In 1712, through the instrumentality of Christopher Hussey, Providence utilised a hardship to His creature to work a revolution in whaling. Hussey, while cruising along the coast, was caught up by a strong northerly wind, and despite his prayers and his seamanship was blown out to sea. When the sky cleared, Hussey’s craft was nowhere to be seen by the anxious watchers on shore. After awaiting his return for a decent number of days, his wife and neighbours at home gave him up as lost. But in the middle of their tribulations, a familiar sail dipped over the horizon, and Hussey slowly headed landward, dragging a dead sperm whale in tow: the first sperm whale known to have been taken by an American whaler.
Hussey’s exploit marked a radical change in whaling methods. All Nantucket lusted after sperm whales. The indomitable islanders began immediately to fit vessels, usually sloops of about thirty tons, to whale out in the “deep.” These little vessels were fitted out for cruises of about six weeks. On their narrow decks there was no room for the apparatus necessary to “try out” the oil. So the blubber stripped from the whale was cast into the hold, the oil awaiting extraction until the vessel returned. Then the reeking whale fat, its stench smiting the face of heaven, was transferred to the huge kettles of the “try houses.” There is an old saying that a nose that is a nose at all can smell a whaler twenty miles to windward. The New England indifference to the stenches of whaling suggests that the Puritan contempt for the flesh was not a virtue but a deformity.
Other whaling communities ventured out after the sperm whale in the wake of Nantucket. Year after year the colonial whalemen pushed further and further out into the “deep” as their gigantic quarry retreated before them. In 1774, Captain Uriah Bunker, in the brig Amazon of Nantucket, made the first whaling voyage across the equinoctial line to the Brazil Banks and, according to local tradition, returned to port with a “full ship” on April 19, 1775, just as the redcoats were in full retreat from Concord Bridge.
The Revolutionary War dealt a terrific blow to American whaling. Massachusetts was regarded as the hotbed of the Revolutionary spirit, and that colony was also the centre of the fishing industries. Hence, in 1775, “to starve New England,” Parliament passed the famous act restricting colonial trade to British ports, and placing an embargo on fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland or on any other part of the North American coast. It was this same measure which inspired Burke in his Speech on Conciliation to his superbly eloquent tribute to the exploits of the American whalemen. When the war began there were in the whole American fleet between three and four hundred vessels—of an aggregate of about thirty-three thousand tons. The annual product of this fleet was, according to Starbuck’s estimate, “probably at least 45,000 barrels of spermaceti oil, and 8,500 barrels of right whale oil, and of bone nearly or quite 75,000 pounds.” Of all whaling communities, the island of Nantucket held out most stoutly,—aided by Melville’s grandfather, who was sent to Nantucket in command of a detachment to watch the movements of the British fleet. Yet when the war ended in 1783, Macy says that of the one hundred and fifty Nantucket vessels, only two or three old hulks remained. In Nantucket, the money loss exceeded one million dollars. So many of the young and active men perished in the war that in the eight hundred Nantucket families there were two hundred and two widows and three hundred and forty-two orphan children.
But even in the face of such prodigal disaster, the fiery spirit of Nantucket was unquenchable. When the news came of the peace of 1783, the Bedford, just returned to Nantucket from a voyage, was hastily laden with oil and cleared for London. This was, as a contemporary London newspaper remarks, “the first vessel which displayed the thirteen rebellious stripes of America in any British port.”
Through the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the American whale fishery lived a precarious existence of constant ups and downs. The whaling voyages were greatly lengthened during this period, however. In 1789 Nantucket whalemen first went hunting the sperm whale off Madagascar, and in 1791 six whaleships fitted out at Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean.
The years between 1820 and 1835 were marked mainly by stable conditions and by a steady but gradual growth. In 1820 the Pacific whaling was extended to the coast of Japan, and within the next few years the whalers were going to all parts of the South Sea and Indian Ocean. And these years marked, too, the falling of Nantucket from her hundred years of pre-eminence in whaling, and the emergence of New Bedford as incomparably the greatest whaling port in the history of the world. It was a Nantucket whaler, however, who in 1835 captured the first right whale on the northwest coast of America, thereby opening one of the most important grounds ever visited by the whaling fleet.
The Golden Age of whaling falls between 1835 and 1860. In 1846 the whaling fleet assumed the greatest proportions it was ever to know. In that year, the fleet numbered six hundred and eighty ships and barks, thirty-four brigs, and twenty-two schooners, with an aggregate of somewhat over two hundred and thirty thousand tons. The value of the fleet alone at that time exceeded twenty-one million dollars, while all the investments connected with the business are estimated, according to Tower, at seventy million dollars, furnishing the chief support of seventy thousand persons. This great industry, so widespread in its operation, emanated, at the time of its most extensive development, from a cluster of thirty-eight whaling ports distributed along the southern New England coast from Cape Cod to New York, and on the islands to the south. The greatest of all the whaling ports, from 1820 onward, was New Bedford.
During the really great days of the whale fishery, the Pacific was by all odds the chief fishing ground. During the early eighteen-thirties, the Nantucket fleet began cruising mainly in the Pacific, and after 1840, the Nantucket whalers hunted there almost exclusively. The Nantucket fleet was soon followed by the majority of the New Bedford fleet, and a large proportion of the New London and Sag Harbor vessels.
These vessels, manned by a mixed company of Quakers, farm boys, and a supplementary compound of the dredgings of the terrestrial globe, would usually be gone for three years, not infrequently for four or five. As long as the craft held, and the food lasted, and an empty barrel lay in the hold, the captain kept to the broad ocean, eschewing both the allurements of home and the seductions of tattooed Didoes. When at last they sailed into the harbour of their home ports, weed-grown, storm-beaten, patched and forlorn, they usually looked, as Verrill says, more like the ghosts of ancient wrecks than seaworthy carriers of precious cargo manned by crews of flesh and blood. After a few months of repair and overhauling in port, these vessels were refitted for another cruise, and off they sailed again for another space of years. It thus happened that the veteran whalers of Nantucket and New Bedford and the sister ports could look back upon whole decades of their lives spent cruising upon the high seas: a fact that Melville amplifies with a cadence he learned from the Psalms. Of the Nantucketer he says: “For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. He alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks on the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”