Snapshot of historic whaling in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area when broken down by months; this map shows the months of December to February, representing the time of year with the heaviest whaling activity and highest number of sperm whale kills in this study.

Following up on the theme posted in March 2012 this is a guest post from Erin Taylor, New England Aquarium Conservation Department projects assistant, on the Phoenix Islands Protected Area initiative. In a series of posts she will share research on 19th century sperm whaling in the Phoenix Islands. This careful examination of whalers' log books, maps and historic whale distributions may help researchers studying sperm whale populations in Kiribati today.

In the previous post in this series, we discussed how historic logbook records kept by whalers can provide a good picture of American whaling and sperm whale distribution in the Phoenix Islands during the 19th century. But these logbooks aren’t able to tell us everything about sperm whales in PIPA, and unfortunately, the whales don’t keep daily logbooks themselves—so it remains that ultimately little is known about sperm whale life history here and, in general, globally.

Though we only understand a little about these magnificent predators, we do know enough to understand that sperm whales are an important component of marine ecosystems. They are a creature of extremes: sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales, and they have the largest brains and longest intestines of any animal on the planet. Their enormous heads house the most powerful sonar system of any animal, which they use to find food (namely deep sea squid) and navigate in the vast ocean. Further, sperm whales are one of the most ‘cosmopolitan’ species, as their range extends across most of the world’s oceans—including, of course, through the Phoenix Islands.

This map of global sperm whale habitat (red) clearly shows their cosmopolitan nature. Sperm whales are found in all oceans from the equator to the poles, preferring ice-free waters with depths below 1000 m—an order that the Phoenix Islands fit to a T (Map: Taylor BL, Baird R, Barlow J, Dawson SM, Ford J, Mead JG, Notarbartolo di Sciara G, Wade P, Pitman RL (2008) Physeter macrocephalus. IUCN 2009. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2009.2. via)

Following up on the theme posted in March 2012, this is a guest post from Erin Taylor, New England Aquarium Conservation Department projects assistant on the Phoenix Islands Protected Area initiative. In a series of posts she shares research on 19th century sperm whaling in the Phoenix Islands. This careful examination of whalers' log books, maps and historic whale distributions may help researchers studying sperm whale populations in Kiribati today.

Imagine you are a 19th century American whaler. You have a boat, you have a crew, you have a vast ocean stretched out in front of you. Now it’s time to find a whale—the needle in a very, very big haystack. Where in the world do you go? Flash-forward to today, and you would have a variety of instruments available at your fingertips to answer this question: GPS, radars, navigation software all now exist to make finding whales and sailing around the ocean ‘a breeze.’ But clearly, 19th century New England whalers were not so technologically fortunate.

Source: New Bedford Whaling Museum, via comlmaps.org

Instead, the historic whaling industry came to rely on wisdom from vessel logbooks kept by whalers during their long voyages. By studying these vital logbook records, whalers came to know of promising global whaling grounds, including the ‘on-the-line’ grounds that stretched through the Phoenix Islands. For anybody looking for sperm whales in the 1800’s, the message passed on from the logbooks was clear: head to the Pacific. Considering modern research generally confirms the presence of sperm whales (in particular females and young males) in equatorial waters of the Pacific year-round, placing your faith in logbook records as a 19th century whaler wasn’t a bad bet.

So what exactly was in these logbooks? Generally, logbook records documented the daily happenings of whalers at sea. This included where (via coordinates) and when (via dates) whales were sighted or hunted—or where and when they weren’t. If a hunt was successful, the logbook record featured the number and species of whales killed that day.

Though logbooks were initially used only for economic purposes by those in the whaling industry, scientists also started to utilize the wealth of information contained in these records in the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of global open-boat whaling efforts. In the 1840’s, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a commander in the U.S. Navy, was the first to use logbook data to create whaling maps, resulting in visualizations of global whale distributions that were invaluable for studying whale life history. Diligent economic record keeping turned powerful scientific tool.

Map by Matthew Fontain Maury (source: Boston Public Library http://maps.bpl.org/id/m8753)

Following up on the theme posted in March 2012, this is a guest post from Erin Taylor, Boston University student and 2012–2013 Intern to the New England Aquarium Conservation Department on the Phoenix Islands Protected Area initiative. In a series of posts she will share research on 19th century sperm whaling in the Phoenix Islands. This careful examination of whalers' log books, maps and historic whale distributions may help researchers studying sperm whale populations in Kiribati today.

New England may seem a world away from the remote, tropical island nation of Kiribati, especially during these cold, gray months. However, a look back in time reveals a deep connection between the two areas. This is because Kiribati, and the Phoenix Islands, were at the center of vigorous efforts by 19th century New Englanders, particularly those of New Bedford and Nantucket, to hunt what were then considered monsters of the sea—whales.

Chasing Sperm Whales

Sperm whales are what brought Yankee whalers to this region. These whales were prized for the gallons of highly valuable spermaceti found in the head of each whale. Spermaceti could be turned into high-grade oil for lamps and wax for candles. This pursuit turned into a global industry, which was a major fuel for the growth of a young United States.

Archibald Thorburn, 1860–1935 | Public domain in United States, via Wikimedia Commons

The Hunting Grounds

Hotspots for whaling were known as whaling grounds. Whalers shared with each other these locations where abundant whales were likely to be found. This information was invaluable, as voyages required a large investment of time and money, with trip lengths typically lasting three to five years. Whalers did not want return from voyages empty-handed. Kiribati and the Phoenix Islands were part of what were called the “on-the-line” whaling grounds—a prominent hotspot that stretched along the equator in the central Pacific.

Map showing the Pacific whaling grounds | Map courtesy The National Archives, Kew.

Though New Englanders began venturing into the Atlantic Ocean to pursue sperm whales beginning in 1712, it was not until the late 1780’s that they rounded the tip of South America and sailed into Pacific waters. It took another quarter century for American whalers to establish ports in Hawaii and for the first vessels to reach Kiribati waters.

Word of the lucrative whaling potential in the newly discovered on-the-line grounds did not take long to reach the New England coast. By the 1840’s, 600 American vessels were operating in the central Pacific. Estimates suggest that throughout the 19th century whaling era in the Pacific, a thousand whaling ships passed through the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati and the neighboring Tuvalu.

Currier & Ives, 1850s | Photo in Public Domain in United States, via Wikimedia Commons

After peaking in the 1840’s and 1850’s, American whaling efforts declined due to a variety of factors, including increasingly scarce whale populations, a shift away from whaling to agricultural and mineral industries in the US, and the destruction of the labor force and whaling fleet during the Civil War. By 1870, the whaling industry had essentially died out in the region.

Devastating Consequences

Unfortunately, the aggressive efforts by New England whalers effectively decimated the populations of sperm whales in the waters surrounding Kiribati and the Phoenix Islands. Though nearly a century and a half have passed since the last Yankee whaling vessels sailed out of the on-the-line grounds, populations have not recovered to original levels. Recent expeditions indicate this once-abundant marine giant is now just a rare sight.


In an effort to understand the reasons behind the slow recovery and the status of sperm whale populations in Kiribati today, the Aquarium is studying historic whale distributions in the Phoenix Islands using records kept by whalers in their vessel logbooks. By studying where whalers found whales—and where they did not—we can learn a bit more about baseline populations and compare them to the scarce populations seen today.

The behind-the-scenes story of the creation of the PIPA is being told with the publication this month of Underwater Eden: Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth by the University of Chicago Press and the New England Aquarium.