Whale Fishery of New England

Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes:

Italic text is marked thus.

The spelling, punctuation and hyphenation are as the original, except for apparent typographical errors, which have been corrected.

WHALE FISHERY OF NEW ENGLAND

AN ACCOUNT, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND SOME INTERESTING AND AMUSING ANECDOTES, OF THE RISE AND FALL OF AN INDUSTRY WHICH HAS MADE NEW ENGLAND FAMOUS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

PRINTED FOR THE STATE STREET TRUST COMPANY BOSTON, MASS.

COPYRIGHTED 1915 BY THE STATE STREET TRUST COMPANY

The vignette on the title-page is reproduced from a print of the ship “Maria” of New Bedford, which in 1853 was the oldest whaleship owned in the United States. Her registry was dated 1782. She was built in Pembroke, now called Hanson, for a privateer during the Revolutionary War, and was bought in the year 1783 by William Rotch of Nantucket, afterwards of New Bedford. At one time she was owned by Samuel Rodman, and also by the Russells. In construction she was the typical whaleship of her time. It is said that she earned for her owners $250,000 and made twenty-five voyages, bringing back a full cargo each time. The tailpiece is from a very old print which represents whaling in the seventeenth century.

Compiled, arranged and printed under the direction of the Walton Advertising and Printing Company Boston, Mass.

FOREWORD

The people of New England have long been interested in all matters pertaining to the sea, and members of many of her best-known families have commanded its merchant ships and whalers.

The State Street Trust Company has always endeavored to encourage an interest in historical matters, and it is hoped that this pamphlet, the ninth of the series, which deals with one of our earliest industries, will be interesting to the Company’s depositors and also to the general public. It is sent to you with the compliments of the Company, which for over twenty years has tried to serve the interests of its depositors.

For valuable assistance in the preparation of this pamphlet the Trust Company desires to acknowledge its indebtedness to Dr. Benjamin Sharp and Sidney Chase, residents of Nantucket (the latter being a descendant of the Starbucks, Coffins and Husseys), to Z. W. Pease, Frank Wood and George H. Tripp, all of New Bedford (Mr. Tripp being the librarian of the Free Public Library), Llewellyn Howland, Frederick P. Fish, Charles H. Taylor, Jr., Roy C. Andrews and Madison Grant of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, D. A. deMenocal, J. E. Lodge and Kojiro Tornita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and George F. Lord, secretary of the Boston Stock Exchange. Assistance has also been rendered by the officers of the Trust Company.

The following books have been used as references and contain valuable information and many interesting anecdotes:—

“The Story of New England Whalers,” by John R. Spears.

“History of the American Whale Fishery,” by Alexander Starbuck.

“A History of the American Whale Fishery,” by Walter S. Tower.

“Moby Dick, or the White Whale,” by Herman Melville.

“Whaling Ventures and Adventures,” by George H. Tripp.

“Whaling and Fishing,” by Charles Nordhoff.

“Miriam Coffin,” by Col. Joseph C. Hart.

“The Gam,” by Capt. Charles Henry Robbins.

“Eighteen Months on a Greenland Whaler,” by Joseph P. Faulkner.

“Arctic Whaleman and Whaling,” by Rev. Lewis Holmes.

“Cruise of the Cachalot,” by Frank T. Bullen.

“History of Nantucket,” by Edward K. Godfrey.

“History of Nantucket,” by Obed Macy.

“History of Nantucket,” by Douglas-Lithgow.

Part 2

“The Glacier’s Gift” (Nantucket), by Eva C. G. Folger.

“History of New Bedford,” by Daniel Ricketson.

“The Perils and Romance of Whaling,” by G. Kobbé.

“The Whale and its Captors,” by Rev. Henry T. Cheever.

“Incidents of a Whaling Voyage,” by Olmstead.

“Nimrod of the Sea,” by Captain Davis.

“Hunting the Biggest of all Big Game,” by Roy C. Andrews.

“Four Years Aboard a Whaleship,” by William B. Whitecar, Jr.

“Etchings of a Whaling Cruise,” by J. Ross Browne.

