Early Human Approaches
As the Southern Ocean was increasingly explored in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it quickly became enrolled into grand ventures of exploration and empire, as well as becoming an intimate field of human labour and struggle to exploit the natural environment.
As the search for southern lands - indeed, for the terra australis incognita of ancient and early modern thought - increasingly found wide open oceans, the promise of land receded, to be replaced by the alternative promise of the seas. The voyages of European navigators into this region, notably James Cook of England (who led the first recorded navigation below the Antarctic Circle in 1773) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville of France (who promoted the first settlement on the Falklands between 1764 and 1767), precipitated deeper commercial interests for its marine wealth and the potential of world trade.[831] The first concerted human activities in the region were extractive and bloody, for they involved the killing of fur seals for their skins, and later of elephant seals for their oil, as well as the killing of right and sperm whales. Killing animals for furs and skins was, of course, a practice as old as humanity itself, but it had also been a practice central to early modern imperial expansion in North America and the North Pacific, developments that John Richards has called, simply, ‘the world hunt’.[832]The sealers of the Southern Ocean in the earliest times came mostly from the New England ports of North America - both before and after independence - and Britain. Through the nineteenth century, American sealers remained a constant presence, joined in smaller numbers by sealers from the colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa. Sealers were initially tied to the whaling industry, though within a few years sealing-only voyages were embarked upon.
Sealing became a more concerted industry in the south beginning at the Falkland Islands from 1775; and while whaling did occur in the Southern Ocean, at this time it was concentrated in the Arctic and warmer waters.The sealers’ movements through the Southern Ocean and the subAntarctic islands were opportunistic and driven by boom-and-b ust exploitation. Some lucky sealers would discover beaches onto which fur or elephant seals hauled themselves to breed and moult, especially in the summer months; those lucky sealers would race to take as much as possible before a competitor also discovered the grounds; and then, having exploited the seals so ruthlessly, they would move on to another beach. And though sealers were in the vanguard of settlement and discovery, they nevertheless tended to keep their discoveries and movements secret, protecting their precious commercial advantages. Concerted sealing began at the Falklands in the mid-1770s, and proceeded in waves, moving to South Georgia after 1786, at the Juan Fernandez islands to the west of Chile after 1792, and at Macquarie, Auckland and Campbell islands south of Australia and New Zealand after about 1810. The most pronounced experience of boom-and-bust sealing occurred after the discovery of the South Shetland Islands in 1819, with the two summers in 1820 to 1822 seeing the almost complete destruction of the fur seal colonies on those islands.[833] There were two peaks of sealing after this, first at the Prince Edward Islands and the Crozets of the South Indian Ocean in the 1840s (which also saw a brief boom in the killing of southern right whales), and finally at the Kerguelen Islands and Heard Island, also in the South Indian Ocean area, in the 1850s. The early peaks of sealing activity were mainly interested in fur seals, the later peaks in the mid-nineteenth century - and continuing into the twentieth - were for elephant seals.[834] Between the 1780s and the 1830s between five and seven million seals were killed in the Southern Ocean, depending on how the figures are tabulated.[835]
The products of the seal hunt - furs, skins and oil - were sold into markets old and new.
Furs and oil, of course, were old products, and found ready enough markets in North America and Europe. New ways of processing the furs to separate coarse from fine hairs were developed in the late eighteenth century, allowing for a refinement of the product and an expansion of the existing market.[836] Seal furs were also central products in opening the Chinese market to American traders after the War of Independence. From 1784 into the first decades of the nineteenth century, a constant stream of goods was sold into China - it was a necessary market as the American market had become glutted with seal products and the British market was closed to Americans. American and British domestic markets re-emerged in importance after this time.[837]While the life of sealing and whaling in this period was bloody and testing, they were also industries with specific communities, ways of life and identities. Sealers formed small and ephemeral communities on the scattered islands of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic. If this was a world outside the reach of sovereignty and the international legal order, they were communities with connections to certain other social and economic orders. Sealers either visited briefly or established longer-term settlements on shore. Their settlements were basic constructions, using local stones, whale bones found on shore, and seal skins and sails; sometimes these constructions were free-standing, often building off caves and other local formations. Archaeological evidence suggests relatively non-hierarchical communities with heterogeneous construction styles and techniques both locally and across the whole ocean. At some islands it seems that sealers constructed their domestic and working areas separate from each other.[838]
These were temporary and extremely isolated communities, with no intention of long-term occupation or settlement. As far as is known, the settlements were occupied by men only, though women had their part in the industry in home ports or, rarely, on ships.
Whatever the constraints and hardships, sealers had their own cultures and agency, bearing the maritime cultures of the time. Ben Maddison has emphasised how they were part of a ‘global maritime proletariat’ who, though under structures of command and with work pressures, exercised their rights and manifested their working-class cultures.[839] [840] Indigenous peoples facing imperial expansion and colonisation also found space in the oceans and the sealing and whaling industries for themselves. Lynette Russell has traced how Aboriginal men and women in Australia ‘exercised choices’ in response to colonialism that included joining sealing and whaling voyages in the southern oceans.11 If sealing and whaling were among the first global enterprises underpinning expanding markets, they also, to some extent, allowed choices and mobilities for some in changing circumstances. The southern oceans in this time, then, were complexly entangled in new imperial and capitalist expansion.