight hundred ninety four humpbacks were killed in that same
area within one decade. And that's just in that one area.
And also you you will note that blue whales and
fin whales used to be out of the reach of
um any kind of whale ship were they too fast
and they could out maneuver and out out run any
ship that was chasing them until Sven foy In introduced
(13:59):
the steam power whales. Right, So it was just the
sperm whales at first, is that right? Right? And sperm
whale also, by the way, is what they were looking for,
mainly because sperm oil was the best oil available, burned
the cleanest and the brightest. And sperm whales also had
something called sperm machetti, which is like this waxy substance
(14:19):
in their head that you could use to cut the
whale oil into candles. That worked really well. It was
just like the best stuff. It was also way more
valuable than regular whale oil. Yeah, how much did they produce?
I had this year? Oh, they had like um to
forty barrels, and there's like a whale oil per whale
per sperm whale. Yeah, and that's wharrel was thirty one
(14:42):
and a half gallons. Yea, so it's I did the
math somewhere. Sixty gallons per sperm whale. Yeah. Well, and
they would use every part of the whale. We'll at
least give them that. It's not like shark fin soup,
like cut off the shark fin and then dump the
shark back in the water. They would try to use
every part of the whale per sustenance. Um. So I
guess we're going back to the beginning again, which is
(15:03):
why did they do this to begin with? Because it
couldn't grow veggies in a lot of these places, so
whale was like what they subsisted on, subsided on, subsisted,
subsisted on, subsided happened after they ran out of whale exactly. Um.
So you know it's got a lot of protein, iron niacin,
(15:24):
vitamin's A d C. Yeah, and that's like good stuff
for them, right. And they figured out early on that
they could burn the blubber too right to light and
heat their iglues make sleds. That would help making sleds
and tools out of baileeen whales. Teeth, I guess I
should make air quotes teeth. Um, you can use it
for all sorts of stuff. Imagine bones too. And this
(15:48):
is back in the day that like before commercially and
there's a long tradition of using all parts of the whale.
But there's a huge difference between even a massive commercial
enterprise like that were like the ones that were launched
off of Nantucket that required sale power and hand thrown
(16:08):
harpoons and then steam power boats and harpoon guns with
explosive tips. There's a big difference, huge difference. And then
the global demand also just kind of changed everything too. Yeah,
Japan um post war, post World War two. Uh, they
relied a lot on whales for for food. They were
(16:29):
um pretty poor at the time after the war, trying
to put the pieces back together, and whales were a
big part of that. On the school lunch menu up
into the nineteen sixties, even although it's not supposed to
taste very good, is it. It's supposed to taste it
says in this article like either reindeer or moose. Yeah,
that's a fine slate, try it, I guess. Yeah, And
(16:51):
that's what he had to say. Yeah, and it's not
heavily spiced out of tradition, right. Uh. That is in
Norway Iceland, in Alaska. Ok. Yeah, in Japan they spice
the heck out of it, I guess so. I'm sure
they say serve it as sashimi, which would mean that
they probably don't. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of a
(17:12):
s h phoneme tongue twisters in this one for me.
You are right, No, Well, we'll persevere. So we're no
longer running on um any kind of our Our economy
doesn't run on whale oil any longer. No now raping
the earth of petroleum. Right, but at least it doesn't
(17:33):
you know, have babies. Um, So why are we still
killing whales? Uh? Well, in Japan they have a loophole
um under Article eight of the International Convention of the
Regulation of Whaling that says that they are allowed to
(17:54):
kill for research purposes. Technically anybody is yeah, but well
yeah in Japan is the only one taking them up
on it, saying yeah, this is for research, yes, but
that is disputed, yes, because really the only um use
these days for whales is meat. Right, So Japan um
is through this international convention, they're not the only ones
(18:17):
who can use um. Whale hunting for scientific research is
a reason to kill whales right, um. But yeah, they're
they're only criticized for it because there's other techniques that
other countries used to study whale populations that don't require, um,
the whale to die. Well. I don't get that to
begin with, because what they're studying is what they're trying
(18:40):
to prove is that there are actually more whales. And
people are saying that's one of the things. They're saying
one of the other things. And I should say that
my source for this is Greenpeace, um. But they said
they were saying that Japan routinely uses study study samples
of populations of like five whales from the same area,
(19:02):
which is a terrible way to study like a species. Um.
And they are examining their stomach contents to find out
about whale diets, and then they'll say, oh, well, these
whales eat a lot of salmon, and salmon's are very
commercially important, um fish, so we should kill more whales, right. Um.
(19:23):
If you look at the Australians, they study whale diets too,
but they track whale feces and they also study whale
habits by keeping them alive and get more data by
keeping them alive by just tagging them. Yeah, and they're
one of the countries that's come out hardest against Japan
and condemning them, right yeah. Yeah, the Australians were like, good,
(19:43):
I'm glad you guys made it back safely and early
from your whale hunting season this year. So the Japanese
are very much criticized for exploiting this, but under international
law they can do this. And um, I guess the
provision that allows science big whaling says if you catch
a catch and kill a whale for scientific purposes, you
(20:05):
have to use the whole whale. So they're saying, well,
we've got to sell this as food, right. The the
that's a huge loophole because it's basically like, yeah, if
you say we're well here's this here's this study we're
carrying out, you can just conduct commercial whaling, which is
what they're doing. So um in now they were starting,
(20:25):
they already were processing. Is that what you said earlier?
They're already processing on board before. Yeah, So what happened then?
Did it just? The factory ships made it even easier.
