This is a partial view of a work called “A Chart of the Whale Coast of New England c. 1810” by New Bedford marine artist Clifford Warren Ashley (1881–1947). The mural measures 6 feet high by 16 feet wide and details the coast of New England, including the north shore, Cape Cod, the Connecticut River, and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Ashley—an artist, illustrator, and author known for his works centered on the whaling industry—painted the mural in 1919. (Mattapoisett Historical Society.)
ON THE COVER: The tryworks of the bark Kathleen are clearly visible as the ship sits at dock in New Bedford. Tryworks, which were used to process whale blubber into oil (commonly called “trying out”), made it possible for ships to take longer voyages. The crew would boil blubber in the great iron pots and then store the oil in barrels below desk. The Kathleen was stove in by a whale in 1902. (Millicent Library.)
Whaling in Massachusetts began with local Native American tribes. They harvested whales by herding them from the ocean into shallow waters, causing them to beach themselves. This, along with the opportune finding of a beached whale, was how whaling began in the area. In the records of Plymouth Colony, Gov. William Bradford writes of seeing many whales frolicking as the Mayflower arrived in Cape Cod Bay after the Pilgrims’ Atlantic crossing as they reached what is now Provincetown. This abundance of whales continued for many years and was instrumental in creating the industry that sprang up along the coastline of Massachusetts.
As shore whaling progressed in the colony of Massachusetts after the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620, the natives and Europeans would wait in small huts on the beach to watch for pods of whales just offshore and then alert groups of waiting men, who would rush to the beaches and man small double-ended whale boats to pursue them. Once the whales had been harpooned and killed, they were towed to shore for processing. The blubber was stripped off and melted down into oil in great iron pots on the shore, and as much of the whale as possible was used and harvested not only for oil but also for food. The whale bones and baleen were also used in the manufacturing of many products.
This type of whaling eventually led to ships pursuing whales during small voyages that lasted for weeks, and then months, when whalers could catch more by being out among the pods as they were sighted migrating through or feeding in the waters off Massachusetts. By the late 1700s, these journeys had become longer as the presence of offshore whales decreased, and the ships became larger and better prepared to process the leviathans at sea. Ship owners, backers, and financiers began to see the immense profits available to them from this newly emerging enterprise and bought ships and hired captains, then sent them off to sea to fill their holds with oil and whalebone.
At this point, the ships were equipped with all necessary tools for the processing of whales at sea and provisioned for voyages that could take years to fill the ship to capacity. The double-ended whaleboats were hung onboard, and there were great iron pots, called tryworks, that were built into the ship along with brick ovens for boiling down the blubber. Barrels were brought along and used to store the oil below decks, with differentiation between the boiled oil from blubber (the fat just inside the skin of the whale) and the sperm oil (taken from the head case of the sperm whale). This sperm oil, which was of a finer quality and already in liquid form, became known for making the best candles and lamp oil that was less smoky. It was also used for the lubrication of small instruments like watches or sewing machines. Oil companies, such as Nye’s Oil Refinery in Fairhaven, processed the sperm oil into the finest grades of oil for use on delicate machinery. The Nye oil company is now known as Nye Lubricants, Inc., and is still in business today; however, it no longer uses the oil from whales, instead using refined petroleum.
The whaling business was built upon the knowledge and experience of the local Native Americans and commenced in earnest on the Island of Nantucket when locals invited Wampanoag tribal member Ichabod Paddock to come to the island to teach them how to hunt whales. Another Massachusetts town, New Bedford, became known for its whaling fleet along with the town of Fairhaven located across the harbor. Fairhaven started as a whaling port but became known as a port for outfitting, rigging, and provisioning the ships that sailed the seas. This town—along with Falmouth, Monument (now Bourne), Mattapoisett, Gloucester, Essex, Provincetown, Marblehead, Boston, and many others along the coast—took part in the industry in different ways, from shipbuilding to provisioning. The complementary industries that arose around the booming whaling industry included shipbuilders, coopers who made the barrels to store oil, sailmakers and rope-makers, the insurance and financial people on shore who handled the money, and the shipowners who financed the long journeys and reaped the biggest profits.
The industry also became a way for a young man to make his mark—and possibly his fortune—in the world. Men who began as cabin boys or seamen rose through the ranks to captain their own ships. The fledgling industry welcomed men of all races, men from local tribes, immigrants from Cape Verde, and freed men of color. There were captains who refused to sail without a Wampanoag man aboard, and in Herman Melville’s famous book Moby-Dick, one of the three harpooners was a Wampanoag man named Tashtego. Absalom Boston, a free man of color from Nantucket, became captain of the Industry, the only known whaling ship that sailed from Nantucket with an all-black crew in 1822. Amos Haskins, a Wampanoag man from the Gay Head tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, became captain of the Mattapoisett-built bark Massasoit. (Haskins, who died at sea in 1861, is buried in Rural Cemetery in New Bedford.)
