Commercial whaling in the United States dates to the 17th century in New England. The industry peaked in 1846–1852, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, sent out its last whaler, the John R. Manta, in 1927. The whaling industry was engaged with the production of three different raw materials: whale oil, spermaceti oil, and whalebone. Whale oil was the result of "trying-out" whale blubber by heating in water. It was a primary lubricant for machinery, whose expansion through the Industrial Revolution depended upon it before the development of petroleum-based lubricants in the second half of the 19th century. Once the prized blubber and spermaceti had been extracted from the whale, the remaining majority of the carcass was discarded.
Spermaceti oil came solely from the head-case of sperm whales. It was processed by pressing the material rather than "trying-out". It was more expensive than whale oil, and highly regarded for its use in illumination, by burning the oil on cloth wicks or by processing the material into spermaceti candles, which were expensive and prized for their clean-burning properties. Chemically, spermaceti is more accurately classified as a wax rather than an oil.
Whalebone was baleen plates from the mouths of the baleen whales. Whalebone was commercially used to manufacture materials that required light but strong and thin supports. Women's corsets, umbrella and parasol ribs, crinoline petticoats, buggy whips and collar-stiffeners were commonly made of whalebone. Public records of exports of these three raw materials from the United States date back to 1791, and products of New England whaling represented a major portion of the American GDP for nearly 100 years.Starbuck, Alexander "history of the American Whale Fishery, 1989, Castle Books, Secaucus, NJ
Historic Aboriginal whaling within the boundaries of today's United States predated the arrival of European explorers, and is still practiced using the exception granted by the International Whaling Commission, which allows some subsistence hunting by Native Americans for cultural reasons. Catches have increased from 18 whales in 1985 to over 70 in 2010. The latest IWC quota regarding the subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale allowed for up to 336 to be killed in the period 2013–2018. Residents of the United States are also subject to U.S. Federal government bans against whaling as well.
History
New England The commercial whaling fishery in the United States is thought to have begun in the 1650s with a series of contracts between Southampton, Long Island resident English settlers John Ogden, John Cooper and the Shinnecock Indians. Prior to this, they chased pilot whales ("blackfish") onto the shelving beaches for slaughter, a sort of dolphin drive hunting. Nantucket joined in on the trade in 1690 when they sent for one Ichabod Padduck to instruct them in the methods of whaling.
The south side of the island was divided into three and a half mile sections, each one with a mast erected to look for the spouts of right whales. Each section had a temporary hut for the five men assigned to that area, with a sixth man standing watch at the mast. Once a whale was sighted, whale boats were rowed from the shore, and if the whale was successfully harpooned and lanced to death, it was towed ashore, flensed (i.e., its blubber was cut off), and the blubber rendered into whale oil in cauldrons known as "try pots." Well into the 18th century, even when Nantucket sent out sailing vessels to fish for whales offshore, the whalers would still come to the shore to boil the blubber.
In 1715, Nantucket had six sloops engaged in whale fishery, and by 1730 it had 25 vessels of 38 to 50 tons involved in the trade. Each vessel employed 12 to 13 men, half of them being Native Americans. At times the entire crew, with the exception of the captain, might be natives. They had two whaleboats, one held in reserve should the other be damaged by a whale. By 1732, the first New England whalers had reached the Davis Strait fishery, between Greenland and Baffin Island. The fishery slowly began to expand, with whalers visiting the coast of West Africa in 1763, the Azores in 1765, the coast of Brazil in 1773, and the Falklands in 1774. It wasn't until the 19th century that whaling really became an industry. In that time many whaling vessels had both Black men and native men onboard with white men.
Recruitment of whalers
According to Frances Diane Robotti, there were three types of whalemen: those who hoped to own their own whaleship someday, those who were seeking adventure, and those who were running from something on shore. Generally only those who hoped to make a career of whaling went out more than once. Many Black and indigenous whalers made several trips because of the economic prosperity it granted.
Since a whaleman's pay was based on his "lay", or share of the catch, he sometimes returned from a long voyage to find himself paid next to nothing, or even owing money to his employers. Even a bonanza voyage paid the ordinary crewman less than if he had served in the merchant fleet. The lay system was a gamble and sailors were never ensured decent wages. Richard Boyenton of the "Bengal" only earned six and a quarter cents after five months at sea, but occasionally sailors got lucky and brought home a significant amount of money after just a couple of voyages. More commonly sailors would earn very little after years at sea. Ships that returned to port less than full of oil were called "broken voyages" while ships that came home overflowing were praised. The Loper returned to Nantucket with its deck and hold chock full of casks of oil while ships like the Brewster prioritized oil so significantly that they threw food and water overboard to make more room for oil.
