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Chapter One

South for

Spermaceti

The Southern Fishery may be said to embrace, with the

exception of the seas constituting what is properly called

the Northern or Greenland Fishery, the whole expanse of

ocean.

Charles Enderby

By 1650 Europeans had already been whaling for the better part of a thousand years. Like the littoral dwellers of other continents, the Basques had long pursued the whales that ventured near their coasts. Rowing boats carried the hunters close enough to fix their prey with spears or arrows attached to lines, floats or drogues. Harassment to exhaustion was their hunting technique. As the target species, the Biscay whale ( Eubalaena glacialis ), became scarcer and more timid, it became necessary to venture further from shore in pursuit. Small sea-going vessels came into use and they carried the whaling boats ever deeper into the cold northern seas. The Basques were whaling off Newfoundland within a few years of its discovery by John Cabot.

Others also were interested in the commercial possibilities of whaling. In the seventeenth century Britain and Holland jostled for maritime supremacy in the northern seas. Both employed Basques and Friesians in the ships they sent to take the whales found off Spitsbergen and Greenland. Like the Biscay whale these were baleen (whalebone) whales, but the body of Balaena mysticetus yielded larger quantities of oil and longer mouth bone. Like its Biscay cousin, the Greenland whale was slow and relatively docile, and could usually be relied upon to stay afloat after being killed. From every point of view the Biscay and Greenland whales were `the right whales' to catch, and so they were called.

The seventeenth century also saw the start of British colonisation of North America, and it was not long before the New Englanders began to exploit the whales that each year appeared on their coasts. As early as 1650 a company was licenced at Southampton on Long Island. In a prophetic clause, their licence was `to kill whales upon the South sea'. This might have been a reference to right whales migrating along the south coast of Long Island but it is tempting to believe that the company had grander ambitions, the more so as a map illustration of the 1670s shows what is unmistakably a sperm whale ( Physeter catodon ) being pursued by three boats to the south of the Island.

The Americans were not the first to exploit the species. A Portuguese document of 1643 records that inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Lembata traded `fish oil', and it is reasonable to infer that this was sperm oil because the men of the village of Lamalera continue to catch sperm whales to this day, beyond the ambit of the International Whaling Commission. They use a traditional harpoon, line and boat method sufficiently unlike its `primitive' North American equivalent to stamp it as an indigenous development.

In 1666 a correspondent reported to the Royal Society

that about two years since, there stranded upon the Coast of New-England a dead Whale, of that sort, which they call Trumpo, having Teeth resembling those of a Mill, and its mouth at a good distance from, and under the Nose or Trunk, and several boxes or partitions in the Nose, like those of the Tailes in Lobsters; and that being open'd there run out of it a thin oily substance, which would candy in time; after which, the remainder, being a thick fatty substance, was taken out of the same part, with a scoop. And this substance he affirmed to be the Sperma Ceti; adding further, that the Blubber, as they call it, it self, of the same sort of (Right) Whales, when stewed, yields on the top a creamy substance, which taken off, and thrown upon white wine, lets off a dirty heterogeneous sediment, but what remains aloft, affords a Sperma-Ceti-like matter.

The correspondent added that this type of whale `might be' caught on the coast eight or nine months in the year. Two years later, Richard Stafford of Bermuda wrote to the society that he had seen drift sperm whales at the Bahamas:

Myself with about 20 more have agreed to try, whether we can master and kill them, for I could never hear of any of that sort, that were kill'd by any man; such is their fierceness and swiftness. One such whale would be worth many hundred pounds.

Others followed. In 1688 a Dutch resident of New York sought permission to hunt sperm whales off the Bahamas and the coast of Florida. Their success or failure is unrecorded. It was clearly ship-based whaling that Stafford and the others had in mind but, like the Basques, the colonists had begun as shore whalers, sending boats to pursue whales seen from observation points along the coast. Once captured, the whales were towed ashore, `cut in' and boiled down. Many communities participated, but the inhabitants of a small island south of Cape Cod quickly became noted for their skill and determination in the business.

