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hi everybody welcome back to fishtrap's nea sponsored big read uh we are reading the book in the heart of the sea the tragedy of the whale ship essex and i hope you've been able to see some of these events that we've been doing um the what is the big read well it's a uh it's a program of the national endowment for the arts where we all gather together to enjoy as a community as friends as families and ourselves uh uh read a really good book together and fishtrap has put together some weekly events to help support that and uh today is another one uh we have some before we get there i just want to thank our community sponsors community bank arts center east oregon arts commission and the book loft here in enterprise and today we meet again with julia treesenberg from the columbia river maritime museum that's an astoria oregon a a town dripping in history with with captains and sailors and uh fishing people so we're great we're really happy to have julia back what are we going to talk about today julian we are talking all about whaling in oregon this afternoon great well take it away awesome thank you so much for having me today and good afternoon everyone thanks for joining us once again for the nea big read through fish trap my name is julia and i work in education department at the columbia river maritime museum and today we're going to be talking all about whaling in oregon so there's a lot of different aspects of whaling history all around the country and all around the world but today we're going to focus on this very small window of time when the oregon coast was actually home to one of the last commercial whale fisheries in the united states and once again that's talking about commercial whaling or industrial whaling from an aboriginal whaling perspective in the pacific northwest really the first nations tribes near vancouver island and people living near the olympic peninsula like the macaw tribe is a really great example of people who have a long-standing history of this kind of aboriginal wailing and that's an ongoing conversation that people are having as we work through you know hundreds of years old treaties and an effort to preserve that kind of cultural history that's in the northwest corner of course of the pacific northwest and south of that right here in oregon there's been some debate by researchers and historians over how much aboriginal whaling was being done on the oregon coast so about 15 or so years ago there was an anthropologist who found an elk bone that had been carved into the shape of a harpoon and seemed to be stuck inside of a whale bone which made him think maybe there was some evidence for wailing along our coast but most tribes will say to you that their history tells them that their ancestors would harvest whales if they came to shore and share those resources with the community along our area in the northwest corner of oregon farther south near coos bay but there wasn't so much of an active whaling history in the same way that you would find near the olympic peninsula or near vancouver island very early on in astoria's history we actually had a brief glimmer of being part of what we refer to as the golden age of whaling this extremely um populist time for whaling ships around the country and that's because right as you've been learning about and in the heart of the sea places like new bedford and nantucket were considered the heart of whaling on the east coast and so they were originally wailing through the atlantic oceans but as they started to run out of whales they moved to the pacific and the arctic and as they did that they were hoping that astoria would become the new nantucket of the west like it could be the new hub on the west coast instead of these ships having to go all the way back to the east coast and so in 1846 there was this ship called the main that was traveling through the pacific on a whaling trip and the idea was they would stop in astoria two years under their voyage to offload everything that they had collected and then head back out to sea before they went back to their home port on the east coast so in 1848 right two years into this journey as they're heading to astoria the main was full of whale bone of whale oil there was about 1400 barrels of whale oil and they were ready to offload all their supplies before heading back out into the ocean the problem that the maine ran into and the really important thing that you should know about this area of oregon is that the columbia river bar where the columbia river meets up with the pacific ocean is considered the graveyard of the pacific it's known to be one of the most dangerous river to ocean crossings in the world and so when the maine came up to the columbia river bar and was trying to get to astoria it was supposed to wait for a bar pilot this expert on navigating the area to be able to get across safely but the main didn't want to wait for a bar pilot it wanted to go it alone and see if it can make it across and of course you can probably guess what happened it immediately crashed and shipwrecked and lost everything that was on board the ship so 1400 barrels of whale oil two years worth of work out in the ocean completely worthless because of this shipwreck at the mouth of the river and so after that all of the whaling companies on the east coast decided well astoria couldn't possibly become this new nantucket of the west because the area itself was just too dangerous for those ships to navigate interestingly over a hundred years later our corner of the oregon coast