They were just more outfitted with it. Yeah, they were
kind of like d I Y processing whales beforehand, but
they were definitely doing it during like the Golden Age
(20:46):
off and Nantucket, where like you would capture a whale
harpoon it. All of the guys who had just been
fighting this thing for like hours would grow it back
to the ship and they'd attach it with chains to
the ship and then start skinning it like layer by layer. Yeah,
they said it's like peeling an orange skin. And they
(21:06):
would carve it up into blanket pieces. There were a
ton a piece, Like some guys died for that. That
was one of these people die was getting crushed by
like a slab of blubber. Oh sure, a ton of
whale blubber falling on you. That's not a good way
to go. Um. And then they would haul these blanket
pieces up and then divide them into what they call
horse pieces. My guess is that that was about the
(21:28):
size of a horse. Sure probably could still kill you.
I imagine you die going. Then they would boil, boil out,
extract extracting the blubber, the oil from the blubber. And
this is all done on board, like with big iron
pots and stoves. Pretty gnarly. Yeah, and um, there's blood everywhere,
(21:49):
there's oily blubber everywhere. So one of the one of
the great um dangers of the job was slipping on
deck and falling overboard. You don't think that the waters
around the ship they were skinning the um whale weren't
just infested with sharks, So that was a very dangerous
Part two. Uh so, once they had the oil um
(22:12):
extracted from the blubber, they would actually go ahead and
put it in the casks, stow it down in the hold,
try and clean up the mess, even though there really
is no cleaning up that mess, no, apparently not. And
um then they just start over again, and like a
whaling expedition, dude, was years long. They went for years,
(22:33):
Like they just go out there because they could do
this all um aboard their ship and they just live
on the whale the whole time. They usually had provisions.
I'm sure they would stop in Tortuga and pick up
some provisions and some vds or whatever, beans and veneerial
disease with their whale and um and then you know,
go on their way. But like they would be away
(22:55):
from home for years at a stretch. Yeah, so is
a crazy life, all right. So let's uh flash forward
a bit um factory ships in nineteen five were introduced,
which really ramped up the killing and sixty years in
the sixty years following that, more than two million whales
were killed in the Southern hemisphere. So that's when people countries,
(23:19):
the League of Nations specifically sat up and said, you
know what, in one we should put together some sort
of legislation to regulate this, and they's pretty cool. For
twenty six countries got on board. Um, except for Japan,
Germany and Russia. Uh. Then ten years later, uh, in
(23:41):
nineteen I'm sorry. Five years later they established the International
Agreement for Regulation of Whaling, and again Japan said no thanks.
And that year there was a record high of forty
six thousand, thirty nine whales killed in the Antarctic alone.
It still is the record. And you know, they've tried
(24:02):
these different things over the years, but basically what I
gathered was there was never any enforcement. No, the the
i WC has no teeth. They have by lean that's it.
So they can't really they can't do anything that was
off the cuff. Was really, um, well, then they can't
do anything like you can sit there and make up
regulations all day, but Japan can just say no, we're
(24:22):
not gonna do it, I think, and be like, hey,
that would hurt our economy. Sorry, we understand that you
feel for the whales, but we're whaling. So what are
you gonna do? And they they say, oh, yeah, we forgot.
There's no sanctions that we can carry out against you.
We can police, we can condemn it. Yeah, there's no
whale police, see shepherds, but their rogue. Yeah, they do
(24:43):
a good job apparently. Whether or not you agree with
their methods is one thing. But they certainly made a
difference this year. Uh. Flash forward again to nineteen six
UM when they banned commercial whaling altogether, again rejected by Japan,
in Norway and Russia. But in that in that UM convention,
(25:06):
there was that loophole for scientific research. There's also I
think always been exceptions for indigenous groups too. Um. But
the uh, the the big loophole was the scientific whaling one.
That's the one that they continue exploiting because everybody's like,
we're not doing any commercial way, like we're just licensing,
(25:27):
issuing scientific whaling licenses to these commercial whaling out Now
early you said the United States still does with that.
Is that just indigenous peoples? Yeah? Um, And there was something.
I couldn't find out what happened, man, But I saw
this like chart of whaling and from since n UM
(25:47):
it's had an impact that the convention, that treaty had
an impact, because if you look at UM overall total
kills UM they call him catches, it's declined just trem
endlessly since then. It's just since the band was put
in place. Yeah, and then I saw for nineteen, for
two thousand nine eight, around eight nine hundred killed for
(26:11):
the world that year compared to forty six thousand in
Antarctica alone, which is pretty crazy. The key is is
whether that number can be kept down in pace with
the if that can outrun the decline of whale population
so that there aren't any extinction events before whaling just
(26:32):
ceases or before the stocks can be um stabilized refurbished. Yeah,
I think there's like a real definite like race against
the clock thing that's going on right now with whale populations.
If I remember correctly when we did it must have
been when we did the the Swim with the Whales podcast.
(26:54):
I think I remember something about the way they reproduced
or reproduct reproductive cycles really long, so they have a
hard time re establish thing. It's not like they're having
little whale pups every every year or two. So that
probably has something to do. And I think they stick
around like with their parents, like they raised and nurse.
They're young for a very long time as well. They're
just like dead beats in the basement couch waiting around
(27:17):
listening to Pink Floyd. You like Pink Floyd. Oh, yes
I do. There's two thanks the doors and Pink Floyd.
Very nice. So what does the future hold, Mr Clark? Well,
not being a prognosticator myself, I don't feel comfortable predicting
the future. But I don't know, man, I'm surprised by
(27:37):
the um that that news report that you you gave me,
like that the c Shepherds were having like that kind
of effect. I figured that they would be a nuisance,
not an effective activist militant group. Well they reased it
up a couple of years ago too. They rammed each
other supposedly. Yeah, but I got the impression from this
(27:58):
article that it was like, all right, I'm on board
your vessel and I can't really do anything and they're like, oh,
you can't do anything either, And you know, it was
like that that encounter was a the representation of just that,
like the idea what the id WC does with whaling.