Nantucket is little more than a crescent-shaped sandbank, 22 kilometres long and 5.5 across at its widest point. Its soil is poor, and it was flight from religious persecution rather than economic opportunity that prompted its first proprietors to cross from the mainland in 1659. They started with four boats around 1690, each operating from its own designated stretch of shore, but by 1715 they were venturing into the deep, as they called it, in sloops of as little as 12 tons towing a single whaleboat. The Nattick Indians proved to be adept at the white man's way of hunting what was one of their traditional food sources. They were recruited to the ships according to a formula that appears to be an attempt to ration their skills and cheap labour throughout the fleet: a two-boat ship, for example, had a crew of thirteen of whom five were Indians--two for each boat plus a shipkeeper. The whales were brought alongside the ship and stripped of their blubber, which was then casked and carried back to the island for rendering down, or `trying out' as the term was. Voyages were short: a single whale would fill the hogsheads.

The original prey of the islanders were Atlantic right whales, the North American population of the Biscay whale. It was not until some time around the turn of the century that the sperm whale, on which the wealth and fame of Nantucket would be built, came to their attention. A large specimen was washed ashore. There was a heated local debate about ownership, and by the time it was resolved someone had made off with the large teeth that lined its lower jaw. When the blubber was tryed out the oil contained a white waxy substance. When the huge head was opened there was a large reservoir of the same matter in its upper part. It was found that the merchants of Boston were willing to pay a substantial premium for this head matter. From it they manufactured fine candles that were not inferior to those of beeswax for clarity of light and absence of smoke and odour. They were also cheaper.

Exactly when the islanders began systematically to pursue the sperm whale is shrouded in the obscurity appropriate to such a legendary and epoch-making event. Nantucket's first historian, Obed Macy, writing in 1835, ascribed it to the year-1712 when, so the story went, Christopher Hussey was blown well out into the Atlantic in a storm. Although he was looking for right whales, he struck a sperm whale when one presented. Intentional or not, it was a bold stroke; the armament of the great toothed whale and its disposition when attacked are quite different from that of the right whale. The sperm whale is dangerous at both ends. Its flukes are as powerful and nearly as flexible as those of the right whale, but its mouth is a unique hazard for boat whalers. The lower jaw can be 5 metres in length, with 15-centimetre teeth. The sturdiest of wooden boats could not resist its bite, much less the light, slender cedarwork of the whaleboat.

And sperm whales can be ugly. Most whales when harpooned are only concerned with escape. This is also true for the majority of sperm whales but the exceptions, and there were many, tended to stick in whalemen's memories. If a sperm whale fought, its attackers would count themelves lucky to escape without a stove boat. The death of a crewman was by no means a rare occurrence. Hussey seems to have been lucky on two counts: he did not experience the disappointment of many before him who had seen their irons and hundreds of fathoms of whale line being trailed into the distance by a type of whale too deep-diving, too strong and too fast to be held using the techniques of the day; and his sperm whale appears to have rolled fin out without offering any more resistance than would have been expected from a right whale.

Unfortunately, the folk history of whalers is not always reliable. In 1712 Macy's hero, a grandson of one of Nantucket's original proprietors, was only six years old. But Nantucket had six whalers in the deep as early as 1715, so the date of the exploit is not as unlikely as the attribution. We are on firmer ground with Judge Paul Dudley's 1725 Essay upon the Natural History of Whales , in which he tells us that an informant named Atkins, ten or twelve years in the trade, was one of the first to fish for the sperm whale, an event that he dated around 1720. By 1730 there were 25 vessels in the offshore fleet, ranging in size from 38 to 50 tons. The significance of Hussey's whale is difficult to assess. It is clear that there was already a well-established premium market for sperm whale products: George Ripley's Compound of Alchemy (1471) advised the use of `Sperma cete ana with redd Wyne when ye wax old'. Unless this need was entirely met from drift whales and by-catch from the right whale fishery, Stafford and the other early venturers must have enjoyed some success.

Be that as it may, the Nantucketers were confident that their expertise would allow them to dominate the market. `Time and experience,' noted an observer, `gave them advantages which made it difficult to rival them.' The bounty for which they became eligible by an Act of Parliament in 1748, introduced to support the struggling British industry, was, to the efficient islanders, a gift. Pursuing their comparative advantage, however, had other implications. The sperm whale was pelagic, monarch of the deep ocean `off soundings'. It was also mainly a creature of the temperate zones and tropics. The waters in which it was chiefly encountered were the ocean deeps to the south and east of Nantucket.

