Endless Vacation, March/April 2002

New England's Whaling Towns

"There she blows! There she blows!" was the cry from Captain Ahab. "Man the boats," he yells. I jump to my feet, ready to do battle with the Great White, but the rest of my hapless crew just sits there on the deck in their sleeping bags sipping coffee. "What a sorry lot of lazy scalawags," I thought to myself. But they just stared at me, including the mighty Ahab himself. It was then that I realized I'm aboard the Charles W. Morgan, not the Pequod, and that Captain Ahab is actually Geoffrey Robinson, an olive farmer from New Zealand. In character, he continues to read from Chapter 133 of Herman Melville's epic Moby Dick in this 24-hour readathon at Connecticut's Mystic Seaport.

150 years after Melville wrote arguably the finest novel in American literature and 80 years after the last whaling vessel embarked from an American port, the allure of whaling remains high. Nathaniel Philbrick's book, In the Heart of the Sea, which details the tragic story of the men on the whaleboat Essex and inspired Melville to wrote Moby Dick, has been on the best seller list for over a year. Perhaps in this time of relative peace and prosperity, we seek adventure from yesteryear, a time when men would be at sea for two to five years, filling 175 gallon white oak casks with oil from their latest kill. Thankfully, we no longer have to witness this gruesome task, but we can still learn what it was like to be a whaler at this country's three historic ports, New London, Nantucket, and New Bedford. Whaling museums trace the history of this industry and grandiose merchant's homes, colonnaded Custom Houses, and a bevy of other intriguing sites await the visitor who follows in Melville's footsteps.

I started my tour at the Mystic Seaport for the sole reason of viewing the only remaining American whaleboat, the Charles W. Morgan. Built in 1841, the Morgan worked a remarkable 80 years when most boats had a sea life of 20 years. More than 100-feet-long, she had a capacity to hold 3,000 barrels of oil from 50 to 70 whales on every voyage. The white sails were floating in the breeze, gleaming against a cloudless blue sky, when I scampered across the planks of the upper deck. Docked on the Mystic River, the Morgan's black hull looks strong enough to navigate the open waters one last time. Rather than go whaling, however, I'll settle for a sunset cruise.

I can think of no other profession more torturous than the job of a whaler. Just ask Melville who jumped ship on a South Pacific island after boarding the Acushnet from New Bedford. A sailor must first say goodbye to his loved ones who he might not see for another five years, if ever. Of course, their were no cell phones or e-mail, so the only communication was a letter that might come with another whaling ship, say a year or two later. On board, stern captains and officers were known to treat their crews harshly with abusive language and the occasional slap. Paid only for the amount of whale oil he brought home, the captain would keep the ship at sea for as long as necessary. During that time, your diet consisted of salt pork, salt beef, beans, rice, hardtack biscuits (aptly named), molasses, and vinegar.

Months would go by without even spotting a whale and then the monotony was broken by a spray of water shot through the spout. "Only a dozen sailors were needed to sail the Morgan," says Bill Peterson, Senior Curator at the Seaport, "but when that cry went out that a whale was spotted, all the men went into action."

They climbed aboard 25-foot whaleboats, rowboats that cling to the outside rails of the Morgan. Paddling hard, they were quick to pursue; harpooner at the bow, ready to pierce this giant of the sea. Once the whale was hit, he would dive down into the ocean. Line was let out and the whalers were taken on what was known then as a "Nantucket sleigh ride." Being that the whale is a mammal, the sailors knew that he eventually would come up for air and that's when the harpooner would aim for his heart or lungs with a sharp spear-like lance. Awash in a sea of blood and oil, they would drag their kill back to the ship and heave it aboard.

Below deck on the Morgan, between the spacious captain's quarter in the back of boat and the crew's cramped bunks in the fo'castle was the blubber room. Blubber was cut and stacked in four-foot long pieces, waiting to be thrown into an oven on the upper deck called the tryworks. This brick fireplace burned night and day until every drop of oil was rendered ("trying out"), covering the ship and all the sailors in a thick black cloud of oily, acrid smoke. Disgusted by this piece of machinery, crew members would often throw the tryworks, brick by brick overboard, on their voyage home.