It's like there's nothing you can do. Really, no one's
able to do anything that has a real impact. But
(28:21):
apparently they figured it out. So what happened was in
two thousand ten, they claimed the Japanese ship rammed the
Sea Shepherd ship, sinking it, and so the dudes from
c Shepherd went aboard the whaling ship and that's when
they just said, we can't do anything, so let's have
a tickle fight. Pretty much, he was going to make
a citizen's rest. Come on, that's like one thing. If
(28:44):
you don't carry it out, you don't tell anybody. You
were going to do that, right, you know, like I'm
gonna make a citizen's rest. I was going to write
you should just tackle them or something. I'll bet that
that was all over Discovery Channel too, Yeah, probably, so,
um so anything else. I don't have anything else other
(29:05):
than to say, uh, you know, if this is important
to you, pay attention, because there's always I think they
met just last year about this again. It's like an
ongoing battle to keep these regulations in place. So oh,
I've got another one. Let's hear um. If you root
for whales, you should check out the story of the Essex,
(29:25):
which inspired Moby Dick. Um. It's the only known ship
to have been sunk apparently purposely, purposefully by a whale
ramming it. Whale rammed it, turned around, got speed and
rammed it again and ended up sinking the Essex and
sent like the twenty crew members on like this horrible
(29:47):
journey um where they were adrift in the South Pacific
and they avoided islands that were close by because they're
afraid of cannibals. But in their attempt for South America,
they began to starve in resort to cannibalism themselves. Wow.
That's an ironic twist, didn't it. I've never read Moby Dick.
Can you believe that I do? I have not read
it either, so really yeah, I know? Wow? What we
(30:09):
need to get that done? Okay, let's go read Moby
Dick right now, chuck, okay. Um, while we read Moby Dick,
you should learn more about whaling. You could type that
into the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com,
which means it's time for listener mail. Josh I'm gonna
call this good organization in Austin, Texas, which we were
(30:29):
just at and um, this is sent from Patrick who
was at our variety show that'll be through. He said,
great show, guys. I was pleasantly surprised with the quote
unquote acting in the pilot by y'all, and I look
forward to tuning in later. Quote unquote acting is accurate exactly. Uh.
(30:49):
They He's involved though, with a new nonprofit and I
told him he would plug it. Um Retreat r E
lowercase capital t r e E or case t. Let
see where we're going here, t r e E t
retreat Okay, not t r E A t H. They
(31:11):
plant trees UM. They are a kaleidoscopic group of bicycle
and tree enthusiasts with strong backs, sharp minds, and big
hearts who volunteer to replant communities. The group formed in
response to the Basstrop wildfires that took place during the
summer of aught eleven. The way you can't say eleven
(31:32):
it's bullets in, isn't it um? Just outside of Austin, Texas.
During two days in January, Retreat America planted over two
d trees and put eighty miles on their bikes. UM
they're heading back to Basstroup for another round of tree
planning March, which is right now, so by the time
(31:54):
this comes out, that'll be be over. But you can
still support him by going to Facebook dot com Ash
retreat with two Ease America. It's a brand new group.
They're trying to spread the word, so just a little
awareness is what they're looking for, and they have some
mandates here. One is to plant as many donated trees
native trees as possible for homeowners affected by natural disasters.
(32:18):
To harness the spirit of volunteerism that exists in everyone.
Harness it and beat it with the stick number three
and live in communities socially and economically in the aftermath
of disasters. Number four. Stimulate stewardship and invigorate a local
desire to rehabilitate the damage land stimilated. With the stick.
Number five, spread proper tree planting and care techniques. Stick
(32:45):
number six foster appreciation for UH and involvement in uh abericulture.
How many UH lists of the how many demands do
they have to have? One more? UM encourage the use
of bicycles within the urban and vironment. Finally, we get
the bicycles. So Patrick, y'all are doing great work. Austin
(33:05):
is one of our favorite places now to visit and
retreat America. You should support go check him out bike
person or a tree person or if you hate trees
and you love your car, then there's probably an organization
for you, dude. We should also give a shout out
to the contest winner who we met and hung out with. Yeah,
(33:26):
Caleb Caleb. Did he sign a release to say his liscening. Oh,
we'll just say Caleb w from Dallas. Yeah, he came out.
He won the House Stuff Works Facebook contest and um,
he came out, hung out with us. We we went,
We went out to lunch. We took him on a
tour of the office, tak him out for a very
nice lunch. Um. The resulted in food poisoning for me.
(33:49):
I'm sorry to hear that, and um it was. It
was very tasty though. Yeah, and he went to UM
I followed up with him. He did go to the
King Center after he left us. Yeah, he was keen
on that. Yeah, he went. He'd been studying the life
of Martin Luther King and was excited to go visit.
We uh told him how to get there, and he
went and he went to the King Center and his
original house that he lived in. It's like all in
(34:11):
the same area, and his church I think as well.
So yeah, he checked it all and he said, it's
really cool. It was very cool. So Caleb, we're glad
you were here. You were a really nice dude. Yeah,
you really were. It really could have gone a different
way and we were very fortunate that you were the winner.
That's right, So congratulations to you again. Um, let's see
Chuck Whaling stories. Do you think anybody has one? I
(34:32):
doubt it. Alright, let's find out. Let's hear your Whaling story.
