Whaling in the 18th Century

From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world.

In 1620, the Pilgrim fathers William Bradford and Edward Winslow wrote: “Cape Cod was like to be a place of good fishing, for we saw daily great whales, of the best kind for oil and bone.” These were probably right whales (Eubalæna glacialis), the animal that served as the foundation of North American commercial whaling. The bone to which they referred is the baleen. Baleen was used to make a wide variety of products, such as tools, buggy whips, and corset stays.

Colonial Whaling Begins

The first record of the colonists’ attempts to organize community efforts to hunt drift whales was in Southampton, Long Island, in March of 1644. Over the next 30 years this organization developed into actual shore-whaling operations, where small boats were launched into the surf when whales were sighted offshore. By 1672 the colonists and their Native American neighbors were working together to hunt whales along the coast from small sailing vessels.

Their blubber would be removed and boiled down into oil in large iron vats called try-pots. The baleen was also removed, and the carcasses were left to rot. The whalers of nearby Eastham described this phase of their whaling operation in 1706: “ye Rest of ye Boddy of ye Lean of whales Lye on shoare in lowe water to be washt away by ye sea” (Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, 1878, p. 30).

A Colonial Whaling Industry Takes Shape

With the advent of the systematic hunting of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) that began from Nantucket after 1712, American commercial whaling grew dramatically in its economic importance. Sperm whales differ from other types of whales in several ways, but they were hunted for two main reasons. The first is that sperm whale oil burned cleanly and brightly and was a superior lubricant. Secondly, the spermaceti found in the head of the sperm whale was used to manufacture the finest grade of candles. Colonial exports of candles to England became a profitable business.

In 1774, two years before the start of American Revolution, the colonial fleet numbered 360 vessels hailing from 15 New England and New York ports. It was around this time that the port of Dartmouth, later to be called New Bedford, was beginning its rise to greatness as a whaling port.

The Impact of the Revolutionary War

American whaling came to a disastrous halt during the American Revolution as British naval vessels blockaded American ports and harassed American shipping on the high seas

The post-war 1790’s were a short period of regrowth between the American Revolution and the War of 1812 as spermaceti candles and sperm oil for lighthouses was in demand in both the United States and Europe.

The Golden Age of Yankee Whaling

The New Bedford fleet reached its peak in 1857, when 329 vessels valued at more than $12 million employed more than 10,000 men. The Whaleman’s Shipping List newspaper listed 20 ports in 1855, most of those being the same New York and New England regions that also made up the list of whaling ports before the American Revolution. There was one important addition to that list, however: San Francisco, California.

Arctic Whaling and the Civil War

In 1849, whaling master Thomas Welcome Roys of Sag Harbor, New York, sailed the ship Superior through the Bering Straits and into the Western Arctic. His quarry was the bowhead whale (Eubalæna mysticetus). With the hunting of this species, a new chapter in the history of American whaling had begun.

The bowhead is a very fat whale with thick blubber and baleen plates up to 13 feet long. The stocks of this whale in the Western Arctic waters had never been commercially exploited but hunting it was dangerous work in icy seas.

Markets for whale oil and baleen had been steady for many years, then the baleen market spiked around the time of the Civil War. The dictates of women’s clothing fashion in the form of hoop skirts and corsets brought long, flexible baleen into a pricey marketplace.

1859: Drilling for Petroleum in Pennsylvania

At this time the need for sperm whale oil for lighting was superceded by the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 and the market for sperm whale products slackened. This marked the end for ports like Nantucket that had never wholly embraced Arctic whaling.

Interestingly enough, Provincetown, Massachusetts, a port that specialized in short voyages and small vessels, continued successful whaling for many more years, but the peak of Yankee whaling had been passed. Access to the Western Arctic was easier from San Francisco, and the New Bedford whaling merchants moved offices and agents there so they could continue their business on both coasts. The opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 further consolidated the dual coast whaling business.