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THE WHALEMEN
The whalemen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, facing
the isolation and peril of the open sea, risked their lives in the
exhilarating pursuit of the largest animal ever hunted. Drawn
by adventure and the thrill of the hunt, they endured countless
hours of tedium as they trolled the deep waters, waiting to hurl
their harpoons at the giant creatures. For some, it was an obsession; for most, however, it was their livelihood, a passage to
either fortune or ruin.
Long before Herman Melville wrote about Captain Ahab’s unconquerable white whale in Moby Dick, whalemen hunted the
great beasts, killing them for their precious bones, oil, and ambergris. Although men began whaling as early as the Stone
Age, it was between 1650, when the first whale fisheries were
established off the coast of New England, and 1850, that the
whaling industry reached its peak. With the wreck of the whaler
Wanderer in 1924, the whaling industry quietly ceased to exist.
In its heyday, whaling earned vast fortunes for fleet owners in
Cape Cod, Nantucket, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, as
thousands of men took to the seas. Beginning with colonists in
flimsy open boats, the industry expanded as enterprising Americans sent ships to every corner of the world, adding to their
new country’s wealth and enlarging their knowledge of its geography. Born before the steam engine, the whaling business
thrived for more than three centuries, dependent only upon the
strength and courage of the brave souls who manned the ships.
From the Beginning
Centuries before European explorers stirred the waters of North
America with their tall ships, the Makah Indians of the Pacific
Northwest hunted the humpback and gray whales that swam in
the ocean near their villages.
Hundreds of years later, on the other side of the continent,
English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold found the remains of a
similar hunt - “many huge bones and ribbes of whales” - on an
island off the coast of Massachusetts he named Cuttyhunk.
In 1605, after witnessing Indians hunting whale off the coast of
Maine, Captain George Waymouth, another English explorer,
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described their technique: With “a Multitude of their Boats . . .
[they] strike him with a Bone made in fashion of a harping iron
[harpoon] fastened to a rope; which they make great and
strong of Bark of Trees, which they veer out after him; then all
their Boats come about him as he riseth above Water, with
their Arrows they shoot him to death; when they have killed
him and dragged him to Shore, they call all their Chief Lords together and sing a Song of Joy. . . .”
The tales told by these early explorers captured the attention
and imagination of the English, who gleaned from their accounts that whaling was a profitable enterprise: A successful
whaling expedition might yield a profit of $40,000 to $60,000 the equivalent of $1 million to $1.5 million today - from the oil
and whalebone alone. But whaling expeditions were expensive:
In 1616, when Captain John Smith, one of the founders of the
Plymouth Colony on Massachusetts Bay, returned to England
after a long and unproductive excursion, he wrote that he
“found this Whale-fishing a costly conclusion: we saw many,
and spent much time chasing them; but could not kill any.”
In 1620, as passengers on the merchant ship Mayflower
entered Cape Cod Bay, they witnessed a sea teeming with
whales. “Every day, we saw Whales playing hard by us,” one of
the Pilgrims recorded. “. . . If we had instruments and meanes
to take them, we might have made a very rich returne.” But
the Pilgrims were ill-equipped for a whale hunt; when two men
rushed out with their muskets to shoot a whale that surfaced
near the ship, one of the guns misfired and exploded. No one
was hurt, however, and the whale, oblivious to the commotion,
“gave a snuffe” and swam away.
English colonists who settled on the northeast coast came prepared to fish – a passage in their original charter granted them
“all royal fishes, whales, balan, sturgeons and other fishes.” But
mostly, they fished for cod, not whales. It wasn’t long,
however, before the possibilities of whaling captured their attention; in 1635, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, wrote that he had seen three or four whales cast
ashore at Cape Cod, noting, “as it seems there is almost evere
yeare.”
While the flesh of a whale was edible, the real prize was whale
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THE WHALEMEN
oil, used by Europeans to light their homes, settlements, and
cities. Whale blubber also made good candles, and as a
byproduct, soap; the oil was also instrumental in wool and
rope-making. For colonists trying to introduce civility into a
savage new world, the whale became a vital commodity.
At first, the patient fishermen waited for whales to come to
them, content with harvesting the dead whales that washed up
on the sandy beaches. Before long, however, the colonists improved their methods by building better boats and fashioning
harpoons and lances made of iron instead of bone or stone.
They abandoned the use of drogues - a buoyant wooden barrel
or inflated sealskin tied to an arrow or harpoon used to exhaust
the wounded animals so they could be more easily caught - and
attached the rope of the harpoon to the boat itself, so that the
whale was forced to tow his weighty enemy behind him.
As settlers moved from Massachusetts to Long Island in the
1640s, whaling became more popular. By 1650, the practice
begun by Long Islanders in East Hampton and Southampton
had spread south to Nantucket and New Bedford in Massachusetts, spawning an increasingly prosperous industry.
Initially, whale hunting began close to shore; lookouts who
spied a whale would run a flag up a tall mast, summoning the
men of the company to the beach, where six-man crews would
board the boats and set out after the whale. Many of these
lookouts and crewmen were Indians - brave, experienced
whalemen who worked for low wages. To ensure their wages
remained low, in 1672, Francis Lovelace, the governor of New
York, ordered that “whosoever shall Hire an Indyan to go awhaling, shall not give him for his Hire above one . . . Cloath
Coat, for each whale hee and his Company shall kill, or halfe
the Blubber, without the Whale Bone, under a Penalty herein
exprest. . . .” None of the crewmen were highly paid, however;
after the ship’s owners took their customary 60 to 70 percent,
the crew divided the rest. For an expedition lasting several
years, a captain might earn $6,000 - more than $180,000
today - while an ordinary seaman could expect only $10 to
$800, a little more than $20,000. If the expedition was unsuccessful, many whalemen came home with nothing.
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