The mightiest living creature is the whale; it is hard for us to realize by how great a margin his tonnage outstrips that of his nearest rival. Half a dozen elephants, head to tail, would scarcely equal his length; even the gigantic reptiles of prehistoric ages would look puny alongside of him. I once made a model of a whale, and carved a man to the same scale;1 the contrast never fails to amaze people when I place them side by side on the table. Looking at them, you wonder how man ever had the temerity to engage this creature in combat; how our grandfathers, armed with only a slender lance, could ever succeed in overcoming his vast strength.
Yet the dangers of the chase were only one peril the whalemen of the last century overcame. They followed their quarry into the uncharted vastness of the Pacific, into the frozen wastes of the arctic; they survived shipwreck on inhospitable shores, countered the wrath of hostile natives, the cunning of the land sharks, and the parsimony of the owners. Theirs was a hard and dangerous calling, the memory of which thrills us today as we look over the annals of the vanished fleet that once carried to the four comers of the earth the names of New Bedford, Nantucket, New London, Sag Harbor, and many tiny New England ports, scarcely known today outside their own immediate vicinity.
1 See illustration page 372.
In the heyday of whaling, Nantucket stood pre-eminent, but the industry lingered longer in New Bedford which came to be associated more intimately in our minds with whaling than any other. It is not surprising, therefore, that when you cross Buzzards Bay and head into New Bedford, you begin to scan the sky line for masts and yards and to sniff the breeze for the odor of sperm oil. Then you recollect that these are the days of electricity and petroleum and lastex, remember that sail has passed, and with it old ways and old seafaring trades, and you know that you will find nothing at New Bedford but cotton mills. It seemed, therefore, like a flash back into the last century when, coming up the channel, I did actually see crossed yards on lofty spars, passed anchored vessels with oil-streaked sides and the characteristic, spectacle-shaped crow’s-nests, saw wharves piled with whaleboats and oil barrels. Even as recently as 15 years ago there were one or two whaling vessels still sailing out of New Bedford. Now they are gone, but their memory is still fresh, especially among the aging mariners who once wielded lance and harpoon and cutting spade and saw leviathan in his death throes. More ancient in their design, more primitive in their occupation, the whale ships outlasted the China clippers, the packet ships, and the lofty Cape Homers, bringing some of the flavor of the age of sail down to our own times.
Strange ships and a strange trade! Today, if we voyage 2 weeks without seeing land, we consider it a long time to be at sea, yet it was not unusual for a whaler to sail 8 months with nothing to break the horizon. Four-year cruises were common, which might be lengthened in individual instances to 7 or 8 years by transfers from homeward bound vessels to others, outboard bound and shorthanded.
The ships themselves were not like other ships. Built in a little group of ports in southeastern New England, hailing from a still more restricted section of the country, they evolved in their own way, scarcely touched by contemporary developments in naval architecture. Today they would be considered very small, since they seldom ran to an over-all length much greater than 100 feet, yet they were commonly ship or bark rigged. In an age that had practically standardized on the ship rig for ocean-going vessels it was hard to escape yards on the mizzenmast, but barks were easier to handle, and skill in maneuvering was the whale man’s greatest boast. Necessary it was, too, when approaching a wary whale or when picking up widely separated boats or when working up to a whale killed many miles to windward.
It is the popular impression that whalers were slow, tubby vessels, “built by the mile and sold by the yard,” as one writer describes them, but this is disproved by a study of existing half models and by contemporary descriptions, referring to many of them as “clippers” and “half clippers.” They were, indeed, old-fashioned; a sailor just off a McKay or a Webb clipper would probably be pretty scornful of the whaler’s rounded lines, while the ship-minded public, accustomed to the gleaming paintwork and polished brass of the latest record- breaker from San Francisco, would not regard very highly the grimy whaler discharging its greasy cargo down the street.
Built and rigged in their own peculiar way, with wooden jackstays, curious top construction, carrying topgallant crosstrees, and with halyards, sheets, and braces led quite differently from those of their contemporaries, they were nevertheless well suited to a trade that demanded handiness above all, and found a fair turn of speed useful.