specifically warrenton and hammond right near the mouth of the river got a second shot at commercial whaling in the united states with these mink farms that were all around oregon so farmers these mink farmers started to run out of ways to feed the mink and before they had apparently been using these wild horse herds that were scattered throughout oregon and washington but as they ran out of horses their solution was to turn to the oceans right their solution to feed all these mink was to build a whale fishery right on the mouth of the river near warrenton and hammond and so this was a collaboration with the oregon fur producers bio products and their kind of subsidiary company called hal fangs oregon and then frank and evan parker owned this whaling boat or soon-to-be whaling boat i should say called the tom and al and you can see it towing a whale over to bio products near the mouth of the river in this photo here they outfitted the tom now with this harpoon gun that bioproducts got from norway i'm told it's about a 90 millimeter cannon with these bomb tipped harpoons and so the idea was that you would harpoon your target and then about four seconds after the bomb would detonate inside the whale and this was meant to be a very efficient and hopefully faster death for the whale than previous technologies had allowed them to do now of course this is in the 1960s this is at the very end of commercial whaling there really isn't that much whaling going on on the east coast and it's dwindling in the west coast but bioproducts was hoping to turn a profit with a few different um resources that they were taking from these whales the first one being of course the whale meat right to feed those mink farms and a lot of pet food companies as well we're going to them and then interestingly one use for whale oil that some historians will talk about from the 1950s and 60s was with organizations like nasa there's a little bit of debate over how much whale oil nasa was actually using but the idea was basically that whale oil is extremely consistent it can withstand really really high and really really low temperatures and so it can be used for all kinds of different research missions and extreme environments as synthetic oils came onto the market in the 1960s the need for this was a little less but it's one interesting type of customer that you might not normally expect from the whaling industry so this period in time right this very small window of commercial whaling on the oregon coast was going on from about 1960 to 1965 with some wiggle room in between those years there and in those five years they hunted 13 whales this photo here that you're looking at is a few of the key players at bio products during this point in time so on the far right you'll see richard carruthers who i believe is one of the co-owners of hal fangst on his right over here is lyle anderson he was also a warrington local and he was the chief chemist at bioproducts at the time and in that center of the photo holding a big flensing knife is mark dozier and we'll talk about him in just a moment as we go through this you might be asking yourself because i know i asked myself this question weren't people horrified that they were still hunting whales wasn't this something that the public was upset about or frowned upon or anything like that because really the 1960s wasn't that long ago but the answer overwhelmingly seems to be no that well maybe a few people were upset at the idea of whale hunting during this point in time for most locals it was actually really exciting to get a chance to see these animals up close and personal there are all these stories of of bar keepers around here just having completely empty tables when people heard that whales were coming because everyone would go out to bio products to watch that take place you can see here in this photo there's huge crowds of people coming as the tom nail and tom now is bringing up a couple of whales to be processed at bio products and mark dozier who you saw in that photo was a really great example of what a spectacle this could really be he was not actually an oregon native he came originally from california and was working at bioproducts during those few years to help process the whales because he was one of the few members of that team who had any previous whaling experience and so all of these crowds would come to watch him flens or strip the whales of their blubber um as this whole kind of event for the day he became a local celebrity this next photo i'm going to show you is in color so it's going to be a little gorier than the last two pictures you saw but i want to point this out because you can see a few of the different tools that they were using during this time right that enormous knife once again which we'll get an up-close look at and then if you look closely at mark's boot you can see that he has a bit of a strap or stirrup on there and it was pretty common to have some kind of grip or spikes in the soles of your boots so that you weren't sliding around on the whale as you were cleansing it now here are a few artifacts that i was actually really excited to find for you from the maritime museum's collection that were actually used at bio products during this time so just like you saw in that photo with mark and his teammates here is a flensing knife i like to point this one out in particular because if you look closely at the handle there there's actually a six inch whale carved into the wood which is kind of a fun addition to this knife i'm told that every worker at bio products had their own cleansing knife that