You can tweak to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook at Facebook dot com,
Stupid Timeline, Facebook dot com, slash stuff you should Know um,
and you can send us an email at Stuff Podcast
at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our
(34:58):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join houste Works
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to you? Stuff you should
know from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I can't believe we're
doing this again. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant doing one again? Yes,
(00:23):
the show? Yeah? What did you think we were done?
I'm so tired, are you? I'm so tired. I'm discouraged
to know that you hate Tom Petty. I hate them,
Mr Petty. I'm sure you're a genuinely nice guy, but
I can't stand your music. Oh I love Tom Petty.
That's great. I hope you love them enough for both
(00:44):
of us. That's fine. I just I'm not surprised because
you don't dig a lot of that sort of classic
rock stuff. That's not true. Born and raised thirty special
fan buddy, Are you really okay? I like plenty of
classic rock except led Zeppelin. Uh Um. I don't hate
(01:08):
a C. D C. I just don't really whatever you know?
Uh what else don't I like? Wait, let's do this
the other way. Here's the classic rock. I do like
the doors your I just twitched did it. Jim Morrison
does that to me? Um, let's see. Uh, I guess
(01:28):
that's about it. The doors. Yeah, I used to like
the Grateful Dead, as you know, sure, but I don't anymore. Well,
this has been a scintillating start. Do you want to
record over this? No? No, I think it's good. So
um ahoy chuck. Um, we're gonna be talking like that
a lot like Scarby Sea dogs. Um, not pirates, it's
(01:52):
Scarby Sea dogs, big difference. Um, that was a Scotsman
they sailed. They definitely did. Um. I have an intro.
Let's hear it. And it was a gift from you.
So thank you for this? Oh the news recently? Yeah good,
let's talk about that. So the Japanese, Um, we're very
sad when they came back to Japan from Antarctica and said,
(02:16):
we only caught two hundred and sixties seven whales, which
is way less than the nine we planned to catch
this season. Yeah. Um, they left. They left Japan in
December and came back very recently, um at the beginning
of March, because whales season was virtually over in Antarctica.
(02:40):
Even though there's a couple of weird things here. Uh,
Antarctica is one of the places in the world where
whales are protected internationally supposedly, and number two, whale hunting's outlaw.
This isn't like gb year zero where you can just
go and whale commercially. Um. Instead, it's two thousand twelve
(03:05):
and Japan still managed to kill two d and sixty
seven whales. Now, um, for people who are fans of whales,
I'm a fan of whales. Isn't everyone who's like stupid whales?
They deserve it. I'm sure whalers no. I think they
just have a you know, an industry that they're trying
to keep going. Um. And I want to clarify, uh.
(03:28):
When we say whaling, we're talking about whale killing expeditions,
not whale watching expeditions. Just to clarify to people like
my wife. Um so Uh. The the Japanese whaling season
ended prematurely, right, It packed up their harpoons and went home,
thanks to the efforts of a group known as Sea Shepherds.
(03:51):
Then the sea Shepherds. Sea shepherds sell sea shells by
the sea shore. They're militant. Uh. They're described as a
militant environmental group. Have you seen their boats? Are they
the ones that are painted like death from Above style?
They have They have the logo Jolly Rogers skilling cross boats,
but one of the bones is a triadent and the
(04:12):
others like a shepherd's hook. That's pretty cool. But even
cooler it's painted on the side of boats that look
like batmobiles. Yeah, that's the ones. I yeah, pretty cool.
I believe they have a show on our our parent
mother company, Discovery, who keeps us warm in her embrace
and suckles us from her teeth. Whale Wars. Yeah, that's
(04:34):
gotta be it, right. Yeah, that's time I've never seen that.
I don't say that. I love that show every night.
I love that show too, and all of its commercial sponsors.
So they show up, they say, we're gonna throw our
ropes in your propellers, and we're gonna launch stink bombs
at your boat and to to to thwart your whole
(04:56):
operation in the Japanese retaliated using water cannons, throwing harpoons,
grappling hooks, bamboo spears. Yeah, but what's crazy is the
sea shepherds. They came out on top. I mean there
were at least six hundred and change whales that didn't
lose their lives this year. Um, because in the Japanese
(05:17):
said they call them sabuteurs, not activists. Um. But because
these they were harassed the whole time. So it's working.
That's a huge victory. But um, whaling, I'm out there.
I'm putting us out there, dude, because I think for
most of our listeners in America, there's a lot of
sympathy for whales. This isn't a whaling country. Although, um,
(05:39):
there is whaling in the US by indigenous groups Alaska, way,
there's still are they grandfathered in? Yeah, there's about three
hundred a year. Roughly they take about three hundred whales
a year or no, I'm sorry, less than a hundred.
I mean, I feel like a jerk saying that's not bad.
But compared to the old numbers, that's really not bad
(06:01):
exactly right. Um, So I think there's a lot of
sympathy for whales. Yeah, apparently in Japan, even the younger generation,
they're having a hard time talking them into being on board.
Even though Japan, which we'll talk about, is is skirting
some of these laws to continue to whale, and Japan
is a whaling country, has been a whaling country since
(06:22):
the seventeenth century. Um. So, yeah, the idea of killing
a whale has gotten more and more stomach churning over
the year. Agreed. So let's talk about how to do it. Okay, Uh,
should we go the history first. I didn't talk to
you about this beforehand like we normally do. Sometimes we do,
so we never do. Yeah, we can talk about history.
(06:44):
I think that's a good idea. Okay. Where did whaling start?
