WHALING VENTURES AND ADVENTURES

BY

GEORGE H. TRIPP,

Librarian of the Free Public Library, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

To anyone interested in adventure the most stirring, in exceptional types of courage, in examples of grim determination and victory over apparently insurmountable obstacles, of peril and hairbreadth escapes; to anyone who is a lover of history, exploration, and the advancement of geographical knowledge, to any who appreciate the rapid transition of comedy into tragedy, to the lover of hunting on the most gigantic scale, the story of the American whaleman offers a most fascinating subject of study. As a hunting expedition each whaling voyage was filled with perils; the quarry, the largest, the most vicious; the danger, the most imminent, the skill and daring required the greatest. No animal in prehistoric or historic times, of which we have any record, exceeded the whale in size, in strength, and in power.

Whales have been captured over a hundred feet in length, with heads thirty-five feet in circumference, with massive jaws spreading from eighteen to twenty feet in width; the sperm whales with massive teeth on the lower jaw, and the right or whalebone whales with layer after layer of whalebone fringed with a beard that presented a most grim and fearful spectacle when the enormous cavity of the mouth was opened. The tails of the largest whales measured in breadth up to twenty-five feet, and were most formidable weapons. To get an idea of the enormous size of the largest whales it is sufficient to say that they have been estimated to weigh from seventy to one hundred and fourteen tons, the largest of them containing blubber enough to fill one hundred and fifty barrels with oil. A whale captured by

Jonathan Howland in the early days of the New Bedford whalers yielded two hundred and ten barrels, while it is soberly recorded that in 1861 a New Bedford ship captured a whale yielding two hundred and seventy-four barrels. Even the tongue of the largest whales has given twenty-five barrels of oil, and weighed as much as ten oxen. The main artery which conveys the blood from the heart of this enormous animal has a diameter of at least a foot.

One can appreciate in some measure the courage required to approach an animal of this size for the purpose of attacking him in his own domain. These monsters could propel themselves through the water at the rate of twelve miles per hour, developing, it has been estimated, one hundred and forty-five horse power. Hundreds of instances could be mentioned of savage assaults of these harassed animals upon the boats of their pursuers, and without the most consummate skill in avoiding their onrush the boats would be crushed as if made of paper. A great many lives have been lost in this way. Any lurking doubts in regard to the violence of the conflict and the dangers involved can readily be removed by examining the lifelike pictures which hang on the walls of the New Bedford Library, portraying actual combats with these monsters.

It must be understood that, until the advent of the whaling guns, these battles with the whales were fought at close range, the boats getting near enough to allow the harpooner to wield his weapon with accuracy. Annals of the whaling industry are filled with disastrous encounters with these enormous animals, and at least two cases are on record, one of a vessel from Nantucket, the Essex, and one, the Ann Alexander, from New Bedford, which were deliberately sunk by the attacks of whales. Those who embarked upon these hunting expeditions, who followed their prey from one sea to another, from the Arctic to the tropic regions, were crowded into vessels, the largest of them being no more than four hundred or five hundred tons, considerably shorter than the cup defenders of the

New York Yacht Club, while the average whaleship was considerably smaller.

The first whaling was done off shore in sloops of only thirty or forty tons. The actual combat with the whale was engaged in from the whaleboats, which were like elongated rowboats, made with special skill and of exceptional strength and adapted for riding the waves, but everything depended upon the skill and resources of the harpooner and the boatsteerer. Assaults on the most vicious animals of the tropical jungle fall into insignificance when compared with the enormous chances which were taken by the whalemen, and considered by them, not as a special exploit deserving of glory, but as a part of their everyday work.

As a commercial venture the owners of whaleships took many chances. The danger of losing all was constant. The venture appealed to the speculative interest to an extraordinary degree. It was a gamble from start to finish, from the time the first plank of the vessel was laid until she came rolling in from sea, "clean" or with a "greasy" load. was not unusual for vessels to be gone from twenty to forty months, and during all this time no financial returns were made to the owners, and possibly for months at a time no report of the doings of the captain and crew received.