Bermuda and the Bahamas excepted, European and colonial whaling had hitherto looked and sailed north, the direction in which the right whales travelled to reach their summer feeding grounds. During the summer months it was possible to follow them into the Arctic, the more easily after the expulsion of the French from Canada during the Seven Years War, which also opened up the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Straits of Belle Isle to the New England whalers. It seemed to the Nantucketers that they could have the best of both worlds; south into the Atlantic for sperm in the spring and then north along the American littoral during the summer, following the migrating right whales. Ships and crews could be employed for a larger part of each year without the need to extend the distance or duration of individual voyages. Nothing would have been further from the thoughts of the islanders than whaling the South Seas, even though at that time the term would have been understood to mean no further afield than the coasts of South America. The phrase had come into common use in connection with the great financial speculation of 1720, the South Sea Bubble, but to English-speaking peoples the wastes beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, other than the routes to India and China, were still a great unknown. The islanders could have had no idea that they were on the verge of redirecting their trade in a way that would take them and their competitors to the ends of the earth. They would find, as did the citizens of Southampton, that the South Seas started at their own south shore.

These New Englanders were businessmen, not explorers. They ventured no further in pursuit of the sperm whale than it took to fill their ships. In the earliest days this meant no further than the Gulf Stream or the Bermuda Triangle, and the sloops that had sufficed for right whale fishing were adequate. But the inexorable dynamic of whaling meant that filling the ships, one year to the next, required ever more distant and hence longer voyages. Whaling on any known ground reduced its population and `gallied' (frightened) the survivors. These might abandon the ground or, even if they remained, become so difficult to approach that looking for an undisturbed population could be a better investment of a whaleman's time and effort. Ship size and fitout reflected this development. In 1756, when Bermuda was still a long voyage, the average size of a Nantucket vessel was 75 tons; by 1775, when they could be found as far away as the Falkland Islands, the size range was 90 to 180 tons.

From this era come the earliest of surviving American whaling logbooks. One, dated 1756, records a voyage by the sloop Manufactor , master John Taber, out of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In 1756 the place that would become New Bedford, the most famous of whaling ports, was the farm of Joseph Russell. From his waterfront he traded to the West Indies and sent out whalers, and he also payed a Captain Chaffee, late of the business in Lisbon, the large salary of £100 a year to supervise the manufacture of spermaceti candles. John Taber's account of his 3 1/2-week cruise reveals in their earliest state many arrangements that were still features of wooden ship whaling a century and a half later.

9 April 1756 weigh'd anchor in Acushnet River Bound to Nantucket and from thence on a whale Voyage.

11 April went to meeting [at Nantucket, where Quakers were a large part of the population]

12 April got up our Rigging and Shipd Zecheas Gardner on a 19th [share, or lay] of the whale Clear of all charges Except Small Stores [New Bedford was learning sperm whaling from the Nantucket experts]

16 April Spoke with Jonathon Coffen [master of another whaler] the wind Shifting to Eastward after some debate put to sea off of the maneland we lay by and caught Codfish this day we had fresh winds and rain until night got under Short Sail, my Self very unwell

17 April At evening Brought to under trysail [As whalers were looking for whales rather than making a passage they carried minimal sail at night.]

19 April Found a Dead Whale with one iron [harpoon] in her; But not worth cutting [too far decomposed]

20 April was fresh NNW winds we saw plenty of Sparmecitys and struck four but could not get one N 37° 40'

21 April Saw many whales and I struck one and got in a 2nd [two harpoons were attached to each whale line] and tow-yron [harpoon attached to a drogue] after which Z Gardner Lanc'd her [ie Taber harpooned the whale from the bow and then changed positions with Gardner, the expert who knew how best to kill it--but the whale had other ideas]

She Stove and over-Set our Boat but did not hurt a man afterwards we got her but left her head [The most valuable part of the whale and a serious but common loss--when a sperm whale was cut in its head was first severed from the body and towed astern until the blubber was all aboard.]

22 April was Rough SSW Winds so that we could neither mend our Boat [probably the only one aboard] nor cut our whale on Deack. Saw Whales

23 April was moderate wind at SW this Day we mended our Boat and Cutt our whale on Deak after wards we found a [drift] whale which we cutt

24 April the fore part was moderate we Cutt our whale on Deack the latter part rough we saw whales but could not try for them

27 April was Rough whale weather we Killd a whale and took her on Board and saw one dead which we did not Cutt

28 April we Cutt our whale on Deack and now have our Hogsheads full and are very Desiorus to fill our Small Casks. Spoke with Jonathon Macy and one Freeman [As there is no mention of trying out, the casks would contain blubber and head matter rather than oil. Three whales have filled the ship.]