It started in uh Spain and northwest Spain and southwest
France by the Basques. Well that's commercial whaling. Oh well
you're you're talking about just uh Nanook of the North
out there with this harpoon, sure, yeah, indigenous folks yeah,
or Sandtok of the south. Yeah. Um, there's a good
(07:05):
whale in down Antarctic away what still is yeah? Um,
but not just them. The Norwegians have long been whaling cultures,
same with the Icelandic. Yeah, true, Russians and they still
ice in Iceland and Norway. Right, they're still at it. Yeah,
now not so much these days. Were there at the
(07:26):
very least getting a little more aware alright. So getting
back to the Basques, the first commercial whaling operations UM
as early as one thousand in the Bay of biz
K and then of course everyone else saw what was
going on, jumped on board England in UH in North
(07:47):
America in the early sixteen hundreds, Japan six. The US
finally off Nantucket sevent twelve. So this this article kind
of skirts over some really big stuff here, Like it
basically goes from Nantucket to ven Foyn And when you jump,
make that jump, you leave out the entire Golden Age
(08:09):
of whaling right in fifty year. So when you reach Nantucket,
the you you encounter UM and there's this awesome ken
Burns like two part series on UM whaling. If you're
ever interested, it's definitely worth checking out this one. But
Nantucket became like the whaling capital of the world and
(08:33):
thereby also became the commercial um engine of the world
because whaling and whale oil uh came about at a
time when the Industrial Revolution hit, and whale oil was
to the world what fossil fuel oil is today. Pre petroleum,
(08:54):
it was petroleum. Yeah, like it literally is what the
world ran on and what we lit artificially our world with. Right,
So UM New Bedford specifically in Nantucket or like the
what Saudi Arabia is today, and whales out there in
the ocean were basically like floating pieces of oil rich
real estate that anybody with the ship could go claim.
(09:15):
Is that why that area is so still so dollar heavy?
Probably is that what got them going to begin with?
Wer Yeah, and from like seventeen fifty to eighteen fifty
it was like one of the richest places in the world.
So you can't quite skip over that. It's definitely worth mentioning.
That's right, Those cold uh Atlantic waters up there, fertile
(09:39):
ground for whales, I imagine. Yeah, And they started out
by just um harvesting whales that washed up ashore. But um,
that would have been a nice way to just keep
it that way it was, But then the industrial revolution
hit and they're like, oh, whale, it really burns. Well,
we can make candles out of it. If I dabbed
some behind my ears, I'll use as a perfume, well,
(10:00):
like a stinky whale. Yeah. But it isn't uh perfuman
cosmetics and stuff like that, right it is. I think
it probably still isn't something in Japan, all right, So
are we ready for spin? Sure? The Norwegian Pioneer sven Foyn,
which is a great name. Uh. He launched the first
(10:21):
steam powered whaling ship in eighteen sixty three and then
invented a little something that really changed everything called the
harpoon cannon, which is pretty awful. It's not you know,
your harpoon a whale by hand up until that point,
and then now all of a sudden you could shoot
a harpoon with a cannon that would explode inside the whale.
(10:43):
Crazy sven Foyn is pretty much single handedly the reason
why we have such depleted and endangered whale stock today.
And I guess it didn't mess up the whale too
much with the explosion, and hopefully it was over because
prior to that, um, killing a whale is very cult
when you are hand throwing a harpoon, right sure, And
that's how they did it. UM. So you had a
(11:05):
bunch of guys in little tiny boats like all throwing spears,
not necessarily harpoons, because the harpoon was used to towe
the whale back whence it was dead, but like a
spear UM and the only way to kill it was
to spirit in its gills, so that eventually it was
stabbed enough that it would um aspirate and choke on
its own blood. And it took a while, and it
(11:27):
would swim about pretty pretty heavily for a little bit,
is called a flurry, and then it would just go
on its side finn up. And that's how you knew
the whale was dead. And you harpooned it, and all
the whale boats towed it back to the boat for processing.
So hopefully that explosion just killed it immediately. But I'll
but it didn't. Yeah, but at the very least it
must not have messed it up for harvesting processing, or
(11:49):
else they probablyn't have done it. Um Well, you mentioned
the threshing about very dangerous job back then. Definitely imagine
it still is to a certain degree. But back then
those little boats, large whale, much larger than your boat
thrashing about. It's gonna capsize you. You could drown, You
could slip on the boat with the blubber and the
(12:10):
blood everywhere. Yeah, because I mean, we'll think about this.
You have a whale ship, right, and that's where like
everybody lives in stays. But to go hunt the whale
when you're actually killing the whale, you're in a whale boat.
And that's basically like the size of a rowboat. And
that's what you're in with with a whale, Like, get
off of me, get exactly. So lots of dudes died, uh.
And then there's the disease of course, going to exotic
(12:33):
and gross sports of call tuberculosis, what else, yellow fever, malaria,
pretty much I would imagine the whole gambit, the whole
gambit of sea board disease, scurvy, ricketts v D. Let's
get real, yeah, um, And like you said, seven had
a direct hand in leading to the depletion of the population,
(12:53):
and starting in the early nineteen hundreds, things really started
going south for the whale. Yeah. Numbers wise, yea, you
want to rattle off a few of these, So like
this is sven point everyone, this is fin Foin's work.
I'd lay this clearly at his feet. In nineteen o four, UM,
A hundred and eighty four whales uh were killed off
(13:15):
of the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, right right
within ten years UM. It jumped to four right within
ten years UM. Just blue whales alone, thirty eight were killed,
hundred and seventy six fin whales and twenty one thousand
(13:37):
eight hundred ninety four humpbacks were killed in that same
area within one decade. And that's just in that one area.