It

There is a story told of a New Bedford captain, who had been out for nearly four years, and no reports had been received for over two years. The owners were naturally getting anxious, and when one day a vessel was seen coming up the lower bay, with the owner's signal showing that the vessel was getting back into port, the owner made great haste to board a tug, rush down the harbor and clamber on board the vessel. His first words were, "Well, Captain, what luck?" "Wal," replied the captain, "I didn't get no whales, but I had a damn good sail."

The master of a whaling vessel was indeed an autocrat. His word was law, and the interests of his owners were entirely in his hands. Upon his judgment depended the disposition of thousands of dollars' worth of property and

the lives of a crew of sometimes thirty or forty men. Not only the owners of the ship, but the traders and mechanics who fitted out the vessel with spars and rigging, casks, provisions and cordage, all were dependent upon the success or failure of the voyage for the satisfaction of their claims. Sometimes they who might be called the collateral owners of the vessel did not have a final clearing up of the indebtedness that was due them until the vessel returned to port, after a voyage lasting perhaps three or four years, and the cargo was finally disposed of. It can readily be seen that such a method of doing business was provocative of long credits and a great deal of business done on paper, and the ramifications of business and of obligations from merchant to merchant down to the most trifling debts owed to tradesmen, if ever written up, would be an extremely interesting subject for sociological study. Again, the method of compensation by which every sailor was paid, not a fixed wage, but by a system of lays by which he should have a fractional part of the proceeds of the voyage, was the conventional method pursued through all the history of the whaling industry. The lays would vary from perhaps 1-10 or 1-12 (the captain's share) to 1-175, or even a smaller fraction. This method of paying the crews would naturally make them more alert and eager to fill their vessels with a productive cargo. If the risks were great, the successes were sometimes phenomenal.

The rewards of the shipowners when their voyages were successful were sometimes extraordinary. Perhaps the most notable case was that of the old ship Envoy, which was bought in 1847 by Capt. William O. Brownell, of New Bedford, who intended to break her up for the metal in her hulk. She had been bought in 1833, a vessel of a little less than four hundred tons. In her first voyage of four years she had paid for herself and outfit and left a large profit for the owner. In her last voyage before coming into the possession of Captain Brownell she had brought home a cargo worth $56,000, so that in fourteen years she had acquired for her

owner $200,000. Now the ship was worn out by her struggles against sea and ice and she was sold to be broken up, but a Captain Walker took a look at her and decided that possibly she might do for another voyage. He bought her for a low price, the ship ready for sea costing just $8,000. No insurance company would take the risk, so it was entirely a gamble on the part of the owner, with the chances much against his recovering a single dollar. The vessel sailed from New Bedford in 1848, and in 1852, after a cruise the most profitable probably in the history of the industry, the old ship Envoy, on the original investment of $8,000, had made $138,450, or 1630 per cent. No wonder that the whaling industry thrived-and by 1857 New Bedford alone had three hundred and twenty nine vessels engaged in the industry, while taking those in the New Bedford district they amounted to four hundred and twenty six vessels-ships and barques.

A book could be written on the geographical discoveries made directly by whalemen. The whole of the western coast of South America was practically opened to the world, in a business way, by the visits of American whalemen, so that the ports of Callao, Valparaiso, Arica, were as familiar names in New Bedford as Portland and Salem, and the South Seas were brought very near to the youth of New Bedford fifty years ago, as near as in Stevenson's famous directions to his friend Sydney Colvin, "just to the Pacific, and the first turn to the left.'

One of the most interesting experiments in physics, or natural philosophy as it was called in my boyhood, was the description of the almost infinite divisibility of matter as shown by a grain of musk, which, it was said, if placed in a bureau drawer would continue to give out fragrance for twenty years, each particle which struck the nostrils being taken from the original grain, and that at the end of twenty years the musk would not seem to have lost appreciable weight. In very much the same way some of the memories of childhood persist. To a boy whose early life was spent