Whaling on Martha's Vineyard

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PROLOGUE

The whaling industry thrived from 1700 to 1900. It was a major economic boon to the community of Martha’s Vineyard. This work is a historical account of the impact and influence on whaling by the men and women of Martha’s Vineyard.

Martha’s Vineyard was neither the busiest nor most profitable seaport during the whaling era. However, a great number of able-bodied seamen and whaling captains hailed from the Vineyard. Profits from the whaling industry bolstered the local economy. Whaling wrecks and calamities devastated Vineyard families. Martha’s Vineyard was intimately involved in the whaling industry.

This book provides an overview of a distinctly American business. Chasing and capturing whales and plundering them for their blubber evolved into a sophisticated operation on the open ocean. Risks were accepted as the cost of doing business: long years far from home, isolation and loneliness at sea, inadequate diet, occasionally brutal discipline, dangers of storms and ocean travails. This was the life of the whaleman.

In this book, I often refer to whaling concepts such as logs, lays and gams. The log or logbook was the official record of the whaling venture. The lay was the pay for the men who went whaling. A gam was a social visit between two or more whaleships. These terms and others constitute the whaling lexicon.

Several major events affected the whaling industry as a whole. We refer to these incidents repeatedly. During the Civil War, the forceful exercise of piracy by Confederate raiders on New England whaleships severely depleted the whaling fleet. The Arctic freeze of 1871 was a near-tragic calamity when dozens of whaleships were trapped in Arctic ice; economic losses were staggering. Two mutinies linked to the Vineyard represent the most brutal of whaling experiences: the Globe mutiny of 1824 and the Sharon mutiny of 1842.

Throughout, I focus on Martha’s Vineyard. However, whaling on the Vineyard was intimately tied to the ports of Nantucket and New Bedford.

And we have to acknowledge, as so many people have before, that Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s masterpiece, is still at the epicenter of the whaling industry.

Now sit back, and travel back to a uniquely American era on the high seas.

1

SHORE WHALING

At best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.¹

Local Native Americans, the Wampanoag, numbered approximately three thousand when the first white man sailed by Martha’s Vineyard in 1602. The natives hunted and harvested whales, primarily those that washed up along the Vineyard shores.

The origin of whaling, according to the Wampanoag, is that their legendary ancestor Moshup dove off the Gay Head cliffs and, swimming far out to sea, caught a whale by the tail and dragged it back to the Vineyard shore. He stood on the beach, swinging the whale around his head before dashing it against the clay cliffs. The blood from the whale turned the cliffs a deep, dark red.

Moshup encouraged the Wampanoag to cut the trees on Gay Head to fuel fires to cook the whale. And from that, the Wampanoags learned to feast on the meat of the whale. That is why, according to legend, the trees on the peninsula are so sparse. (Conservationists believe the salt air that wafts across Gay Head stunts the trees.)

The Wampanoag followed Moshup’s lead and hunted whales in dugout canoes along the shore and carved up those whales that washed ashore. The Wampanoag considered fresh whale meat an important part of their diet, as did Europeans. Native Americans also used the oil of the whale as a skin salve.

Moshup, the legendary ancestor of the Wampanoag, taught Native Americans about the bounty of whale meat. Pictured here is a whale skeleton in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Photo by Thomas Dresser.

The Wampanoag hunted whales offshore in their dugouts, with spears or harpoons, and harvested whales that had washed ashore. Harpoons that date back six hundred to one thousand years have been found in archaeological digs on Martha’s Vineyard.

"The first recorded attempt by white men to kill a whale took place in 1620 while the Mayflower was anchored in what was to be called Provincetown Harbor."² We don’t know how successful that venture was, but we do know the Pilgrims recognized the bounty to be garnered from the sea along the New England coast.

Early white settlers on the Vineyard followed the lead of the Wampanoag in hunting whales. Like the Wampanoag, the white man harvested whales that had washed ashore; this was known as shore whaling or drift whaling. Small huts or houses were constructed along the shoreline to offer shelter for those who watched and waited for a whale to drift by. These primitive shelters offered a place to sleep and held rum against the cold. On the Cape, often several men were stationed in the huts, searching the horizon for a drifting, dying whale.

In 1641, Thomas Mayhew formed the first permanent settlement by the white man on Martha’s Vineyard, with the intent of converting the Wampanoag to Christianity. His settlement in Great Harbour, now Edgartown, was by the shore. The ocean was integral to early colonists. One settler, Joshua Barnes, journeyed from England to Yarmouth to Plymouth and eventually settled in Edgartown in 1646. He was a shore whaler, cutting up whales that died at sea and drifted to the shore. Early on, Vineyarders plundered the ocean’s greatest mammal, which was relatively easy when a dead carcass washed ashore.

All through the winter, lookouts were stationed along the shoreline, searching for whales. Adjacent to the huts, masts, akin to a crow’s nest, offered a better vantage to scan the shoreline. Shore whaling was a relatively simple way to supplement hunting in the fields and forests. In fact, Records show the prevalence of shore whaling at the Vineyard, and its inhabitants early shared in the marketing of the oil. Lookouts and tryhouses became a part of the landscape.³ (Try houses were fireplaces where pots were heated to reduce blubber to oil.)

Whale cutters were appointed to carve up or harvest the so-called drift whales brought to the shore by the wind or the tide. Regulations were established in Edgartown that drift whales were to be cut freely, meaning the whale meat was to be shared among townsmen. In 1652, Thomas Daggett and William Weeks were appointed whale cutters for the town, responsible for overseeing a fair distribution of the whale meat.

