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The junk, located in the lower half of the forehead, contains a spongy material impregnated with sperm oil. The oil squeezed from the junk made the finest lamp oil. Additionally, whalers harvested oil from the blubber of the sperm whale. The price of oil always depended on supply and demand, as well as on the quality of the oil, which varied from whale to whale even within a given species. But sperm oil always fetched a price three to five times that of common whale oil. In 1837, when the annual sperm oil yield of the American fleet was more than 5 million gallons, it sold for $1.25 per gallon. The price peaked in the 1860s at $2.55 per gallon.

Unlike tallow, spermaceti couldn't be dipped or molded into candles by a housewife in her kitchen, for the complex process of making spermaceti candles took almost an entire year to complete. After the spermaceti arrived in port, it was brought to the candle works, where the candlemakers boiled it to filter out impurities and then stored it until the cold weather, when it would fully congeal. On a mild winter day, when the spermaceti softened a bit, they shoveled it into woolen bags and pressed it between the wooden leaves of a large screw press. The oil they squeezed from the spermaceti then was called "winter strained sperm oil"—clear and clean—and they sold it as lamp oil, which commanded the highest price. They stored the remains until spring, when they heated it again to filter out more impurities, then cooled it, molded it into cakes, and shaved it into small pieces before they pressed it again—this time in cotton bags and under greater pressure—to produce "spring strained sperm oil," which was a lower-quality oil. What remained in the bags they pressed a third time to make "tight pressed oil" or "summer oil." The remaining solid after these three pressings was almost pure spermaceti—waxy, brownish or yellowish in color, and streaked with gray. They stored it for the summer, then heated it again, this time with potash to bleach and clarify it—clear as spring water, it was said—before molding it into candles that would fetch twice the price of those made of tallow. Spermaceti candles had no comparison, except perhaps those made from beeswax, and like beeswax candles, they would always remain the province of the well-to-do. So steady and clear was their light that the brightness of the flame of a pure spermaceti candle that was seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and weighed one-sixth of a pound would eventually become a standard of measure for luminous intensity—one candlepower—against which the light of other candles, all lamps, and even the first electric lights would be measured.

The desire and demand for spermaceti and sperm oil would drive the whaling trade well into the nineteenth century. The size of the fleet reached its peak around 1846, when more than seven hundred vessels sailed out of twenty major American ports and a host of smaller ones, and several hundred vessels from other countries also roamed the whaling grounds. The oil and spermaceti brought to port that year were valued at $8 million. Melville himself posed the question as to "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff." There had been an estimated 1.1 million sperm whales in the world's oceans before the hunt for them began in earnest. How many remained in the mid-nineteenth century isn't known, but it's thought that today the somewhat recovered population stands at about 360,000.

Although sperm whales may have been the prized catch, whaling ships continued to take whatever whales they could find. In 1851 more than 10 million gallons of common whale oil—bringing about 45 cents per gallon—also arrived in American ports. The millions of gallons of whale oil and sperm oil circulating the globe meant that light was more readily available to many people—especially those in cities—than it had been