Women also traveled aboard the ships. Captains’ wives and families sailed with their men to strange ports and gave birth on unusual islands like Pitcairn, the island peopled by the mutinous crew of the Bounty, a favorite place to go when a birth was imminent because of the special care the island women would take with the New England mothers-to-be. There was sadness among these women for children lost at birth and at sea and left behind. Crew members also died at sea, their bodies thrown overboard into the depths. Cruelty and piracy existed among the whalers as well, as in the case of the infamous Capt. William “Bully” Hayes, who took what he wanted on the high seas, including ships, and spread fear wherever he went. Hayes was known to participate in a slave trade called blackbirding that involved sending a ship out on a whaling journey that was then used illegally as a slave ship after the crew kidnapped natives. After completing its delivery of humans, such a ship was often scuttled, and the owner would claim it was lost at sea.
Strange tales of the whalers abounded in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was an industry that brought news of faraway places and peoples, fantastic creatures, and deadly encounters. It spawned a new art, called scrimshaw, that began as a way for sailors to keep busy during the long and sometimes tedious days at sea; they used the teeth and bones of whales as canvases for elaborate carved designs and to make products to be used at home, such as pie crimpers and sewing implements. Ships that hunted whales sailed far and wide from the shores of New England to the Atlantic fishing grounds of Stellwagon Bay, the Caribbean Sea, down the coast of South America, and around Cape Horn off Tierra del Fuego into some of the most dangerous waters in the world. From there, they hunted in the Pacific, often stopping in the Galapagos Islands to gather provisions like fresh water and food and to leave letters for other ships to bring back to New England from the old post barrel on the Galapagos Island of Floreana. This barrel, erected by whalers in the 19th century, served as a post office for New England ships; whalers arriving in the Pacific would leave letters for home, and ships departing the Pacific for the return trip to New England would take letters from the barrel back to waiting families.
The whalers also took many, many turtles and tortoises from the Galapagos—to the point of decimating the populations and even pushing one species into extinction. When the whalers realized that tortoise oil was of an even finer grade than sperm oil, they began taking the reptiles not just for meat but also for oil, and this caused an even greater decline in the numbers. Whaling logbooks that were kept on every voyage contain records of how many of these creatures were taken, and most were meticulous in their accounting of the number of tortoises as well as whales taken and kept track of how many barrels of oil and pounds of whalebone were collected from each whale. Fortunately, today, under the stewardship of the country of Ecuador, the tortoises and turtles are making a comeback, although the exact amount of damage caused by the whaling industry in the Galapagos Islands may never be known.
In the mid- to late 19th century, whaling ships began hunting in the Arctic waters as whales, being driven to extinction, became harder and harder to find in the Pacific Ocean. Although it was unbeknownst to many at the time, this marked the beginning of the end of the industry. A number of events started the decline—and, finally, the end—of the whaling industry as a financial success.
The discovery of oil at Drake’s Well in Pithole, Pennsylvania, on January 8, 1865, initially caused an increase in the number of whales taken, because without the need to boil blubber for oil, ships could fill their holds with baleen or whalebone more quickly and make a tidy profit from that. Baleen, taken from the mouths of baleen whales, was in demand for making corsets, umbrellas, buggy whips, and even springs for carriages. Eventually, the discovery of petroleum did become part of the decline of the industry as it came more and more into everyday use.
Around the same time, a large number of ships from the old whaling fleet were destroyed during the Civil War. Some were destroyed as part of the Stone Fleet, a group of ships that the Union deliberately sank to blockade southern harbors, and some were burned to the waterline by notorious Confederate captain James Waddell after the war was over. Major disasters also occurred in the Arctic fishing grounds. With the decline of whales in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans due to overfishing, whalers went north to hunt for the bowhead whale. There, a number of journeys met an unlucky fate and were cut short by the ice. Arctic whalers also took seals and walruses when they could not find whales, causing untold harm to these two other populations. Numerous ships were frozen into the ice floes and had to be abandoned in the late 19th century. The beauty and romance of the people, the sailing ships, and the strange sea tales that arose from the industry slowly came to an end.
In spite of the intriguing and fascinating nature of the whaling industry, it was a bloody business. It blossomed and then died in approximately two centuries, saw its heyday in the early to mid-1800s, and continues today in much smaller numbers under a high degree of regulation. Some of the whale populations that were harmed in those two centuries are rebounding after many years of stewardship by people around the world, but some have been lost forever.
Now that humanity has realized the harm they caused these magnificent creatures in the quest for money and goods, the facts and figures from carefully kept records and logbooks of the whaling industry are being utilized to tally those past actions and are being brought to bear on our responsibilities surrounding the future care of whales.
This map from an 1871 atlas shows the coast of Massachusetts. The whaling industry affected all the seaside towns in Massachusetts, starting when the native whalers and the Pilgrims of Plymouth set rules for dividing up a found or killed whale and continuing into the heyday of the industry in the 19th century. (Bourne Archives.)