Why Are They Called Right Whales? The Name's Dark History

The “right whale to hunt” explanation

For early whalers working from shore or from small rowing boats, right whales had every quality that made a whale worth chasing:

• They were slow. Right whales usually swim at about 4 km/h (2 knots) and rarely go faster than about 9 km/h (5 knots), so oarsmen could catch up with them.
• They stayed near the coast. They feed and give birth in bays and shallow coastal waters, where lookouts on land could spot them.
• They were easy to approach. Right whales spend long periods at the surface and often do not move away from boats.
• They floated. Blubber makes up roughly 40% of a right whale’s weight, so a dead whale usually stayed at the surface and could be towed to shore or stripped of blubber beside a ship.
• They were valuable. A large right whale produced barrels of oil and long, flexible baleen.

Faster whales, such as blue and fin whales, were a different story. They could outswim rowing boats and usually sank when killed, so they were not hunted on a large scale until steam-powered catcher boats and explosive harpoons arrived in the late 1800s.

What whalers wanted from right whales

Whale oil, boiled down from blubber, lit lamps and lubricated machinery for centuries before petroleum products replaced it. It was also used to make soap and to soften leather.

The baleen was just as important. Right whales have about 200–270 baleen plates on each side of the upper jaw, up to about 2.8 m (9 ft) long. Whalers called this material “whalebone”, although it is made of keratin, like fingernails. It was strong and flexible and was used for corset stays, hoop skirts, buggy whips and other items that today would be made from plastic or spring steel. The closely related bowhead whale, which has even longer baleen, was once called the Greenland right whale. How baleen works for the whales themselves is explained in What are baleen whales?

Is the story true?

It is a sensible explanation, and it fits how whalers wrote about these animals. But the earliest records that use the name give no reason for it. In his history of American whaling, Leviathan, Eric Jay Dolin notes that the origin is unknown and that “right” may originally have meant “true” or “proper”: the typical whale, the standard against which others were judged.

The scientific name points the same way. When the zoologist John Edward Gray created the genus Eubalaena in 1864, he chose a name that means “good” or “true whale”. So right whales may have been the right whales to hunt, the true whales, or both.

How whaling nearly wiped them out

Right whales were among the first large whales hunted commercially. Basque whalers hunted them in the Bay of Biscay from around the 11th century and later sailed to the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. The right whales of the eastern North Atlantic, once found from Norway and the British Isles to northwest Africa, never recovered and are now considered functionally extinct.

In the western North Atlantic, colonial shore whalers from Long Island and New England hunted right whales from small boats in the 1600s and 1700s. By about 1750 so few were left that the commercial hunt there had largely ended, and whalers moved on to other species and other oceans. In the 1800s, American and European fleets killed tens of thousands of right whales in the North Pacific and the Southern Hemisphere.

International agreements protected right whales from commercial whaling from 1935, but the damage was done. Back-calculations suggest the western North Atlantic population may have numbered fewer than 100 animals at that time. Illegal Soviet whaling continued in secret: records that came to light after the Cold War show that Soviet fleets killed at least 3,212 southern right whales in the 1950s and 1960s, while officially reporting only four, and hundreds of North Pacific right whales in the 1960s.

The three right whale species today

All three species share the same callosities, black bodies, missing dorsal fin and V-shaped blow. Southern right whales have made a strong comeback, and places such as Hermanus in South Africa and Península Valdés in Argentina are now famous for whale watching. The two northern species remain among the rarest whales on Earth.

Why the old name still matters

The same traits that made right whales easy for whalers to catch now put them in danger from modern ships and fishing gear. They are slow, they live along busy coastlines, and they spend long periods at or just below the surface, where vessels can hit them. Their skim feeding, swimming forward with the mouth wide open, makes it easy for ropes to wrap around their jaws, flippers and tails.

Right whales were not the only whales hunted for oil. The sperm whale was the great prize of 19th-century whaling ships. But no other large whale was pushed so close to extinction so early, and the North Atlantic species has never recovered. Today’s numbers are covered in How many right whales are left?, and the biology of the species is described in the North Atlantic right whale profile.