This is the time of year when oil wars once raged in the Arctic. Or at least they did 400 years ago when the oil came not from the ground but from the fat of the bowhead whale.
In 1613, the bowheads had just been "found in large numbers in the bays of Spitsbergen and the other islands of the Svalbard archipelago, just as the long-standing Basque right whale (so named because whalers thought they were the 'right' whale to hunt) fishery off the coast of Labrador was going into decline," writes Jeffrey Mazo in Politics and Strategy. "Svalbard's many deep bays and fjords made catching the whales easier than in the open sea, and the nearby shoreline offered convenient sites for the industrial processes needed to extract the oil."
Spitsbergen, an archipelago about halfway between Norway and the North Pole, was then claimed by the Dutch, but the English were having none of that.
"After a profitable voyage by a Basque whaler (in 1612)," Mazo notes, "1613 saw at least 28 vessels from Spain, France, England and the Netherlands hunting whales in Svalbard," the Icelandic name for the islands.
Among those vessels was the Tiger, a craft with 21 large guns, sent by the London-based Muscovy Co. to accompany a fleet of six whalers.
"The Tiger warned off at least 17 foreign whalers, confiscating all or part of their catch," Mazo writes. The company doubled its fleet and upped its firepower the next year, but Mazo reports, "the Dutch had organized themselves into a cartel under a government charter and sent 11 armed whalers accompanied by three men of war, and the resulting stand-off led to a temporary Anglo-Dutch agreement to divide the fishery and exclude all other parties.
"The next year saw the Danes dispatch a flotilla in an unsuccessful attempt, thwarted by the ad-hoc alliance, to assert sovereign rights over the archipelago. Over the next three years, conflict between the English and Dutch continued, with both sides attacking or seizing the other's ships, catches and land-based facilities, and culminated in a small naval battle in 1618 involving Dutch men of war, in which three English sailors died."
Battles, it would appear, raged off and on until the resource was gone. Could this portend the Arctic oil future of today?
Mazo: "The struggle over the Svalbard whale fishery can't really be seen as a precedent for what might develop as Arctic petroleum resources – or other valuable minerals – become more accessible in coming decades. It predated the Westphalian order, let alone the customary law of the sea. But there are some interesting resonances. The struggle coincided with the strategic shift in the relationship between England and the Dutch Republic, from allies in the religious wars to commercial and military rivals.
"It was not a driver of this shift; rather, the broader relationships between the nations involved in Arctic whaling shaped the way the struggle for control of the resources developed (through surrogate commercial companies). ... In this respect, the bowhead whale fishery resembles the modern exploration of Arctic oil and gas, with commercial oil companies from many nations, Arctic and non-Arctic alike, operating in different and varying consortia among themselves and with national oil companies in all parts of the region."
Shell, a Dutch-company; Statoil, a Norwegian company; and ConocoPhillips, a U.S. company, now hold leases to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska in the interests of the U.S. And just across the international boundary, ExxonMobil, another U.S. firm, has teamed with Rosneft, a Russian company, to explore for oil in the Chukchi Sea and elsewhere in the Russian Arctic in the interests of that nation.
All of which would make it appear the new struggle over oil does have something in common with an old struggle over oil, a struggle with which Alaska is not unfamiliar. The Alaska Arctic was the last, great U.S. province for whale oil, a commodity more valuable than crude oil in its day.
The industry lasted almost until the start of the 20th century. But with the whales almost gone by then, civilization began a shift to a new from of oil -- petroleum. It has powered the globe ever since.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com