Going to sea was a young man's adventure, particularly when he wound up in the South Sea paradises of the Sandwich Islands, Tahiti, or the Marquesas Islands, where a young American man might find himself surrounded by young women ready to freely offer him their charms, something he was unlikely to experience at home. Many, including Herman Melville, jumped ship, apparently without repercussions. After his romantic interlude among the Typees on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, Melville joined another whaler that took him to Hawaii, from where he sailed for home as a crewman on . Along with Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, and others, Melville cultivated the image of the Pacific islands as romantic paradises. The California Gold Rush offered young men an adventure to California, for free if they signed on as a whaleman. Many whalemen (including captains and officers) abandoned the crew in San Francisco there, leaving abundant ships deserted in the bay.
Many Black and Indigenous whalers were recruited because of wages they could receive and because of racial stereotyping at the time.
Expansion In 1768, the fishery began a huge expansion that was to culminate just prior to the American Revolutionary War. Between 1771 and 1775 the Massachusetts ports alone employed an average of 183 vessels in the northern fishery, and 121 in the southern. During the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars there was a complete shutdown of the industry, its peak growth came after the American Revolution.
The first New England whalers rounded Cape Horn in 1791, entering the Pacific Ocean to hunt the cachalot or sperm whale. At first they only fished off the coast of Chile, but by 1792, the sperm whalers had reached the coast of Peru, and George W. Gardner extended the fishery even further in 1818 when he discovered the "offshore grounds," or the seas between 105–125° W and 5–10° S. In 1820, the first New England whaleship, the , under Captain Joseph Allen, hunted sperm whales on the Japanese ground, midway between Japan and Hawaii. The previous year the first New England whalers visited the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, and subsequently these islands were used to obtain fresh fruits, vegetables, and more crew, as well as to repair any damages sustained to the ship.
In 1829 the New England fleet numbered 203 sail; in five years time it more than doubled to 421 vessels, and by 1840 it stood at 552 ships, barks, brigs, and schooners. The peak was reached in 1846, when 736 vessels were registered under the American flag. From 1846 to 1851, the trade averaged some 638 vessels, with the majority coming from such ports as New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts; New London, Connecticut; and Sag Harbor, Long Island. By far the largest number sailed from New Bedford, but Nantucket continued to host a fleet, even when they needed to use "camels," or floating drydocks, to get over the sandbar that formed at the mouth of the harbor.
Thomas Welcome Roys, in the Sag Harbor bark Superior, sailed through the Bering Strait on 23 July 1848, and discovered an abundance of "new fangled monsters," or later to be known as bowhead whales. The following season fifty whalers—46 from New England, two from Germany, and two from France—sailed to the Bering Strait region on the report from this single ship. In terms of number of vessels and whales killed, the peak was reached in 1852, when 220 ships killed 2,682 bowheads. Catches declined, and the fleet shifted to the Sea of Okhotsk in 1853–1854. Whaling there peaked in 1855–1857, and once that area began to decline in 1858–1860, they returned to the Bering Strait region.
Peak
The American whaling fleet, after steadily growing for 50 years, reached its all-time peak of 199,000 tons in 1858. Just two years later, in 1860, just before the Civil War, the fleet had dropped to 167,000 tons. The war cut into whaling temporarily, but only 105,000 whaling tons returned to sea in 1866, the first full year of peace, and that number dwindled until only 39 American ships set out to hunt whales in 1876.US Bureau of the Census, 1960, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, p.445.
During the winter, some of these same vessels would make their way to the lagoons of Baja California. The peak began in 1855, commencing the period of lagoon whaling known as the "bonanza period", when whaleboats were crisscrossing through the lagoons, being pulled by enraged whales, passing by calves that had lost their mothers and other ships' crews hunting whales. Less than twenty years later, in 1874, the lagoon fishery was abandoned entirely, due to several years of poor catches.
Several New England ships were lost during the 1860s and 1870s. During the American Civil War, Confederate raiders such as the , , and captured or burned 46 ships, while the United States purchased forty of the fleet's oldest hulls. Known as the Stone Fleet, these ships were purchased to sink in Charleston and Savannah harbors in a failed attempt to blockade those ports. Thirty-three of the 40 whalers that comprised the Arctic fleet were lost near Point Belcher and Wainwright Inlet in the whaling disaster of 1871, while another 12 ships were lost in 1876.
The use of steam, the high prices for whalebone, and the proximity of the whaling grounds brought the rise of San Francisco as a dominant whaling port in the 1880s. By 1893, it had 33 whaleships, of which 22 were steamers. At first, the steamers only cruised during the summer months, but with the discovery of bowheads near the Mackenzie River Delta in 1888–1889 by Joe Tuckfield, ships begin to overwinter at Herschel Island, off the Yukon coast.