The Basques did indeed invent whaling around 1215 or so. But it took the Yanks to make an industry of it.

While I do not share the knee-jerk sense of shame for our terrible history as hunters of innocent animules, I think the slaughter of whales should have stopped dead at the turn of the century, when kerosene was finally available industrially and we could no longer justify the use of whale oil to fill basic survival related needs.

And I love the image of that one whale getting just mad enough to step up and do something about it.

A