With all these facts told to me in lurid detail by Morgan guide David Littlefield as we rested against the tryworks, I was beginning to feel a little clammy myself. I wandered back to terra firma and stopped for an old-fashioned root beer and pickle on Front Street, a re-creation of a working whaling village with all the requisite shops. In the cooperage, large casks were created to store the oil; at the shipsmith, a man sweated over a fire, melding wrought-iron metal to create lances, harpoons, and spades to cut the blubber; the ship's chandlery was used to purchase foodstuff; and the printing press was busy advertising jobs for naive greenhands, appealing to their patriotic side with a sign reading: "20 Proud Americans Wanted for the Good of the Country."

While the Mystic Seaport's rendition of a whaling town does a decent job of placing you back in that time period, the town of Mystic was never a major whaling port. You'll have to visit New London, 10 miles down the road, to see how the riches of whaling built a city. The Thames River carves a deep harbor where merchant and whaling ships could dock on Bank Street and unload their taxable good at the grey granite Custom House. Whaling agents lined the street, gaining by far the most wealth from the trade without ever having to venture out to sea. They would own the ship, hire the captain, outfit the boat, and very often, would process the oil back home, which was then used for lighting. They would pay captains a certain amount, say 1/8 of the lay, the total sale of the oil. Depending on the amount of oil brought back, other crew members might not even break even. After three years out to sea, they may even end up in debt! This depended on whether sailors owed credit to the agent for purchase of their mattress, clothes, and dishes needed aboard the boat.

Much of the whaling money eventually went to the city. "Look around New London and you'll find the Henry Havens Public Library, the Joseph Lawrence Hospital, both were whaling agents," says Sally Ryan, New London's Municipal Historian. Depending on the particular agent, different flags were flown aboard ship. Some of these can still be found in a small collection of whaling memorabilia at Bank Street's Shaw -Perkins Mansion.

Agents and captains might have a certain tenderness toward the sea, but in town, they would never live near the port where brothels and seedy taverns were the norm. Instead, they lived on a hill with views of the sea. This is the case with Whale Oil Row on Huntington Street, a group of four identical Greek Revival homes, complete with pillars, which were built in the 1830s for whaling captains. Around the corner, at New London's Post Office, WPA muralist Thomas LaFarge painted three large panels in 1938 that depict life on a whaling boat. Overseen by whalers still living at the time, the multi-racial crew can be seen pulling on ropes, skimming off the tryworks, and unfurling the main sail. Indeed, whaling was the great equalizer for minorities. Many of the African-Americans on board were runaway slaves or future abolitionists like Frederick Douglas. Both Nantucket and New Bedford had black whaling captains with all-black crews.

From New London, I would drive an hour to Cape Cod to catch the ferry 20 miles offshore to Nantucket. Unlike the mainland towns, Nantucket was an island community where everyone knew each other, intermarried, and had no qualms about signing up for a whaling voyage to help the local economy. Their whaling history is the longest, starting in the late 1600s when locals would go in small boats along the shore to capture right whales. When they realized that the head of a sperm whale contained far more oil, whalers began to take longer voyages and by the mid-1700s, the island of Nantucket was gaining prominence. "Nantucket whale oil lit the streets of London at that time," says Niles Parker, Chief Curator at the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Thus, during the Revolutionary War, the islanders had no reason to secede from the motherland and ended up being bombed by both sides. Still, like other ports, whaling started up again and was in its heyday during the 1820s and 1830s. Lucky for the whale, Pennsylvania discovered petroleum in the 1850s, a much cheaper form of lamp lighting, and the industry began its slow demise.

Parker walks me around the creaky floors of the Whaling Museum, once a former spermaceti factory used to make candles. He leads me to one of his favorite exhibits, an air-conditioned room containing cases of scrimshaw. After the whale was plundered and the oil processed, the captain would distribute teeth to the crew. To bide their time on the long voyage, crew members would etch into the hard bone with knives. Peering into the cases, I found it ironic that these rugged men whose lives were spent killing the world's largest creature could create such finely detailed drawings on the small surface of a whale's tooth. Pictures of the men in pursuit of a whale, or remembrance of their wives they missed desperately back home were impeccably sketched. Homesickness was also evident downstairs in a sailor's journal, whose first lines read, "My dear, oh how I wish I was with you tonight for I am heartily tired of sleeping alone."