And also you you will note that blue whales and
fin whales used to be out of the reach of
um any kind of whale ship were they too fast
and they could out maneuver and out out run any
ship that was chasing them until Sven foy In introduced
(13:59):
the steam power whales. Right, So it was just the
sperm whales at first, is that right? Right? And sperm
whale also, by the way, is what they were looking for,
mainly because sperm oil was the best oil available, burned
the cleanest and the brightest. And sperm whales also had
something called sperm machetti, which is like this waxy substance
(14:19):
in their head that you could use to cut the
whale oil into candles. That worked really well. It was
just like the best stuff. It was also way more
valuable than regular whale oil. Yeah, how much did they produce?
I had this year? Oh, they had like um to
forty barrels, and there's like a whale oil per whale
per sperm whale. Yeah, and that's wharrel was thirty one
(14:42):
and a half gallons. Yea, so it's I did the
math somewhere. Sixty gallons per sperm whale. Yeah. Well, and
they would use every part of the whale. We'll at
least give them that. It's not like shark fin soup,
like cut off the shark fin and then dump the
shark back in the water. They would try to use
every part of the whale per sustenance. Um. So I
guess we're going back to the beginning again, which is
(15:03):
why did they do this to begin with? Because it
couldn't grow veggies in a lot of these places, so
whale was like what they subsisted on, subsided on, subsisted,
subsisted on, subsided happened after they ran out of whale exactly. Um.
So you know it's got a lot of protein, iron niacin,
(15:24):
vitamin's A d C. Yeah, and that's like good stuff
for them, right. And they figured out early on that
they could burn the blubber too right to light and
heat their iglues make sleds. That would help making sleds
and tools out of baileeen whales. Teeth, I guess I
should make air quotes teeth. Um, you can use it
for all sorts of stuff. Imagine bones too. And this
(15:48):
is back in the day that like before commercially and
there's a long tradition of using all parts of the whale.
But there's a huge difference between even a massive commercial
enterprise like that were like the ones that were launched
off of Nantucket that required sale power and hand thrown
(16:08):
harpoons and then steam power boats and harpoon guns with
explosive tips. There's a big difference, huge difference. And then
the global demand also just kind of changed everything too. Yeah,
Japan um post war, post World War two. Uh, they
relied a lot on whales for for food. They were
(16:29):
um pretty poor at the time after the war, trying
to put the pieces back together, and whales were a
big part of that. On the school lunch menu up
into the nineteen sixties, even although it's not supposed to
taste very good, is it. It's supposed to taste it
says in this article like either reindeer or moose. Yeah,
that's a fine slate, try it, I guess. Yeah, And
(16:51):
that's what he had to say. Yeah, and it's not
heavily spiced out of tradition, right. Uh. That is in
Norway Iceland, in Alaska. Ok. Yeah, in Japan they spice
the heck out of it, I guess so. I'm sure
they say serve it as sashimi, which would mean that
they probably don't. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of a
(17:12):
s h phoneme tongue twisters in this one for me.
You are right, No, Well, we'll persevere. So we're no
longer running on um any kind of our Our economy
doesn't run on whale oil any longer. No now raping
the earth of petroleum. Right, but at least it doesn't
(17:33):
you know, have babies. Um, So why are we still
killing whales? Uh? Well, in Japan they have a loophole
um under Article eight of the International Convention of the
Regulation of Whaling that says that they are allowed to
(17:54):
kill for research purposes. Technically anybody is yeah, but well
yeah in Japan is the only one taking them up
on it, saying yeah, this is for research, yes, but
that is disputed, yes, because really the only um use
these days for whales is meat. Right, So Japan um
is through this international convention, they're not the only ones
(18:17):
who can use um. Whale hunting for scientific research is
a reason to kill whales right, um. But yeah, they're
they're only criticized for it because there's other techniques that
other countries used to study whale populations that don't require, um,
the whale to die. Well. I don't get that to
begin with, because what they're studying is what they're trying
(18:40):
to prove is that there are actually more whales. And
people are saying that's one of the things. They're saying
one of the other things. And I should say that
my source for this is Greenpeace, um. But they said
they were saying that Japan routinely uses study study samples
of populations of like five whales from the same area,
(19:02):
which is a terrible way to study like a species. Um.
And they are examining their stomach contents to find out
about whale diets, and then they'll say, oh, well, these
whales eat a lot of salmon, and salmon's are very
commercially important, um fish, so we should kill more whales, right. Um.
(19:23):
If you look at the Australians, they study whale diets too,
but they track whale feces and they also study whale
habits by keeping them alive and get more data by
keeping them alive by just tagging them. Yeah, and they're
one of the countries that's come out hardest against Japan
and condemning them, right yeah. Yeah, the Australians were like, good,
(19:43):
I'm glad you guys made it back safely and early
from your whale hunting season this year. So the Japanese
are very much criticized for exploiting this, but under international
law they can do this. And um, I guess the
provision that allows science big whaling says if you catch
a catch and kill a whale for scientific purposes, you
(20:05):
have to use the whole whale. So they're saying, well,
we've got to sell this as food, right. The the
that's a huge loophole because it's basically like, yeah, if
you say we're well here's this here's this study we're
carrying out, you can just conduct commercial whaling, which is
what they're doing. So um in now they were starting,
(20:25):
they already were processing. Is that what you said earlier?
They're already processing on board before. Yeah, So what happened then?
Did it just? The factory ships made it even easier.