A subsequent town decision affirmed that the cutting-in process of drift whales was shared equitably. In 1690 Mr. Sarson and William Vinson were appointed by the ‘proprietors of the whale’ to oversee the cutting and sharing of all whales cast on shore within the bounds of Edgartown.⁴ Throughout much of the seventeenth century, shore whaling was the primary means of taking a whale.

Shore whaling proved an important element in the hardscrabble economy of the late 1600s. On occasion, arguments arose over who was entitled to the whale. A whale washed ashore in Edgartown in 1692, and two men both claimed it. When a third man entered the dispute, it was shown his harpoon had killed the whale, so he earned the right to share in the proceeds.

This 1692 case provided precedence in the practice of sharing the proceeds from the contested capture of a whale. A 1793 court case arose when men from two ships harpooned the same whale. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court determined both ships should share in the blubber. It became accepted practice that whoever’s harpoon was found in a captured whale should share in its distribution.

Ovid Osborn Ward, great-grandson of whaling magnate Samuel Osborn Jr., was the sculptor of this iconic whale statue in Edgartown Harbor. Photo by Joyce Dresser.

A tax on the oil of drift whales was levied by Plymouth Colony in 1652. One barrel of oil per whale was to be paid to the colonial treasury. And in estates along the shore, whaling items often appeared in the inventory of a decedent, whether as oyl, kittells or harpoons. It will thus be seen that the Vineyard was among the first of the colonies to make use of the whale as a commercial industry.⁵

No boats were needed, and no spears were thrown—the meat was easily harvested. However, with the increase in the colonial population and the haphazard nature of drift whaling, shore whaling proved too dependent on happenstance or chance.

Fewer laws on shore whaling were enacted after 1725, indicating that the process of whaling was evolving from a land-based to an ocean-based operation. Vineyarders recognized their best chance was to go to sea to capture whales, following their Wampanoag forebears.

The men of Martha’s Vineyard set the pace for whaling, capturing whales years before Nantucket was even settled by Europeans.

The original group of Nantucket colonists was known as the First Proprietors. The colonists purchased the island in 1659 from Thomas Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard for thirty pounds and two beaver hats, one for myself, and one for my wife. Nantucketers honed their whaling prowess by copying comparable coastal communities, mimicking techniques developed on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island. In the late seventeenth century, a tower was erected on the shore of Nantucket as a lookout for whales.

The first whalemen set to sea from Martha’s Vineyard prior to 1700. John Butler (1650–1738) captured whales offshore and reduced their blubber to oil in his try house, where pots of blubber were boiled down to oil. Prior to 1700, he [Butler] carried on whaling in the shoals and kept his try house busy. An Edgartown record shows Butler to have made several catches between 1702–3.⁶ Besides Butler’s try house in Edgartown, another was erected in Holmes Hole, now Vineyard Haven, in the early 1700s.

An authority on the early history of whaling, Alexander Starbuck, asserted that it is quite probable that deep-sea whaling did not commence at the Vineyard until about the year 1738. Starbuck reported that Joseph Chase, from Nantucket, purchased a house and about 20 acres of land on the shores of Edgartown Harbor, erected a wharf with a try-house near, and commenced the fishery with his vessel.⁷ Prior to 1750, three different Vineyard men ventured in whaling at sea for a couple of years but did not find it financially remunerative.

Candles were first manufactured from sperm oil by Benjamin Crabb of Rehoboth beginning in 1749. Crabb’s experiment used spermaceti bailed from the head of a sperm whale. Spermaceti candles burned with a cleaner, brighter light than wax candles. The success of these candles, using spermaceti oil, inspired efforts to capture sperm whales.

As whale oil became more valuable, whaling expanded rapidly. More whaleships were built, manned and launched. The protocol for chasing whales was established early on. Small whaleboats were lowered into the water from the whaleship and rowed off to chase a whale. The harpoon, or lance, affixed to a lengthy line, would be thrown into the side of a whale or back of its head; a second harpoon was thrown for the kill. This system was in use for more than a century.

Aboard ship, life proved both lonely and dangerous. For the crew, living within the confines aboard a vessel over a long period of time was difficult, as whaleships traveled far offshore to chase whales. As the North Atlantic became overfished, ships sailed farther from their homeports.

Whaling could be dangerous. At least three instances were reported of a man caught in the mouth of a whale. In the late 1700s, one Marshall Jenkins survived, but he was scarred for life.

Whaling could be cruel. When a captain was unable to maintain discipline, he could turn angry, and there was little recourse for the crew. Hiram Fisher of the Meridian, out of Edgartown, proved a brutal master. Strict adherence to the line of command was demanded; disobedience led to incarceration in irons or flogging. Punishment was at the whim of the captain, who felt he had to maintain control.

An angry crew aboard a whaleship could spawn an insurrection. If the crew had suffered too much, a mutiny might occur. While it was a rare occurrence, it was not unique. The Globe suffered such a mishap when Captain Thomas Worth was murdered at sea; that dramatic saga lives on to this day.

A whaleboat could be rolled over or crushed by the flip of a whale’s tail or crunched in a whale’s mouth. Pictured here is a whaleboat at Mystic Seaport. Photo by Joyce Dresser.

Whaling pushed the boundaries. Edgartown’s Captain Peter Pease (1732–1829) of the Susanna sailed into the West Indies in 1763. New England whaleships, the Beaver from Nantucket and the Rebecca from New Bedford, ventured into the Pacific in the 1760s. Captain John Pease