Another room in the museum was devoted to the crew of the whaleship Essex. In 1840, when Melville was aboard the Acushnet, he met a man named William Henry Chase whose father had written one of the first adventure stories of his day, Aboard the Essex. It was a harrowing, yet factual account of how in 1819 an enraged 85-foot-long sperm whale rammed the Essex at her bow not once, but twice, in the middle of the South Pacific. The boat capsized and the men were forced to survive on whaleboats for months with little food and water. Many perished before another ship found them off the coast of Chile. The climactic chapters of Melville's epic novel, when Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod, are based directly on this Essex tragedy.

Outside the whaling museum, the "Nation of Nantucket," as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the island has become far more polished than Melville would ever imagine. Whaling has given way to tourism and as I make my way atop the awkward cobblestones to upper Main Street to tour the estate of whaling agent, William Hadwen, I'm bombarded by high-end boutiques, gourmet foodstores, and far too many T-shirt shops. Indeed, the Nantucket Sleigh Ride is now a gift shop on India Street selling Christmas ornaments. To truly get a feel of what it was like to live in a whaling port during its day, I would have to take a ferry back across Buzzards Bay to the Massachusetts coast and walk the streets of New Bedford.

The 13-block radius of the New Bedford National Historic Park includes the Whaling Museum, Seamen's Bethel, the Custom House, and the Old Candleworks Restaurant, once a spermaceti factory. I would start my visit at the glass-and-brick enclosed new gallery of the Whaling Museum, where a 65-foot-long skeleton of the largest whale, the blue, hangs from the ceiling. After stepping in the museum's centerpiece, a half-scale replica of the whaleboat, Lagoda, I crossed the street and entered the white steeple known as Seamen's Bethel. I climb the stairs into a small church, where cream-colored pews lead to a prow-shaped pulpit. Melville came here and was so inspired by the chaplain of the time, the eloquent Reverend Enoch Mudge, that he created a character based on him in his novel. The walls are covered with memorial tablets to whalers and fishermen who have died in every watery corner of the globe. Cenotaphs from the 1840s hang side-by-side with more recent memorials from the 1970s and 80s. One reads "In Memory of Captain W. M. Swain, The Master of the Christopher Mitchell. This worthy man after fast'ning to a whale, was carried overboard by the line, and drowned. May 19, 1844, in the 49th year of his age."

I leave the past behind and walk down Johnny Cake Hill to the waterfront. Fog begins to lift off the ocean to give me my first glimpse of numerous fishing trawlers, docked two and three abreast at the city's Pier 3. I pass the dingy National Bar, where no one in their right mind besides a fisherman or whaler would frequent. Soon I'm on the lively pier. Men unload their catch, others with leathery faces rotate winches atop their craft or sew multi-hued fishing nets. Refusing to be gentrified like Nantucket or even the waterfront at New London, New Bedford still has the most active fishing community on the Eastern Seaboard. Replace the fish with whale oil and you're immediately transported back to another era.

Most of these fishermen speak Portuguese. After leaving America, the prevailing wind took whaling boats to the Portuguese islands of the Azores. Here, whalers would stock their ships cheaply, and, if need be, find a crew. Today, New Bedford is home to the country's largest Portuguese population, many of whom descended from those first whalers. Walk down Acushnet Street and you can taste freshly cooked sweetbread at a bakery or try kale soup or bacalhau (salted cod) at one of the many Portuguese restaurants like Antonio's.

Looking out to sea past the web of tangled fishing boats, I yearned to see a whale, not in the abstract or skeletal form, but in the flesh. I drove an hour back to Boston and boarded a whale watching boat from the New England Aquarium. Although some countries like Japan continue to slaughter whales for the meat, whale watching has become far more lucrative, close to a $1 billion business. The Boston skyline hovers in the distance as we motor past large tugboats and under planes landing at Logan Airport. The boat soon picks up speed as the Boston Harbor Islands become a blur. We're headed 25 miles out to sea to Stellwagen Bank, a nutrient rich underwater mesa that attracts fish, which in turn attracts numerous species of whales from April to November-humpbacks, finbacks, and smaller minkes.

Ninety minutes out to sea I hear that familiar cry, "There she blows!" This time, from one of the passengers. We eagerly head to the starboard side, where 20 yards off the bow, two humpbacks arch their fins out of the water and jet their silent spouts. A minute later the duo put on an awesome performance, as evidenced by the cacophony of "oohs" and "ahs" heard around the boat. They both dive deep in the water, thrusting their tails high in the air in unison, and then they were gone. Swim in peace, oh great leviathans of the deep.