From a distance the whaler could be distinguished at a glance by the graceful boats hanging from clumsy-looking but exceedingly practical wooden davits. Three of them occupied the entire port side; generally only one was carried to starboard, leaving room to rig the “cutting stage” where the whale was stripped of his blubber. Modem whalers are equipped to bring the whole animal aboard, but the men who shipped on the vessels which sailed from Nantucket and New Bedford had to do their work standing on a swaying plank 10 feet out from the ship’s side, while the whale, made fast by a fluke chain led through a hawse pipe, heaved and twisted in the water beneath and while the ship surged ahead under her topsails, rolling heavily in the Pacific swell.
Her decks would seem intolerably cluttered. Standing shoulder high between the main hatch and the foremast was the massive brick structure of the try-works, where the oil was extracted from the blubber. This occupied the space where the deckhouse was located on most ships; so galley, lockers, companionway, and sometimes a head had to be built way aft, on either side of the tiller. The space between was usually roofed over, forming a sort of wheelhouse where the helmsman could be very comfortable, whether in the blazing head of the line or the bitter cold of the arctic. With the tiller swinging across the deck and the skylight serving the cabin and saloon close to its end, there was no room for the wheel unless it was mounted on the tiller, an arrangement once seen on many small vessels. The wheel was rigged to turn with the rudder and the vessel’s head. When the captain said “starboard,” the helmsman put the wheel to port, but the whole contraption, tiller, wheel, and all, moved bodily to starboard, with the helmsman following after it, trying to hang on, and usually getting a crack in the shins for his pains.
The rest of the deck would be occupied by three cargo hatches, a cumbersome wooden windlass, a carpenter’s bench, a forge and anvil, a grindstone, chicken coops, pig pens, line tubs and other boat gear stowed wherever convenient, harpoons, cutting spades, buckets, spare oars, planks for the cutting stage, and other miscellaneous equipment stowed in racks or hung from pegs.
Below, there was a continuous ’tween deck space, with the cabin way aft, the saloon next forward, with staterooms opening off it for the mates, quarters for the carpenter, cooper, and steward, a room for the “boat steerers” or harpooners, and way up in the eyes the forecastle. This compartment today would cause a member of the Maritime Commission or an officer in the Seaman’s Union to lift up his hands in holy horror, but I imagine the sailors of that time were pretty well satisfied with it. Large enough to accommodate about 25 men, its outboard sides were lined with two tiers of bunks. These were curtained, of course, according to the custom of the time, lest a whiff of fresh air should stray even into such an airless place as a ship’s forecastle. With bright-colored, though doubtless inartistic, material in these hangings, and painstakingly decorated sea chests standing on the deck, the forecastle was probably as pleasant a place as men of this kind ever knew.
Whalemen were a mixed lot. Green hands predominated, attracted by the lure of strange lands and the chances for adventure, for the South Sea Islands were then in their native simplicity and the other countries bordering on the Pacific almost unknown. In addition, there were Kanakas, shipped to take the place of men who had died or deserted; Gay Head Indians from Martha’s Vineyard, who had a reputation as skillful harpooners; sailors, shanghaied or cajoled to make a voyage they would never think of undertaking in their right minds; and Portuguese and “Bravas” from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. These latter were willing to ship for very small “lays”; so the vessels frequently made a practice of setting out undermanned, planning to fill out their complements when whaling in the vicinity of the Portuguese Islands. Discharged in New Bedford, these men settled there, as well as in Rhode Island and Cape Cod, sent for their families, and today form an important element in the population.
The crews numbered between 30 and 40 men. From 20 to 25 of them would be before the mast, 5 would be officers, while the boat steerers, steward, carpenter, cooper, and other petty officers would make up the rest. Each boat had a crew of 6, an officer in command, boat steerer, and 4 men. Since the boat steerer pulled an oar when not otherwise employed, there were three oars on the starboard side pulling against two oars to port, and the sides of the boat were designated as the “2-oar side” and the “3-oar side” instead of by the more usual terms. They were also equipped with sails which were used whenever possible.