2 May was Rough weather and a very Large Sea from the SW last night was very Squally with Showers of Rain at 12 o'clock of noon we put up our helm for home to Gratifie the Crew wind SW Course N b(y) E

3 May We continued our Course N b E till noon were in Lat 40 2 then Souned had 29 fathom Course gravel which I Supose to be off the western shore then bore away NE

Taber included a memorandum of the expenses of the voyage.

3/4 bushel peas

£1/7/-

1 gallon rum

£1/2/6

1/4 quintle codfish

£1/9/-

2 lb tobacco

5/-

1 bushel corn

£1/-/-

1/2 lb chocolate

port charges

£3/3/9

1/2 lb tobacco

5/-

For an outlay of £8 12s 3d, some depreciation of the ship and gear, and less than a month's work, he and his crew of six or seven had won for themselves and the owners a cargo probably worth about £270 (3 whales by 3 tuns by £30). Gardner's 19th lay (net of the small stores) would have come to more than £14. An agricultural labourer would have earned £1 over the same period.

The cruise of the Manufactor had taken her an unknown distance along the 37th parallel eastwards of Chesapeake Bay. Taber lacked a reliable method of fixing longitude and trusted the lead to tell him when he was near land again, but this did not matter if it was known that whales could be found in a certain latitude. When competition thinned out the whales near the American coast, the whalers were drawn further out along the parallel, a siren call that by the mid-1760s had led them to the Azores, or Western Islands, in much the same latitude but two-thirds of the way across the ocean. This stretch of the Atlantic became known as the 36° north ground.

The years before the outbreak of the American Revolution were the piping days of Nantucket. Its population grew rapidly, although from such a small base that it was only five or six thousand in 1775. Of these, 2025 manned a fleet of 150 whalers and others were employed as fishermen. It was a community in which most of the employment was generated by the whale fishery. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a French American who visited Nantucket in the early 1770s on Quaker business, recorded how the industry structured whole working lives.

At schools they learn to read, and to write a good hand, until they are twelve years old; they are then in general put apprentices to the cooper's trade, which is the second essential branch of business followed here; at fourteen they are sent to sea, where in their leisure hours their companions teach them the art of navigation ... Then they go gradually through every station of rowers, steersmen, and harpooners; thus they learn to attack, to pursue, to overtake, to cut, to dress their huge game: and having performed several such voyages, and perfected themselves in this business, they are fit either for the counting house or the chase [as a whaling captain].

A lad would ship as a greenhand as soon as his mother would let him, and he would sail as likely as not in a vessel that had his father or an older brother for an officer. More than professional advancement hung on success as a whaleman. It was alleged that the girls of Nantucket were all bound by a secret oath not to entertain the advances of any suitor who had not killed his first whale. A boatsteerer ashore wore in his lapel, as a badge of office, the chock pin that channeled the whaleline through the bows of his boat. In Nantucket, horizontal integration of the industry was almost complete, and vertical integration began in about 1745 when Joseph Rotch and others began shipping oil to London in ships usually co-owned with British merchants, thus cutting out the Boston middlemen. They needed only the secret of spermaceti candle manufacture to complete the picture.

One of the lads who followed Nantucket's cursus honorum , as he might have called it, was the Quaker Peleg Folger, who is known to us as a whaler from his journals. From the age of eighteen, in 1751, he served on a succession of vessels until 1760. A sampling of his observations, which in the original are liberally sprinkled with Latin, leaves an impression that the education of which de Crèvecoeur thought so highly might have over-qualified him for the whaling.

On Journal-Keeping Many People who keep Journals at Sea fill them up with some trifles or other. My part I purpose in the following sheets, not to keep overstrict history of every trifling occurrence that happens, only now and then of Some particular affair, and to fill up the rest with subjects either mathematical, theological, Historical, Philosophical, or poetical, or anything else that best suits mine inclination.

On Man A Dunghill Blanched with Snow, a May-Game of Fortune, a Mark for Malice, a Butt for Envy! If Poor dispised, if Rich flatter'd; He is born crying; lives laughing, & Dies groaning.

On Manners In the morning we Spyed a Sail and Drew up with her but the Clown would not Speak with us.