“Bark Kathleen, sunk by a Whale,” by Capt. T. H. Jenkins.

“Peter the Whaler,” by William H. G. Kingston.

“The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States,” by George Brown Goode, prepared for the United States Tenth Census.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE WHALE 7

ANCIENT HISTORY OF WHALING 8

EARLY NEW ENGLAND WHALING 13

NANTUCKET 16

NEW BEDFORD 23

OTHER NEW ENGLAND WHALING PORTS 33

ABOARD A “BLUBBER HUNTER” 35

WHALING IMPLEMENTS AND WHALEBOATS 37

DIFFERENT SPECIES OF WHALES AND THEIR PRODUCTS 41

METHODS OF CAPTURE AND “TRYING OUT” 45

THE PERILS OF WHALING 51

THE “CATALPA” EXPEDITION 58

DECLINE OF WHALING AND THE CAUSES 60

WHALING OF TO-DAY 62

Part 3

The illustrations used in this brochure are from rare prints in the possession of the Dartmouth Historical Society and the Free Public Library of New Bedford, H. S. Hutchinson & Co., Charles H. Taylor, Jr., Roy C. Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History of New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., and others.

* * * * *

“Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of the English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent People; a People who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone, of manhood.”—From a speech by Edmund Burke before Parliament in 1775.

THE WHALE

“Oh, the rare old Whale, ’mid storm and gale, In his ocean home will be A giant in might where might is right, And King of the boundless sea.”

From “Moby Dick.”

No animal in prehistoric or historic times has ever exceeded the whale, in either size or strength, which explains perhaps its survival from ancient times. Few people have any idea of the relative size of the whale compared with other animals. A large specimen weighs about ninety tons, or thirty times as much as an elephant, which beside a whale appears about as large as a dog compared to an elephant. It is equivalent in bulk to one hundred oxen, and outweighs a village of one thousand people. If cut into steaks and eaten, as in Japan, it would supply a meal to an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men.

Whales have often exceeded one hundred feet in length, and George Brown Goode, in his report on the United States Fisheries, mentions a finback having been killed that was one hundred and twenty feet long. A whale’s head is sometimes thirty-five feet in circumference, weighs thirty tons, and has jaws twenty feet long, which open thirty feet wide to a mouth that is as large as a room twenty feet long, fifteen feet high, nine feet wide at the bottom, and two feet wide at the top. A score of Jonahs standing upright would not have been unduly crowded in such a chamber.

The heart of a whale is the size of a hogshead. The main blood artery is a foot in diameter, and ten to fifteen gallons of blood pour out at every pulsation. The tongue of a right whale is equal in weight to ten oxen, while the eye of all whales is hardly as large as a cow’s, and is placed so far back that it has in direction but a limited range of vision. The ear is so small that it is difficult to insert a knitting needle, and the brain is only about ten inches square. The head, or “case,” contains about five hundred barrels, of ten gallons each, of the richest kind of oil, called spermaceti.

One of these giants, when first struck by a harpoon, can go as fast as a steam yacht, twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, but it soon slows down to its usual speed of about twelve miles, developing about one hundred and forty-five horse-power.

Mr. Roy C. Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, was on a whaler ninety feet long, which struck a finback whale, and he says that for seven hours the whale towed the vessel, with engines going at full speed astern, almost as though it had been a rowboat.

The whale’s young are about twelve feet long at birth, and can swim as soon as they are born. So faithfully does the cow whale watch over her offspring when they are together that she will rarely move when attacked for fear of leaving the young whale unprotected, or of hurting it if she thrashes round to escape capture. It is believed that whales sometimes live to attain the age of eight hundred years. They sleep at the bottom of the ocean, which fact shows that they do not inhale air when asleep, like the warm-blooded animals, and to help them in breathing below the surface they have a large reservoir of blood to assist circulation. This spot is known to whalemen as the “life” of the whale. When “sounding” to a great depth it is estimated that the whale bears on its back the weight of twenty battleships. The strength and power of a whale are described as almost unbelievable.

Continue reading Whale Fishery of New England free in the Wunder reader →