they were responsible for and once again this was used to help cut into those top layers of blubber as they were kind of stripping the wheel of all the resources that they wanted to use this the next artifact that i found is actually a blubber hook and we'll look at this a little bit more tomorrow actually in terms of the flensing process but it was basically used to help lift up these layers of blubber as they're cleansing the whale right you can imagine how thick and how heavy that would be and so they would use all kinds of tools in order to process the animals themselves things like those cleansing knives this blubber hook chainsaws in some cases really the idea with bio products and this is true for a lot of different industries they were working with the salmon canneries for a long time as well and the goal was to recycle and repurpose as much bio-material as they could so they wanted to use as many parts of the whale as possible so that they weren't wasting any part of the animal and so of course we talked about that meat for mink farms for pet food companies whale oil was also shipped out to the mount hood soap company and they would use it for all kinds of different laundry soaps and hand soaps i'm told that they would grind up the bones of these whales into different types of fertilizer and try to extract vitamins a and e from the whales as well so there are a lot of different ways that they tried to repurpose the animals that they were catching and i think part of this was also because it was so difficult to get the whales themselves right bile products was based right on the mouth of the columbia river but the um the crew members on the tom and al would have to go miles out at sea sometimes up to 100 miles out into the ocean to actually catch any of these whales and so sometimes what would happen is in the time that it took to get the whales from the ocean to bioproducts right near the columbia all of these gases would start to kind of ferment inside the whale's body and it would putrefy everything that was inside and so some of the whales that they brought over to the plant actually couldn't even be processed they were unusable because everything inside had already kind of thickened and putrefied and grossed um grossed everyone out who was working on these whales and so there were a few different reasons right why this period of time for commercial whaling was so short-lived on the oregon coast that being one of the reasons of not being able to transport the whales efficiently the equipment that bioproducts was using wasn't always the most efficient for this particular type of material right as i mentioned before they were using all different kinds of bio material for salmon for shellfish and repurposing as much as they could with the equipment that they had but this was a very vibrant and very unique point in oregon history where busloads of school kids would come and they would watch the funding process take place there were researchers from oregon state and the university of oregon who would come and get samples from the whales as they were being processed and so although this is a very short-lived period of time it's a fascinating aspect of the coast's history as being one of the last uh commercial whale fisheries not only in the west coast but all across the united states right this really came to an end in 1965 and i know dr balance talked about this as well in her kickoff presentation a couple of weeks ago but as you get into the late 60s and early 70s there are all these new environmental regulations that are coming into place to help um kind of decide who can hunt which whales which populations can afford to be hunted and how many of those whales and so places like the international whaling commission kind of determine those quotas all around the world there are a few countries here and there that will wail on occasion and there's a history of research whaling as well right hunting whales for different aspects of research in the united states it's illegal right things like the marine mammal protection act i believe in 1972 that was but like i mentioned earlier there is this history in the northwest in particular of aboriginal whaling there are certain tribes that are still negotiating how that's going to work with preserving their own cultural history and heritage for generations to come because it's a very different type of whaling than the industrial or commercial whaling that we've been talking about today and we'll learn more about tomorrow with that short and sweet that is my history of commercial whaling on the oregon coast thank you all so much for being here with us with us today hopefully we'll see you again tomorrow to learn about the golden age of whaling this period of time when more whaling ships were out than ever before my name is julia from the columbia river maritime museum and with that i will turn it on back over to you mike thanks julia flensing knives and blubber hooks you can see them all at the columbia river maritime museum and maybe even julia show you around uh i learned a lot i didn't know that a out that part of oregon history and glad i do now it looked like messy business and with that uh thank you all for tuning in whether you are watching this in your school classroom uh watching this at your lunch break or around the dinner table at night we're glad you tuned in you can see all the big read events online at fishtrap.org or at fishtraps youtube channel we'll join julia again tomorrow thursday the 4th of march uh and uh we'll see then julia and i hope to see all of you too take care