A WHALE OF A TALE

                                   

      I would imagine that almost the last subject in the world you’d expect to be reading about in Earl’s Pearls is “whaling”. And at first blush your eyes might glaze over at the thought of reading about life onboard a whaler leaving from Nantucket in the mid 1800’s. And I’m no Herman Melville, but here goes nothing.

      As you may recall from an earlier post, I’ve been disposing of my collection of Victorian era picture albums on EBay. I found, unfortunately, that the price of these albums has plummeted since I bought them a dozen years or so ago and most of my albums are quite ordinary. But, while going through the last box of albums I came across a real winner, perhaps financially, but most surely in that it illuminated the life of the whaling community on Nantucket in the nineteenth century.
       This album contains pictures of several well-known ships’ captains and their families, and in particular, Captain Nathan Manter. This name  means nothing to you and me, but the Captain was the subject of a wonderful and well-known painting by Eastman Johnson in 1873.                                                

And here’s the Captain’s photo in my album with part of his family.

     The photo album also contained an image of Abraham Quady, the last Indian on Nantucket who was described in a journal of that period as a, “…venerable, inoffensive old man living of his own and supporting himself by selling berries picked on the common. After years of working on whaling ships he became, “…the prince of Nantucket caterers and without his assistance no evening entertainment was complete.” (I wonder how he made the transition from berry picker to caterer. I’m surprised he didn’t open a gambling casino instead.) He died in 1854 at the age of 82.

      I became hooked on the subject of whaling and on the lives of the folks in the album. If you’d rather just look at the pictures, I’ll forgive you, but otherwise here’s a description of whaling that I found fascinating (and it took my mind off the presidential election that comes to a close today.)

    

   Whaling was an exceptionally dangerous business both physically and economically. In the Yankee whale fishery vessels injuries and death were common to almost every voyage. Many vessels were lost. A few individuals got rich whaling and most of those were owners, agents and those captains that lived.  The crew shared in the profits but the spoils were skewed in favor of the top 1%.

     The oil gathered from the blubber was in demand chiefly for lamps. (It was also the mainstay of women’s’ corsets.)

     By the 18th century, whaling in Nantucket had become a deep-sea industry, with voyages extending for years at a time and with vessels traveling as far as South Pacific waters

    Life for the crew aboard a ship was one of cramped living quarters, long periods away from home, bleak meals and hard dangerous and backbreaking work. Long days were often spent just watching, waiting and preparing the equipment for the hunt. The monotony ended once the spotter called out, "thar she blows", when a whale was located. Quickly the hunt was on.

   The prey would spout as many as forty times before “sounding” (disappearing below the surface) and once it sounded it would disappear for as long as an hour, diving to the bottom of the ocean in search of squid and krill.

      Once the ship was in range, the crews dropped the small whaleboats into the water to take up the chase. It was not simply a matter of rowing fast, reaching the whale, and making a kill. Whales have acute hearing, so it was important to approach quietly. The splash of an oar could "gally" (scare) the beast and make it "sound") and swim further away from the boats.

     Once successfully harpooned, the real danger would start. The header would yell "stern all", and the rowers would make it their job to clear the immediate area as quick as possible to avoid the thrashing of the whales' huge tail. When this was accomplished the crews job was to avoid the unwinding rope as the whale tried to escape the hunters. One crew member would continue to douse the rope with water, to prevent the rope from bursting into flames from the friction, as it unraveled. Most whalers who were injured, were hurt during this stage of the hunt. An unraveling rope could easily cut through anything that got in its path and with a rough sea and an unpredictable whale, avoiding the rope and a thrashing whale was not an easy task.

      As the whale dived it would drag the boat at speeds of up to twenty-five miles per hour, in what was called a "Nantucket Sleigh Ride".

      A whale might tow a whale boat for miles before it tired. A whale sometimes smashed or overturned a boat during the chase, and few crewmen knew how to swim.
Once the whale began to rise again to the surface, the crew would take in the slack rope hand over hand until it once again tightened. After the hunt was over the whalers had the task of returning the dead carcass, all forty tons or so, back to the ship. And then the real work began as the behemoth was cut up and its blubber boiled down to yield its precious oil.
        Whaling, with all its hardships and peculiar customs, was immortalized in the pages of Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick. Melville himself had sailed on a whaling ship, the Acushnet, which left New Bedford in January 1841.

       By 1851, overfishing had decimated whale populations in the Atlantic Ocean. Most whalers moved to the Pacific and Indian oceans. Ships traveled north and south with the seasons, following the large whale populations on their annual migrations. (Maybe that’s why some of the photos in my album list families who moved to San Francisco.) The whaling industry flourished in New England from about 1820 to 1860, until the demand for oil for illumination was replaced by oil taken from the ground.

      Commercial whaling in the 1800s was far more racially integrated than most trades on land, and racial prejudice was generally more muted on whale ships than in society at large. Black and white whalers had to work side by side to get the job done—and to survive.
       Many owners of whale ships were Quakers, a religious group opposed to slavery. Some New England towns were also important stops on the Underground Railroad, an informal network that provided safe passage to people trying to escape slavery. And these towns needed seamen, including free black people and those who had escaped slavery.

     And I guess it’s only fitting to end this post with a photo from my album of Oliver Cromwell Coffin III.  I doubt that he was ever within a mile of a whale.