On the Chase ... we row'd about a mile and a Half from the Vessel, and then a whale came up under us, & stove our boat very much, and threw us every man overboard Save one. And we all came up and Got Hold of the Boat & Held to her until the other boat (which was a mile and a half off) came up and took us in, all Safe, and not one man Hurt, which was remarkable, the boat being threshed to pieces very much.

On Navigation Nothing very remarkable these 24 hours, only I like a Dunce forgot myself and rubbed out my Knots, Courses and Winds off the Logbook before I had set them down on my Reckoning. However, I had cast up my Difference of Lat and [significantly] Long, so I have not lost my reckoning, yet this was a very careless trick.

On Mortality Death Summons all Men to the Silent Grave [a recurrent theme].

On Nantucket Girls if the weather is So Pleasant at home it is a charming day for the Young Ladies to go to Meeting & if they do but Get any Good by it it will be very well.

On Ennui This 24 hours Very Shuffling and unsettled air Nothing Else very much worth While to Set down as I can find but Let me See first our Job has got his hair cut off and he Looks quite Strangely; And our Hog, Sheep & Dog all messed together.

A Toast So Remembering all at Home both Male & Female Mother, Brothers, Sisters, Friends & acquaintance & all others without Exception & wishing them all well & a happy & prosperous Meeting in the Royal Assembly while we are Drinking Flip & Chasing Whales & wishing them all Well till we once more meet together which I hope will not be Long first (by the Blessing of God) I Conclude the Remarks of this 24 hours Being in the vast Atlantick Ocean & how far to Eastward of the Grand Bank of Newfoundland We know not nor Greatly Care for we are all in health & all merry together.

Some of his shipmates seem to have thought that young Folger was a bit too full of himself. `Peleg Folger is a Rum Soull for writing Latin', scribbled Nathaniel Worth at the foot of one page but, lest Peleg should take offence at this liberty, added that he would `intercede with Anna Pitts in his behalf for Retaliation for the same'.

Folger sailed no further than `offshore' and to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, but his years afloat coincided with the collapse of shore whaling from Nantucket. The great year had been 1726, when 86 whales were taken. By about 1760 whales had become scarce and gradually the shore stations were abandoned. At the same time the British authorities began restricting New Englander access to the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. It was alleged that they were damaging the cod and seal fisheries and taking advantage of the Indians, which was very likely true, but this was an excuse rather than a reason. As early as 1732 the Americans had come into contact and competition with British whalers in the Davis Strait west of Greenland, and there was little love lost. Among the ships the Americans might have encountered there, irony of ironies, were those of the South Sea Company, whose charter gave it exclusive whaling rights in South American waters, but whose whalers, in their brief and unsuccessful careers, never sailed those tropical seas. As the British whalemen felt American competition intensifying, de facto was succeeded by de jure discrimination. In 1766 a duty was placed on colonial whalebone and oil imported into Britain and, as British producers continued to be paid a bounty from which colonials were now excluded, the Americans were doubly disadvantaged.

The British restrictions created an even greater incentive to look for more profitable grounds and so commenced a parallel movement southwards on both sides of the Atlantic. From the Bahamas the Americans swept through the West Indies to the Leeward Islands and then on to the Brazil Banks, which were probably pioneered by the Leviathan of Rhode Island in 1772. From the Azores they island-hopped past Madeira and the Canaries to the Cape Verde Islands and thence to the coast of Guinea, although Macy claimed that Nantucket whalers had been there as early as 1763, two years earlier than their first visit to the Azores. Working down the African coast they came to Walvis Bay. Perversely, the Americans sometimes corrupted this to Woolwich Bay, not recognising the Dutch word for whale-fish.

On voyages of such duration it was no longer practicable to cask the blubber for shipment home. It was not an efficient use of space, and in warm climates the fat quickly went rancid, reducing its value as well as making shipboard life intolerable. The solution was to try out on board and Peleg Folger gives us one of the earliest references to the practice, recording that as the Greyhound turned for home on 30 July 1753, `the tryworks [were] set a-going by a flaming torch under our caboose'. By the 1770s the practice was general. Another consequence of longer voyages was that it was no longer possible to undertake a northern and a southern cruise in the same year. On the eve of the revolution a majority of the Massachusetts whalers still fitted for the shorter northern cruises.

