Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

Some stigma has attached to the Nantucket Friends for their want of patriotism in the Revolution. They were perhaps in too great haste to apply for the protection of the crown to suit the temper of the day. Justice to their position requires the impartial historian to state that they were at the mercy of the enemy's fleets. They were virtually left to shift for themselves, and ought not to be censured for making the best terms possible. At the close of hostilities their commerce was, in fact, nearly destroyed. Starved by their friends, now become their enemies, and robbed by their enemies, of whom they had sought to make friends, they were in danger of being ground between the upper and nether millstones of a hard destiny.

I well enough remember the first sight I had of whale-ships on their cruising-grounds; of the watchmen in their tubs at the mast-head, where they looked like strange birds in strange nests; and of the great whales that rose to breathe, casting fountains of spray high in the air. They seemed not more animated than the black hull of a vessel drifting bottom-up, and rolling lazily from side to side, until, burying their huge heads deeper, a monster tail was lifted into view, remained an instant motionless, and then, following the rolling plunge of the unwieldy body, sunk majestically beneath the wave.

The curious interest with which, from the deck of a matter-of-fact steamship, I had watched the indolent gambols and puffings of the school, had caused me to lose sight of the whaleman, until an extraordinary commotion recalled her to my attention. Blocks were rattling, commands quick and sharp were ringing out, and I could plainly see the splash that followed the descent of the boats into the water. Away they went, the ashen blades bending like withes with the energy and vim of the stroke. Erect in the stern, his arms bared to the shoulder, his body inclined forward like a bended bow, was the boat-steerer. I fancied I could hear his voice and see his gestures as he shook his clenched fist in the faces of the boat's crew. This was the boat-steerer's speech:

"Now, boys, give it to her; lay back hard! Spring hard, I tell you! There she blows! Break your backs, you duff-eaters! Put me right on top of that whale, boys! There she is, boys—a beauty! One more lift, and hurra for Nantucket bar!"

After a weary and fruitless chase—for the whales had sounded—we were boarded by the mate's boat, and requested to report their vessel. I gazed with real curiosity at its crew. Every man had a bandana handkerchief bound tightly about his head. Faces, chests, and arms were the color of old mahogany well oiled. They were then two years out, they said, and inquired anxiously for news from the "States." They neither knew who was President, nor of the war raging between the great powers of Europe, and were thankful for the old newspapers that we tossed to them. At length they rowed off, cutting their way through the water with a powerful stroke, their boat mounting the seas like an egg-shell.

An ancient salt with whom I talked in Nantucket spoke of the disappearance of the whales, and of their turning up in new and unexpected waters. From the beginning of the century until the decline of the fishery, vessels usually made a straight course for Cape Horn; but of late years, whales, he said, had re-appeared in the Atlantic, making their way, it is believed, through the North-west Passage. Whales with harpoons sticking in them having the names of vessels that had entered the Arctic by way of Behring's Straits have been taken by other ships on the Atlantic side of the continent.

"When I first went whaling," quoth he, "you might wake up of a morning in the Sea of Japan with fifty sail of whalemen in sight. A fish darsent (durst not) show his head: some ship would take him."

"I have gone on deck off the Cape of Good Hope," he continued, "when we hadn't a bar'l of ile in the ship, an' the whales nearly blowin' on us out o' the water. We took in twelve hundred bar'ls afore we put out the fires."

Now, though they burn coal-oil in Nantucket, I believe they would prefer sperm. You could not convince an islander that the discovery of oil in the coal-fields was any thing to his advantage; nor would he waste words with you about the law of compensations. A few, I was told, still cling to the idea of a revival in the whale-fishery, but the greater number regard it as clean gone. I confess to a weakness for oil of sperm myself. There are the recollections of a shining row of brazen and pewter lamps on the mantel, the despair of house-maids. In coal-oil there is no poetry; Shakspeare and Milton did not study, nor Ben Jonson rhyme, by it. Napoleon did not dictate nor Nelson die by the light of it. Nowadays there are no lanterns, no torches, worthy the name.