They were just more outfitted with it. Yeah, they were
kind of like d I Y processing whales beforehand, but
they were definitely doing it during like the Golden Age
(20:46):
off and Nantucket, where like you would capture a whale
harpoon it. All of the guys who had just been
fighting this thing for like hours would grow it back
to the ship and they'd attach it with chains to
the ship and then start skinning it like layer by layer. Yeah,
they said it's like peeling an orange skin. And they
(21:06):
would carve it up into blanket pieces. There were a
ton a piece, Like some guys died for that. That
was one of these people die was getting crushed by
like a slab of blubber. Oh sure, a ton of
whale blubber falling on you. That's not a good way
to go. Um. And then they would haul these blanket
pieces up and then divide them into what they call
horse pieces. My guess is that that was about the
(21:28):
size of a horse. Sure probably could still kill you.
I imagine you die going. Then they would boil, boil out,
extract extracting the blubber, the oil from the blubber. And
this is all done on board, like with big iron
pots and stoves. Pretty gnarly. Yeah, and um, there's blood everywhere,
(21:49):
there's oily blubber everywhere. So one of the one of
the great um dangers of the job was slipping on
deck and falling overboard. You don't think that the waters
around the ship they were skinning the um whale weren't
just infested with sharks, So that was a very dangerous
Part two. Uh so, once they had the oil um
(22:12):
extracted from the blubber, they would actually go ahead and
put it in the casks, stow it down in the hold,
try and clean up the mess, even though there really
is no cleaning up that mess, no, apparently not. And
um then they just start over again, and like a
whaling expedition, dude, was years long. They went for years,
(22:33):
Like they just go out there because they could do
this all um aboard their ship and they just live
on the whale the whole time. They usually had provisions.
I'm sure they would stop in Tortuga and pick up
some provisions and some vds or whatever, beans and veneerial
disease with their whale and um and then you know,
go on their way. But like they would be away
(22:55):
from home for years at a stretch. Yeah, so is
a crazy life, all right. So let's uh flash forward
a bit um factory ships in nineteen five were introduced,
which really ramped up the killing and sixty years in
the sixty years following that, more than two million whales
were killed in the Southern hemisphere. So that's when people countries,
(23:19):
the League of Nations specifically sat up and said, you
know what, in one we should put together some sort
of legislation to regulate this, and they's pretty cool. For
twenty six countries got on board. Um, except for Japan,
Germany and Russia. Uh. Then ten years later, uh, in
(23:41):
nineteen I'm sorry. Five years later they established the International
Agreement for Regulation of Whaling, and again Japan said no thanks.
And that year there was a record high of forty
six thousand, thirty nine whales killed in the Antarctic alone.
It still is the record. And you know, they've tried
(24:02):
these different things over the years, but basically what I
gathered was there was never any enforcement. No, the the
i WC has no teeth. They have by lean that's it.
So they can't really they can't do anything that was
off the cuff. Was really, um, well, then they can't
do anything like you can sit there and make up
regulations all day, but Japan can just say no, we're
(24:22):
not gonna do it, I think, and be like, hey,
that would hurt our economy. Sorry, we understand that you
feel for the whales, but we're whaling. So what are
you gonna do? And they they say, oh, yeah, we forgot.
There's no sanctions that we can carry out against you.
We can police, we can condemn it. Yeah, there's no
whale police, see shepherds, but their rogue. Yeah, they do
(24:43):
a good job apparently. Whether or not you agree with
their methods is one thing. But they certainly made a
difference this year. Uh. Flash forward again to nineteen six
UM when they banned commercial whaling altogether, again rejected by Japan,
in Norway and Russia. But in that in that UM convention,
(25:06):
there was that loophole for scientific research. There's also I
think always been exceptions for indigenous groups too. Um. But
the uh, the the big loophole was the scientific whaling one.
That's the one that they continue exploiting because everybody's like,
we're not doing any commercial way, like we're just licensing,
(25:27):
issuing scientific whaling licenses to these commercial whaling out Now
early you said the United States still does with that.
Is that just indigenous peoples? Yeah? Um, And there was something.
I couldn't find out what happened, man, But I saw
this like chart of whaling and from since n UM
(25:47):
it's had an impact that the convention, that treaty had
an impact, because if you look at UM overall total
kills UM they call him catches, it's declined just trem
endlessly since then. It's just since the band was put
in place. Yeah, and then I saw for nineteen, for
two thousand nine eight, around eight nine hundred killed for
(26:11):
the world that year compared to forty six thousand in
Antarctica alone, which is pretty crazy. The key is is
whether that number can be kept down in pace with
the if that can outrun the decline of whale population
so that there aren't any extinction events before whaling just
(26:32):
ceases or before the stocks can be um stabilized refurbished. Yeah,
I think there's like a real definite like race against
the clock thing that's going on right now with whale populations.
If I remember correctly when we did it must have
been when we did the the Swim with the Whales podcast.
(26:54):
I think I remember something about the way they reproduced
or reproduct reproductive cycles really long, so they have a
hard time re establish thing. It's not like they're having
little whale pups every every year or two. So that
probably has something to do. And I think they stick
around like with their parents, like they raised and nurse.
They're young for a very long time as well. They're
just like dead beats in the basement couch waiting around
(27:17):
listening to Pink Floyd. You like Pink Floyd. Oh, yes
I do. There's two thanks the doors and Pink Floyd.
Very nice. So what does the future hold, Mr Clark? Well,
not being a prognosticator myself, I don't feel comfortable predicting
the future. But I don't know, man, I'm surprised by
(27:37):
the um that that news report that you you gave me,
like that the c Shepherds were having like that kind
of effect. I figured that they would be a nuisance,
not an effective activist militant group. Well they reased it
up a couple of years ago too. They rammed each
other supposedly. Yeah, but I got the impression from this
(27:58):
article that it was like, all right, I'm on board
your vessel and I can't really do anything and they're like, oh,
you can't do anything either, And you know, it was
like that that encounter was a the representation of just that,
like the idea what the id WC does with whaling.
