Final Voyage (11 page)

The type of whale initially hunted was a species whose characteristics, alive and dead, made it the most suitable—the “right” whale—to hunt: it was a slow swimmer, possessed thick blubber, and, most important, remained floating when killed, so that it was easily towed ashore. The right whale, as it came to be called, was found immediately offshore, its migratory path lying close to outlying Nantucket in the warm waters of the continental shelf between the tepid Gulf Stream and the American coast. Whales were often seen from shore, and Obed Macy records a comment passed down by generations of Nantucketers: “In the year 1690 . . . some persons were on a high hill . . . observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed ‘there,’ pointing to the sea, ‘is a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread.’ ”

Nantucket’s whale fishery continued to prosper through the second half of the seventeenth century. Lookout posts—tall wooden posts with a sitting platform—were erected along the island’s southern coast and manned, like modern lifeguard chairs; boats were launched when whales were sighted. But this was still whaling carried out from a shore base. About the year 1712, a whaler named Christopher Hussey and his crew of white settlers and Indians had set out after right whales, when a strong northerly wind sprang up and blew their boat out of sight of land, far out to sea—probably to the warm edge of the Gulf Stream. When the blow subsided, Hussey and his crew found themselves close to a pod of a very different sort of whale. These had enormous blunt-ended heads that appeared to comprise half the whale’s body. Their jaw was nothing like the large baleen-filled scoop of the right whale, but was a long, narrow plank filled with teeth at the bottom of this head. At least one such whale had previously been found dead ashore in Nantucket, where it had aroused a frenzy of excitement. When cut open, its bulbous, bluff-bowed head was discovered to contain a reservoir of pure amber-colored oil that could be emptied out with ladles. This was initially thought to be a reservoir of the whale’s seminal fluid or sperm. It was quickly found to be far superior in quality to rendered blubber oil: it produced a cleaner-burning flame when lit—its primary use—but was also thought to have medicinal properties, both when swallowed and applied externally. For a time, Macy writes, this oil was esteemed to be worth its weight in silver. And many uses were found for those teeth, great ingots of a hard, fine ivory.

Hussey and his crew succeeded in killing one of these whales and towing it back to Nantucket, prompting the industry’s second major evolution (in America), the second innovation by Nantucketers: the commencement of deep-sea whaling voyages, the duration and spoils of which were limited only by the size of the vessels. Larger ships were quickly built, capable of venturing far offshore and remaining at sea, cruising for whales, with stores to feed a crew for six or more weeks without returning to shore, capacious enough to be loaded with hogsheads full of cut-up whale meat and barrels filled with sperm oil.

Such ships were too slow and clumsy to follow and attack a whale at close quarters, so they also had to be large enough to carry small whaleboats—the size of Indian canoes—that could be lowered for the chase and the kill. Since these did not have to be especially seaworthy or comfortable for long periods, or carry much beyond the essential harpoons, lances, and rope, they could be lightly constructed for speed and maneuverability. Thus evolved the classic whaleboat: about twenty-eight feet long, double-ended for speedy reverses away from a whale’s back and thrashing tail, oar-powered (though they also carried a collapsible mast and sail), rowed by five men and steered by the sixth, one of the ship’s mates. These are the small cockleshells now seen only in whaling museums, and in paintings and illustrations, being tossed, pulled, or smashed to pieces by a whale.

As larger vessels made more voyages, more facilities to receive and process their cargoes were built ashore on Nantucket. New wharves for larger ships were constructed in the town’s harbor; tryworks—sheds housing brick kilns and great iron cauldrons where the blubber was cut up and “tried-out” into oil—were erected near the wharves; warehouses to store barrels, coopering sheds, forges, shipbuilding yards, long ropewalk sheds, and soon candle factories and oil refineries were built. All quickly changed the appearance of what had been a sleepy settlement on Nantucket into a busy, and putrid-smelling, industrial town.

The business of the whale fishery became the primary occupation of almost everyone in Nantucket. Men were employed either aboard the ships or in the building of them and in the heavier manufacturing processes, while women, and many children, found work in the ropewalk and the candle factories, and in the importing and exporting businesses that supported a growing town.

In 1715, three years after Christopher Hussey’s epochal capture of a sperm whale, there were still only six vessels engaged in Nantucket’s whale fishery, producing that year £1,100 for the island. But whale oil was becoming highly sought-after in America and England, and the industry’s growth was explosive: by 1762, Nantucket had 78 ships at sea. The island’s catch that year amounted to 9,440 barrels of oil—almost 300,000 gallons—from approximately 130 whales.