The harpoon had a spear-shaped head turning on a pivot so that when it was once sunk in the blubber it turned sidewise and would not pull out. It was used in making fast to the whale. When this was done, the harpooner and the mate changed places, the former taking the steering oar and the latter standing in the bow ready to lance the creature at the first opportunity. Having been more irritated than hurt by the harpoon, the victim either sounded, when there was nothing to do but wait for him to come up, or started off at a tremendous pace, with the boat trailing along behind him. We hear a lot about fighting whales, but very few of them desired to do anything but escape, the chief danger being that the whale’s frantic rushes would tangle the lines or overturn the boat by an aimless flip of his tail. Such mishaps were fairly common, but a more serious peril was the chance of being separated from the ship during the course of the chase, when the men sometimes underwent great hardships before they were found.
The actual killing was done with the lance. This had a 5-foot iron shaft on a wooden pole and had to be plunged into the whale the full length of the shaft in order to reach a vital spot. Considerable skill was required for this, and even then it usually took several hours to kill the animal. In one instance the whale was struck in the early afternoon but not killed until the following day. Firearms were employed at least as early as 1800, but the mates, jealous of their hard-won skill with the lance, were reluctant to use them. Nevertheless, “darting guns,” a sort of combination of harpoon and gun, were quite common during the later days of whaling.
Today there are probably as many whales taken as ever but the ships fly foreign flags. American whaling flourished when the demand for its products made enormous profits possible. During the first half of the last century there was no better illuminant than whale oil, and during the last half of the same century the growing use of machinery caused an increasing demand for lubricants which the infant petroleum industry was not yet able to supply. Our grandmothers also molded their figures in whalebone corsets. Today light, oil, and elegance come from other sources, but the decline of the industry in this country was due not so much to lack of markets as to lack of interest on the part of capital. At one time the average profit of the whale fishery was figured to be 48 per cent; and individual ships earned as high as 400 per cent during a voyage. In those days there was plenty of money for development but, when profits began to drop, the canny New Bedford capitalists found better uses for their savings. The Norwegians have developed new markets and have introduced new methods which make it possible to hunt the kind of whales (such as finbacks and sulphur-bottom whales) which, for one reason or another, were let alone by the New Bedford whalers and which were still numerous at the beginning of the present century. Now, indeed, the killing of whales has reached such alarming proportions that it has had to be restricted by international agreement.
However, it is not probable that the whale will become extinct in the near future, since, when their numbers are reduced below a certain point it is no longer profitable to hunt them. Sperm whales and right whales were hunted all through the last century, the former for their superior oil and the latter because, in addition to oil, they furnished “whalebone,” the flexible substance through which the whale strains its food. Nevertheless they may still be seen, singly or in schools, the right whale in northern waters and the sperm whale in warmer climates at a distance from land. Differing greatly in contour, they may be most easily distinguished at a distance by their spouts. The right whale has two blow holes on top of a rounded head and sends up a low, bushy spout. The sperm whale, on the other hand, has a single blow hole on the port side of the forward corner of its rectangular head and sends up a single, slanting spout. Most whales seen by the uninitiated are finbacks, whose tall, perpendicular spout is much more easily distinguished than the low spouts of the two former kinds. This species, however, was too athletic for the early whalemen, too active to be easily killed, and too deficient in blubber to be worth the effort.
Spouts may still be seen, but you may travel the length and breadth of the seven seas without raising the soot-stained topsails of a New Bedford whaler. Instead, huge floating factories, seagoing packing houses, send out their fleets of power boats to conquer leviathan, not dangerously with harpoon and lance, but safely at a distance with powder and shell. Today the oil that is landed at New Bedford and Nantucket comes from deep in the bowels of the earth, while we, poring over old records and listening to old men, marvel at tales of a day that is forever past.