It's like there's nothing you can do. Really, no one's
able to do anything that has a real impact. But
(28:21):
apparently they figured it out. So what happened was in
two thousand ten, they claimed the Japanese ship rammed the
Sea Shepherd ship, sinking it, and so the dudes from
c Shepherd went aboard the whaling ship and that's when
they just said, we can't do anything, so let's have
a tickle fight. Pretty much, he was going to make
a citizen's rest. Come on, that's like one thing. If
(28:44):
you don't carry it out, you don't tell anybody. You
were going to do that, right, you know, like I'm
gonna make a citizen's rest. I was going to write
you should just tackle them or something. I'll bet that
that was all over Discovery Channel too, Yeah, probably, so,
um so anything else. I don't have anything else other
(29:05):
than to say, uh, you know, if this is important
to you, pay attention, because there's always I think they
met just last year about this again. It's like an
ongoing battle to keep these regulations in place. So oh,
I've got another one. Let's hear um. If you root
for whales, you should check out the story of the Essex,
(29:25):
which inspired Moby Dick. Um. It's the only known ship
to have been sunk apparently purposely, purposefully by a whale
ramming it. Whale rammed it, turned around, got speed and
rammed it again and ended up sinking the Essex and
sent like the twenty crew members on like this horrible
(29:47):
journey um where they were adrift in the South Pacific
and they avoided islands that were close by because they're
afraid of cannibals. But in their attempt for South America,
they began to starve in resort to cannibalism themselves. Wow.
That's an ironic twist, didn't it. I've never read Moby Dick.
Can you believe that I do? I have not read
it either, so really yeah, I know? Wow? What we
(30:09):
need to get that done? Okay, let's go read Moby
Dick right now, chuck, okay. Um, while we read Moby Dick,
you should learn more about whaling. You could type that
into the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com,
which means it's time for listener mail. Josh I'm gonna
call this good organization in Austin, Texas, which we were
(30:29):
just at and um, this is sent from Patrick who
was at our variety show that'll be through. He said,
great show, guys. I was pleasantly surprised with the quote
unquote acting in the pilot by y'all, and I look
forward to tuning in later. Quote unquote acting is accurate exactly. Uh.
(30:49):
They He's involved though, with a new nonprofit and I
told him he would plug it. Um Retreat r E
lowercase capital t r e E or case t. Let
see where we're going here, t r e E t
retreat Okay, not t r E A t H. They
(31:11):
plant trees UM. They are a kaleidoscopic group of bicycle
and tree enthusiasts with strong backs, sharp minds, and big
hearts who volunteer to replant communities. The group formed in
response to the Basstrop wildfires that took place during the
summer of aught eleven. The way you can't say eleven
(31:32):
it's bullets in, isn't it um? Just outside of Austin, Texas.
During two days in January, Retreat America planted over two
d trees and put eighty miles on their bikes. UM
they're heading back to Basstroup for another round of tree
planning March, which is right now, so by the time
(31:54):
this comes out, that'll be be over. But you can
still support him by going to Facebook dot com Ash
retreat with two Ease America. It's a brand new group.
They're trying to spread the word, so just a little
awareness is what they're looking for, and they have some
mandates here. One is to plant as many donated trees
native trees as possible for homeowners affected by natural disasters.
(32:18):
To harness the spirit of volunteerism that exists in everyone.
Harness it and beat it with the stick number three
and live in communities socially and economically in the aftermath
of disasters. Number four. Stimulate stewardship and invigorate a local
desire to rehabilitate the damage land stimilated. With the stick.
Number five, spread proper tree planting and care techniques. Stick
(32:45):
number six foster appreciation for UH and involvement in uh abericulture.
How many UH lists of the how many demands do
they have to have? One more? UM encourage the use
of bicycles within the urban and vironment. Finally, we get
the bicycles. So Patrick, y'all are doing great work. Austin
(33:05):
is one of our favorite places now to visit and
retreat America. You should support go check him out bike
person or a tree person or if you hate trees
and you love your car, then there's probably an organization
for you, dude. We should also give a shout out
to the contest winner who we met and hung out with. Yeah,
(33:26):
Caleb Caleb. Did he sign a release to say his liscening. Oh,
we'll just say Caleb w from Dallas. Yeah, he came out.
He won the House Stuff Works Facebook contest and um,
he came out, hung out with us. We we went,
We went out to lunch. We took him on a
tour of the office, tak him out for a very
nice lunch. Um. The resulted in food poisoning for me.
(33:49):
I'm sorry to hear that, and um it was. It
was very tasty though. Yeah, and he went to UM
I followed up with him. He did go to the
King Center after he left us. Yeah, he was keen
on that. Yeah, he went. He'd been studying the life
of Martin Luther King and was excited to go visit.
We uh told him how to get there, and he
went and he went to the King Center and his
original house that he lived in. It's like all in
(34:11):
the same area, and his church I think as well.
So yeah, he checked it all and he said, it's
really cool. It was very cool. So Caleb, we're glad
you were here. You were a really nice dude. Yeah,
you really were. It really could have gone a different
way and we were very fortunate that you were the winner.
That's right, So congratulations to you again. Um, let's see
Chuck Whaling stories. Do you think anybody has one? I
(34:32):
doubt it. Alright, let's find out. Let's hear your Whaling story.
You can tweak to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook at Facebook dot com,
Stupid Timeline, Facebook dot com, slash stuff you should Know um,
and you can send us an email at Stuff Podcast
at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our
(34:58):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join houste Works
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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