This, and the lesser efforts by whaleships sailing from New London and Sag Harbor, was enough to impact the numbers of whales found across a broad stretch of the Atlantic. By the mid-eighteenth century, both sperm and right whales were becoming notably scarce along the American coast. No longer were they seen cavorting in the coastal pastures. As Nantucketers sailed ever farther to find them, the direction of their search first arced back toward the Old World: north up Davis Strait to the arctic reaches of Baffin Bay, east to the Grand Banks and beyond, to the Western Islands (as the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde groups were still known, even by Americans in a Eurocentric world). But whales (and the avoidance of French and Spanish privateers during a series of wars these two countries waged against England during the eighteenth century) led the voyaging whaleships inexorably in the direction of the geopolitical future: southeast, down the coast of Guinea, in West Africa, and then westward again, to “the Brazils,” even as far south as the Falkland Islands, where Nantucket vessels were cruising by 1772. Then Cape Horn beckoned, beyond which lay a whole world of unknown whaling grounds to be explored in tandem with the irresistible westward roll of history.

Norsemen had sailed above the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia and Russia from the first millennium, but the Nantucket whalemen rediscovered arctic conditions for themselves, and they made their observations available to fellow whalers:
“The daylight goeth not out of the sky during the whole 24 hours.”
On June 15, 1753, when the whaleship
Grey-hound
lay in Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenland, her log recorded:
“At 10AM it grew thick of fog and we Brought to under a trisail & Foresail not daring to run we knew not whither among ye Ice or Fog. The weather is freezing cold; Nights short; Sea rowling and Tumbling. The Deep tedious; our cabbin a Delight; the fire pleasant, our allowance to every man on board his belly-full and more too if he wants. Alas, if it were not for hope the heart would fail.”

Nantucket’s whalers lived routinely at sea for months at a time, as no one had before them.
“This morning I went out in my boat to the Carcass of a Dead Whale,”
wrote Francis Swain in the log of the
Speedwell
of Nantucket as it cruised in the South Atlantic on March 30, 1776.
“There was a great number of Albatrosses & I knocked down 52 of them with my lance Pole and haul ’d them into the boat . . . they proved to be Excellent good Meat.”

These Nantucketers, “geographically situated as if on a mother ship anchored in the Atlantic,” as historian Edouard Stackpole put it, were the world’s first proficient oceanographers. In London, Benjamin Franklin’s English friends asked him why their own ships were so much slower crossing the Atlantic than the Americans’. For an answer, Franklin wrote to his cousin, Nantucket whaling captain Timothy Folger, who told him about the phenomenon recorded by whalers of the warm river that flowed through the much colder Atlantic, from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Europe. Franklin was the first to publish an article and a map of this “Gulf Stream.”

 

 

 

THOUGH THOMAS MACY and most of the early settlers were not Quakers, Nantucket gradually became thoroughly Quakerized during the hundred years following their arrival. The community’s origins and continued open-mindedness about matters of faith had encouraged a number of Quakers to relocate there, but there seems to have been no regular Meeting until Thomas Story, an early Quaker missionary from England, visited the island in 1704. He found willing believers—not yet Quakers—in Nathaniel Starbuck and, in particular, his wife, Mary. She was “a wise, discreet woman, well read in Scripture, and not attached unto any sect, but in great reputation throughout the island for her knowledge in matters of religion, and an oracle among them on that account, in so much that they would not do any thing without her advice and consent therein,” wrote Story. With the Starbucks’ help, he organized Quaker Meetings with islanders, including a large number of the local Indians, many of whom had already become pious Christians. Story left the island with a regular Meeting established at the Starbuck house, under the guidance of Mary, and “now her three sons and daughters, and sons’ wives, are all in a hopeful way to the knowledge of truth, and liberty of the sons of God, with several other tender people at this time, in that small island.” Story was later able to report that “the Lord did visit them, and gathered many there unto himself, and they became a large and living meeting in him.”

Within sixty years of Story’s visit, two of the island’s three magistrates were Quakers, and most of the rest of the population were of the same persuasion. This religious solidarity had a profound impact on the island’s primary commercial enterprise. Nantucket’s genius in the business of whaling lay in the collective pursuit of a single engrossing occupation by its inhabitants, most of whom were connected by birth and an intimacy that stretched back over many generations, and now by religion. The business was conducted, Obed Macy wrote, as if by one family.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French soldier who became a British subject, traveled through the colonies during the eighteenth century as a surveyor and salesman of cartographic instruments, and published a series of “letters” describing what he saw. He visited Nantucket just before the Revolution and was impressed by the degree to which the overarching ethic of Quakerism, with its “obedience to the laws . . . sobriety, meekness, neatness, love of order,” and, most of all, its “fondness and appetite for commerce” affected the development of the people in tandem with their business on Nantucket:

He also remarked a peculiar distraction that relieved the rigidly austere lifestyle of the island’s Quakers:

THE FACT THAT THIS Quaker whaling cult floated on a sandy cloister out at sea undoubtedly helped establish, by the mid-eighteenth century, Nantucket’s preeminence in the whaling business. But this handily situated platform was still small and required yet another sea voyage to transport its whale oil to any market. There were those who could already see the limits of such a location.