跟讀練習: Whale Hunting Was Absolutely Crazy - 通過影片學習英語口語

“THERE SHE BLOWS! OVER THERE!” The scream cuts through the salty air as  your ship transforms into a war machine.

Three fragile boats are lowered into  the waves, each packed with six men.

You’re on a hunt and your  sweaty hands clench the harpoon.

An enormous shadow bursts through the waves.

It rises above you and comes  crashing down towards the boat.

But you're not hunting for food.

You're risking your life for a liquid  treasure worth 200,000$: Whale oil.

Trapped inside the the  largest animals to ever live.

Ancient Sea Masters Nobody really knows how humans first  got the idea of battling whales.

Probably ancient coastal people  stumbled upon whales stranded ashore.

To them, these titans were rare treasure chests overflowing with meat to eat  and bones to craft tools.

Refusing to leave such fortune to chance,  they paddled out and tried their luck.

Towards the 8th century, whaling turns commercial.

Along the Bay of Biscay, the  Basques build stone watchtowers.

The moment a dark shape breaks the surface, signal  fires blaze and drums thunder across the coast.

Men shove small boats into the waves,  armed with hand-thrown harpoons.

Their target is the North Atlantic Right whale.

An 18-meter and 90-ton gentle giant who is  gloriously slow and prefers coastal waters.

While most whales sink when they die, right  whales stay afloat: the right whale to hunt.

Their massive mouths contain hundreds of baleen  plates, bristly sieves made from keratin.

It’s the plastic of its time, shapable into  anything from baskets to corset stays and armor.

The expensive meat makes up  a third of a whale’s weight, while half of it is blubber, a thick  oily shield that hides the real prize.

When heated, the blubber can be  rendered into precious whale oil.

It’s the Swiss army knife of early industry.

It lubricates machinery, waterproofs ships when  mixed with tar, and helps make soap and paint.

But most importantly, whale oil burns brighter and  cleaner than anything else available at the time.

The Basques turn whaling into  a finely tuned enterprise.

They improve equipment, perfect the art of  processing whales and flood Europe with whale products, while other nations watch with envy.

By the 17th century, the English and  Dutch launch their own whaling fleets.

They hire Basque consultants  and soon the secrets of whale hunting spread across European  powers and into their colonies.

Americans Hijack Whaling Life in colonial New England is as  harsh as its winters and stony soil.

But in the Atlantic, enormous  shadows glide along the coast as right whales follow their migratory routes.

And the settlers know the Old World  pays handsomely for such treasures.

Shore whaling becomes their  first get-rich-quick scheme.

A single good-sized whale  earns each crew member as much as a land-based worker makes in six months.

But it is unpredictable.

Some years, a crew kills a hundred whales,  other years drag on for months without a catch.

Still, whaling becomes a valuable source of trade.

Meanwhile, London is swelling into  one of the world’s great metropolises.

And by the 1740s, fifteen thousand street  lamps burn with colonial whale oil there.

It takes half a whale per night to turn London’s  dark streets into a flickering sea of light.

But just like the Basques had  learned centuries earlier, the right whales near shore become scarcer with  each passing year, just as demand is exploding.

Around this time, a whaling boat is  swept far offshore outside Nantucket.

Hours drag on in uncertainty, until finally, the crew brings down a new kind of  giant: The 18-meter, 45-ton sperm whale.

In their heads, these leviathans carry  nearly two thousand liters of spermaceti, the highest quality oil on the planet.

Milky gold and so pure it burns without smoke.

Sperm whales become the ultimate prize monsters.

A single large sperm whale can yield  oil worth around $200,000 today.

That is a fortune in the 1850s and two to  three times more valuable than right whale oil.

One barrel can buy you  almost 3 acres of farm land.

Then again, outfitting a whaling expedition costs  $30,000, ten times more than an average farm.

A third of voyages lose  money and some never return.

But getting smashed by furious whales is  what truly makes sailor’s blood run cold.

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The planks groan as your shipmates strain at  their oars, rowing straight toward the beast.

The plan is simple and absolutely insane:  row close enough to touch this monster, hurl a harpoon into its flesh, and  hope it doesn't take it personally.

You recognize the creature from  its scars – and it remembers you.

The harpoon bites deep into blubber.

The whale turns into pure, terrified rage.

Your boat lurches forward like you've been  hitched to a steam engine, spray blinding you as you're dragged across the ocean in  what whalers call a “Nantucket sleighride”.

It goes on for an hour.

Then four. Your knuckles are white, gripping the  gunwale as waves crash over the bow.

The men pray and curse.

Eight hours into the hunt,  your exhausted eyes lose focus.

The ropes lash across the deck like they’re alive.

Someone’s leg gets caught and they are yanked  into the ocean, swallowed by the waves.

You hope it’s quick.

Sailors tell stories of other whales  rushing in to defend their kin, dragging men down where lungs  are crushed like tin cans.

But you’re still here – and  the whale is finally slowing, exhausted from pulling your floating  death trap across the ocean.

Now comes the killing.

You have to get close to stab  this giant with a 3-meter lance, going for the massive lungs or heart.

Blood starts flowing from the spout like a  crimson geyser, but the whale is still fighting.

Fifteen blows later, you find the mark.

The whale starts swimming in  tighter and tighter circles, vomiting half-digested squid, until it finally  rolls over in a spreading pool of gore.

And you’re barely getting started.

