WHALING

The American whaling industry started on Long Island in the mid-1600s and by the end of the century had expanded to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. Colonists off the coasts of North Carolina, Delaware, and New Jersey also developed fledgling whaling operations, but it was New England that came to dominate the industry. In the period from 1754 to 1829, the New England whale fishery far outpaced the rest of the world in expertise and in the size, geographic reach, and economic productivity of whaling enterprises.

A ready supply of Atlantic right whales in New England waters, combined with knowledge of an existing demand for whale products in Europe, gave colonists the initial idea that whaling might be profitable. Whale oil fueled lamps and lubricated machinery. A fat, it served as an ingredient in the manufacture of soap. Right whales, humpbacks, and several other whale species also had baleen plates in their mouths. Like modern-day plastic, baleen was firm yet flexible, making it a valuable component in women's corsets, umbrellas, and luggage. Sperm whales lacked baleen but had a waxy oil in their heads that proved to be ideal for candle making.

At first, New Englanders targeted right whales and set up shore stations from which men kept lookout, with whaleboats and try-pots for boiling blubber into oil standing ready on the beach. American Indian men, sometimes by their own choice but often by the more coercive means of debt indenture, made up the majority of the whaling industry's first labor force. By the mid-eighteenth century, New England's right whale population had become scarce from overhunting, which led to two transformations of the industry. In Nantucket folklore, one turning point occurred in 1712, when Captain Christopher Hussey caught Nantucket's first sperm whale. Sperm whales increasingly became the most desired of whales, a trend that would continue into the first half of the nineteenth century, when the American whaling industry reached its peak. The second innovation developed around 1750 and involved putting try-pots permanently on board oceangoing vessels, thereby freeing the manufacturing process from its prior dependence on shore stations.

Although American shorewhaling continued into the early twentieth century, deep-sea whaling for sperm whales emerged as the major type of whaling activity in the 1750s. Oceangoing vessels increased in size and spent longer periods away from home ports; by the 1820s a whaling ship typically had twenty to twenty-five men aboard and went on voyages of about three years. Otherwise, in the decades preceding and following the American Revolution, the economic and technological aspects of whale hunting showed continuity over time. Upon sighting a whale, whether from shore or from a ship, crews of six or eight men rushed to whaleboats to give chase. They attached a line to the whale by throwing a harpoon at it and then lanced it to death, after which they towed it back to the ship. They boiled the blubber into oil and stowed it away in barrels below deck. As the whaling industry grew in size and wealth, American Indians still labored as whalemen but as part of crews composed largely of white and African American men drawn from New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The dangers and enormous risks entailed in a whaling venture probably explain the unusual pay structure: instead of earning wages, whalemen received a "lay" or share of the whaling profits after the owners and other investors had taken their share—that is, if there were any profits.

impact of the american revolution

From the Seven Years' War (1756–63) to the War of 1812, war wreaked havoc on the whaling industry as privateers attacked and appropriated whaling vessels and American whalemen faced impressment. The American Revolution had a particularly devastating impact on the American whaling industry, for Britain had bought most of the whale oil that American colonists produced. Whaling communities tended to be Loyalist, especially Nantucket, which had little other industry besides whaling. When the Revolutionary War started, Nantucket's merchants and shipowners made protestations of neutrality and schemed to keep alive their trade with Britain. Immediately after the Revolution, the British adopted a punitive duty on American imports of whale products, and many Nantucketers were seduced away to Nova Scotia, France, and Wales in hopes of rebuilding their whaling enterprises out of a European port. American whaling all but disappeared during the war and did not embark on a full recovery until the War of 1812 ended, in 1815. Most American whaling families eventually returned to the United States, to Nantucket itself or to the more recently founded whaling cities of Hudson, New York, and New Bedford, Massachusetts.

expansion to the pacific

The American whaling industry was in flux in the 1790s for another reason: the opening up of the Pacific Ocean as a rich new territory ripe for sperm whaling. The first generation of American whaling vessels to return from the Pacific arrived back at New Bedford and Nantucket in 1793, kicking off several decades of rapid expansion of the industry. From the 1810s to the 1820s, whaling voyages out of American ports more than doubled, from about four hundred voyages to over a thousand. Also in the 1820s, New Bedford, Massachusetts, overtook Nantucket to become the whaling capital of the world. The other most active whaling ports at that time were Fairhaven and Westport located near New Bedford; New London, Connecticut; Provincetown on Cape Cod; and Sag Harbor on Long Island, New York. Besides bringing wealth to elite whaling families such as the Coffins, Rotches, and Howlands, whaling led Americans to venture into distant seas, where they played an influential role in the expansion of American influence abroad and in disseminating knowledge about Africa, South America, the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan to those Americans who remained at home.

bibliography

Davis, Lance E., Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter. In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816–1906. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Ellis, Richard. Men and Whales. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Norling, Lisa. Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Starbuck, Alexander. The History of Nantucket: County, Island, and Town, Including Genealogies of First Settlers. 2 vols. 1924. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1998.

Vickers, Daniel. "Nantucket Whalemen in the Deep-Sea Fishery: The Changing Anatomy of an Early American Labor Force." Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 277–296.

Nancy Shoemaker