Nantucket was the exception: of its 150 whalers, 85 went south. The average annual yields for the colony as a whole strongly suggest that Nantucket's priority was sound; with half of the fleet it produced two-thirds of the oil. It is significant however that even the northern fleet took more sperm oil than right whale oil. New Bedford was still learning; each of its ships, which were only slightly smaller than those of Nantucket, took on average only half as much oil. But there were those in Nantucket who appreciated the advantages of a mainland deep-water port and an established manufactory. In 1765 Joseph Rotch bought 10 acres from Joseph Russell and took up residence, leaving his son William to conduct family affairs in Nantucket. The business and dwelling houses that Joseph Rotch built became the nucleus of New Bedford. Seven years later the Nantucketers began manufacturing spermaceti candles. They put it about that they had learned the secret from Rhode Island.

In little more than half a century Nantucket's production had risen thirty-fold. Even more impressive was an eighty-fold increase in income thanks to the premium on sperm oil and a rising price for right whale oil that took it from £7 per tun at the beginning of the period to £17-18 at its close. William Rotch claimed that just before the revolution he was getting £30 for sperm. In 1715 six sloops took 600 barrels of oil and 11,000 pounds of whalebone, value £1100 ($5500). In 1769, 119 vessels produced 19,140 barrels worth $462,996. By that date as much again would have been earned by the other whaling ports, eight in Massachusetts plus Providence, Warren, Sag Harbour, New London and New York. American whaling was now a signficant industry by European as well as by local standards and it was in competition with British producers. It was time, thought the British government, for it to start paying its way, and whaling too became subject to the taxation without representation that was so agitating the colonists.

The duty on American whale products introduced in 1766 was supposed, among other things, to pay for upkeep of the Royal Navy frigates that allegedly provided whalers at sea with protection against pirates and French privateers. It was of a piece with the Stamp Act and the Tea Act as far as the whalemen were concerned, but their indignation was tinged with apprehension. In the event of a rupture with Britain, no American industry was more vulnerable than that of the whalemen. Far from looking after them, the frigates would be looking for them and the London market Would be closed. Gestures were all very well--Joseph Russell called one of his whaling brigs No Duty on Tea --but few would have been prepared to go further. Most nervous of all were the Nantucketers; if blockaded they would starve in a matter of months.

It was a particularly malicious turn of events, therefore, that embroiled the oilmen in the Boston Tea Party. The sons of Joseph Rotch, William and Francis, had back-loaded two of the family's oil carriers from London with the East India Company's tea. When the Bostonians refused to let the tea land and the Governor denied the ships customs clearance to sail, the Beaver and the Dartmouth were left in limbo. The negotiations that Francis Rotch conducted with both parties in search of a compromise that would release his ships foreshadowed in miniature the efforts that the whalemen would make in succeeding years to stand aside from a conflict that threatened to destroy their all. The precipitate action of the Sons of Liberty on the night of 16 December 1773 resolved Rotch's immediate dilemma but created a much larger one for him and for all other colonial whalemen.

The event that seems to have brought the American industry to the attention of the general public in Britain was the news that the Yankees were whaling off the Falkland Islands. In 1757 Edmund Burke could write two volumes on the history of the European settlements in America without once mentioning whaling. By 1774 the territorial dispute over the Falklands, pursued by Argentina to this day, was already souring relations between Britain and Spain. That there was British commercial activity around the islands gave substance to the claim of sovereignty. And it gave Burke a peg on which to hang one of the most famous passages of his speech of 22 March 1775 to the House of Commons, in which he urged conciliation with the rebellious American colonies.

As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries ... you surely thought these acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverence of Holland, nor the captivity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood ... when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all pride of power sink, and all wisdom in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

The bill to which Burke spoke was one in a series of increasingly coercive measures by which Lord North's administration hoped to bring the colonies to heel. Among other things it proposed to exclude American whalers from the Newfoundland Banks. In vain did the colonials argue against the Restraining Act as a whole, but at least Nantucket's peculiar vulnerability was recognised. It was exempted from some of the provisions. Burke's reference to British envy of the American whalemen's success was fair comment, but misleading. The British owners had not ventured into the southern fishery at all. Their Greenland fishery was moribund in spite of the government bounty and produced less than a quarter of the oil that Britain imported. Most of the remainder came from the American colonies, and mutually profitable arrangements were in place. William Rotch, for example, owned at least one vessel in partnership with Champion and Dickason of London. The British firm of Samuel Enderby may have had an interest in the Rotch ships embroiled in the Boston Tea Party.