The Floating Factory You tow the enormous carcass back to the ship, where the crew slams down  chains to secure their prize.

The ship creaks as the dead giant  bobs in the swells beside you.

Now the butchery can begin.

It takes days to process 45 tons  of dead whale into liquid money.

You leap across the blood-slick blubber to  axe through the thick flesh of the head.

Within lies the spermaceti chamber, the  vault of the most precious whale oil.

Then you help peel away the blubber, 20  centimeters thick and tough as leather.

You cut 2-meter wide "blanket pieces", weighing a ton, and haul them up with  pulleys that strain the ship's masts.

Your ship lurches, as you cut  it free to release the weight.

Next comes the rendering.

You fire up the tryworks, brick  furnaces built right on the wooden deck.

In massive iron pots, the blubber  gets boiled down into oil.

The smoke is so thick you can barely breathe.

They say you can smell a whaling  ship from thirty kilometers away: burning far, rotting flesh  and the stink of death.

The work continues around the clock.

Sharks are drawn by the bloody  waste you're dumping overboard.

Men slip on the greasy decks and break bones, get crushed by swinging chunks of  blubber or scalded by boiling oil.

It may be one of the most  gruesome jobs in existence.

The stench, the blood, the endless  toil, it wears you down fast.

Most who sign on quickly regret it,  nearly a third end up deserting.

You are holding on to the dream of coming  home rich – but the odds aren't great.

The Business of Blood When it’s all over, the ship returns with  dozens of barrels of the finest oil on Earth.

By the 1850s, whaling has become  the 5th biggest industry in the US, with 700 whaling ships, three quarters of  the world’s fleet, employing 70,000 people.

In 1853 alone, American whalers  kill over 8,000 whales, making 360,000 barrels of oil and almost  half a billion in today’s dollars.

Voyages grow longer and months turn into years  as ships push into the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Each voyage demands bigger investments and  whaling turns into a venture-capital industry.

Crews work for shares instead of wages, while  forced to buy overpriced supplies on credit.

Many come home in debt and a  lucky few rise through the ranks.

It’s the American dream, they say,  but it feels like an illusion.

The real money flows upward  to ship owners, and merchants.

Fishing villages turn into global commercial hubs.

In New England, the port of New Bedford  rises as one of the richest towns in America.

Whaling is unusually diverse for  its time but deeply exploitative.

Much of the labor comes from  Native Americans and Black sailors.

Native communities become  dependent on English goods, while crews of color are pushed into  the hardest and lowest-paying work.

This pattern of inequality still echoes today.

The blood of whales helps fuel the  rise of American industrial power.

The Machine Age of Killing Until in 1859, a breakthrough changes everything.

Steampowered rigs start  commercially pumping petroleum.

Suddenly, kerosene, lamp oil refined from  crude oil, is cheap and seemingly limitless.

Over the following decades, the whaling  industry faces dramatic changes.

Nantucket, once the heart of global whaling,  sees its last ship limp home in 1870.

The Age of Sail is ending.

The Age of Engine has begun –  and it's ushered in by blood: In the 18th and 19th centuries, 300,000  sperm whales alone were slaughtered.

And they still cannot catch a break.

Although kerosene conquered lighting, whale oil  is still one of the best lubricants on Earth.

Never freezes, spoils or quits.

The machinery powering the  industrialization needs it, so ironically, petroleum soon  increases demand for whale oil.

Norwegians seize the opportunity with  cheaper labor and new technology.

They set up whaling stations on  islands at the edge of Antarctica.

Hand-thrown spears are gone  and now, explosive-tipped harpoons fire from steam-powered  catcher boats for instant kills.

The fast ships can chase down even blue  whales, the largest animals that ever lived.

Normally most dead whales sink, but now  air compressors pump them full of gas, so even the biggest ones float like massive buoys.

No whale is safe anymore.

In the arms race leading up to World War 1, whale oil is also used to produce explosives. But the true carnage comes after World War 2, when Japan and the Soviet  Union also join the slaughter.

They call it the Whaling Olympics.

The same industrial might that once built  tanks and bombers now builds factory ships.

The largest one is 210 meters long, capable  of processing dozens of whales in a day.

In 1964 82,000 whales are reported killed – the  largest animal slaughter by tons in human history.

The War we almost won The ocean couldn't sustain  this mechanized assault.

Sperm whales fall from around 1.

5 million to 800,000 and the even larger  Fin whales from almost 800,000 to 100,000.

Blue whale populations, which had numbered  around 340,000 before industrial whaling, collapse by 98% to less than 5,000.

It isn’t until 1975 that the reality of  industrial whaling hits the global spotlight.

In the North Pacific, environmental  activists steer tiny inflatable boats straight between Soviet  whaling ships and their targets.

The images of fragile human bodies standing in  the path of steel harpoons spread like wildfire.

Overnight, the public turns  against the commercial slaughter.

Across America and Europe, people  support a new cause: Save the Whales.

Finally, the International  Whaling Commission votes for a global moratorium on commercial whaling.

Only Norway, Iceland and Japan never sign  the global ban that takes effect in 1986, basically ending 400 years  of industrial whale hunting.

It’s a different world now, and looking back  the story of whaling seems bloody and barbaric.

But it also lit homes, powered machines  and built the scaffolding of modernity.

A staggering and also concerning  display of what humanity is capable of: the power to reshape the world, with  progress and destruction always side by side.