Colorful boats line up in Provincetown harbor ready for another day of commercial fishing.
Though whaling was never as important to Cape Cod as were its fisheries, it nonetheless formed an significant chapter in the Cape’s maritime history. In the early colonial days drift whales came ashore frequently enough that they formed a portion of some Congregational ministers’ salaries. Live whales were common in Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound, and a modest inshore whaling industry developed in the 17th century. In fact, in 1694 a Yarmouth captain, Ichabod Paddock, was invited to Nantucket to teach the Quaker residents the trade. He apparently did such a good job that Nantucketers soon became the preeminent New England whalers.
Try yards—areas where whale blubber was boiled down, or “tried out,” to obtain the oil—were established early in the 18th century on Barnstable’s Sandy Neck, and in 1715 that town boasted some 200 inshore whalers. But such intensive exploitation soon diminished the nearby stocks, and by 1750 the inshore whaling industry was dying out.
As in fishing, so in whaling, Provincetown with its unrivaled harbor became the Cape’s most important port. At its peak, in 1876, seventeen deep-sea whaling vessels sailed out of Provincetown. The last two Cape whaling vessels made their final voyages from Provincetown in 1920-21. They were the schooner Cameo and the bark Charles W Morgan. The Morgan is preserved at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
One species of cetacean has had a peculiar attachment to the Cape shores over the centuries. The pilot whale, or blackfish, is a medium-sized toothed whale, 15-22 feet in length. It tends to travel in tight groups, and large numbers of pilot whales frequently strand themselves in the tidal creeks and on the shallow flats of Cape Cod Bay, particularly in the labyrinthine channels around Wellfleet Harbor. Scientists are still trying to fathom the causes of these mass strandings, but to the early Cape Codders they were obviously a gift from God, providing both meat and high-grade whale oil from the rounded “melon” in the front of the whale’s head.
A humpback whale displays its tail stock and flukes off the Provincetown coast. Other species of whales are also commonly seen from spring through fall, including finback, minke, and right whales. These marine mammals, once hunted for their blubber and baleen, now support a thriving whale-watching industry.
Before long lookouts were posted to spot pods of pilot whales coming inshore. Fleets of small boats would then be launched, and their crew members would circle the whales and beat their oars and blow horns to “help” the panicked herd ashore. In 1855 Thoreau witnessed hundreds of blackfish driven ashore at Great Hollow in Truro, and in 1880 a school of more than 1,300 stranded in South Wellfleet at Blackfish Creek, giving it its present name. Strandings of pilot whales continued to be a source of local income for Cape towns into the 1930s, when, for reasons not clear, they largely disappeared. But since the mid-1970s strandings have become common again; in November 1982, sixty-five pilot whales came ashore at Wellfleet’s Lieutenant Island.
In the eyes of many, Cape Codders attained their greatest seafaring eminence as shipmasters in the merchant marine. As captains during the early days of the Republic, they were, as Cape historian Henry Kittredge noted, “the first ambassadors of a young nation.” Later, in command of the great clipper ships of the mid-19th-century, they set a number of transoceanic sailing records that still stand today. They also made considerable fortunes for their owners, and for themselves. This monetary bounty was translated into the hundreds of substantial “captain’s houses” that still stand along the streets of their home towns from Sandwich to Provincetown. Brewster alone is said to have counted more than 50 sea captains residing there at one time.
But perhaps even more important than the fortunes and exotic souvenirs these ship captains brought home from foreign ports was the broad perspective gained by their experience. It was said that many a Cape Codder had been to China who had never gone to Boston by land. Wives and children often sailed with the shipmasters, and several of Cape Cod’s small villages boasted a cosmopolitan culture unusual among mid-19th-century New England towns. Many of the retired ship captains became selectmen in their towns, and, as Kittredge put it, “Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign countries.”