The profit came mainly from tax avoidance. Oil imported in `English' vessels attracted duty of only three shillings per tun while oil imported in a colonial vessel paid six shillings. The arrangements also kept the colonial ships properly employed on the whaling grounds instead of wasting their time freighting. So complementary were tax avoidance and transport efficiency that ship-to-ship transfer of oil sometimes occurred on the whaling grounds. The British whaling interests believed that their government's policy would disrupt activities profitable to them and they petitioned against the Restraining Act accordingly.

In the early hours of 20 April 1775 British troops marched out of Boston to their appointment with history at Lexington and Concord. In Nantucket it was business as usual but when the ships returned from their cruises to the Azores, Guinea and Brazil, now taking as long as a year, there were great reservations about sending them out again. The islanders were used to risk, but they were not foolhardy. It seemed that there might be safety in distance. The further south they were, the more likely they would be out of harm's way, although the trick would then be to get their oil to market.

The Secret of the Candle

The process for refining sperm oil, or more particularly for separating from it the more valuable spermaceti, was a closely guarded secret in the eighteenth century. The secret was too valuable to keep. Those who could afford to, like Joseph Russell of New Bedford, bought an expert. Others, like William Rotch, simply kept their eyes open. In 1792 Nantucket alone had ten candle factories. By the 1850s Lewis Holmes was able to persuade Charles Barney, the foreman of Daniel Fisher's factory at Edgartown, that there was no commercial disadvantage in disclosing the process publicly.

The first step in the process of manufacture, is to take the oil in its crude state, and put it into large kettles, or boilers, and subject it to a heat of 180 to 200 degrees, and then all the water which happened to become mixed with the oil, either on shipboard or since, will evaporate.

Winter Strained Sperm Oil In the fall, or autumn, the oil is boiled for the purpose of granulation during the approaching cold weather. The oil thus passes from a purely liquid into a solid state, or one in which it is in grains, or masses. When the temperature of the atmosphere rises, or the weather slackens during the winter, the oil which has been frozen, but is now somewhat softened, is shovelled out of the casks and put into strong bags that will hold half a bushel or more, in order to be pressed ...

Spring Sperm Oil What remains in the bags after the first pressing, is again heated by being put into boilers, after which it is baled into casks again, and upon cooling, it becomes more compact and solid than it was before. During the month of April, when the temperature is about 50 degrees, the oil becomes softened; it is then put into bags, and goes through a second process of pressing ...

Tight Pressed Oil That which is left in the bags after the second pressing, is again melted, and put into tin pans or tubs which will hold about 40 pounds each. When this liquid is thoroughly cooled, as each pressing makes what is left harder ... the cakes taken from the tubs are then carried into a room heated to about 90 degrees; and as they begin to yield to the influence of this high temperature, or the remaining oil begins to soften the cakes, they are taken and shaved into very fine pieces, or ground up in some instances, deposited in bags as hitherto, and put into the hydraulic press ... the bags subjected to a powerful pressure of 300 tons or more, all the oil is extracted from them, and what is left is perfectly dry, free from any oily matter, and brittle ...

Spermaceti What remains after the several pressings, and the removal of all the oil, is called stearine, or spermaceti ... the spermaceti from the head oil is quite different from that of the body oil; the former presents fine, bright, transparent scales like small particles of isinglass, while the latter is more compact, something like dough. In cooling, one exhibits a sparry, crystalline structure, the other that of clay. Head oil or matter is usually manufactured with the body oil of the whale, and mixed in proportion to one-third of the former to two-thirds of the latter.

Spermaceti Candles ... The oil, it is supposed, is wholly extracted, and nothing now remains but the spermaceti. Its color, however, is not white, but interspersed with grayish streaks, bordering on the yellow. The spermaceti is put into large boilers adapted for the purpose, and heated to the temperature of 210 degrees. It is refined and cleared of all foreign ingredients by the application of alkali. Afterwards water is added, which, with a temperature of 240 degrees, throws off the alkali in the form of vapor. The liquid which remains is as pure and clear as the crystal water, and ready to be made into the finest spermaceti candles. [ The Arctic Whaleman , Thayer & Eldridge, Boston, 1861, pp 288-92]

The process had much in common with that for extracting olive oil, but the value of its products was inverted, for with spermaceti the best came last.

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Ahab's Trade; The Saga of South Seas Whaling

0312228090

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