Chapter IX: Aboard an American Whaler

Among the most important harbours in America from which the whalers of the nineteenth century used to set forth must be mentioned New Bedford, Nantucket, Fairhaven, Newport, especially. These names have become so welded to whaling history that it is difficult to think of these ports without conjuring up a mental vision of an old-fashioned ship with her white-painted ribbon on a black hull cruising along the lonely ocean under short sail ready to launch one of those conspicuous boats as soon as the eager scanning look-out hailed the deck.

At these places there grew up whole families of whaling people whose life interest was wrapped up in this subject, who married and intermarried those who built or sailed or part-owned the ships. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were eight or nine thousand people living at Nantucket all practically dependent on the whaling industry. Herman Melville wrote of Nantucket as “more lonely than the Eddystone Lighthouse,” and amusingly suggested that the people here “are so shut up, belted about, every way enclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of turtles.” “What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood!”

And it is Melville who has enabled us to reconstruct for ourselves those little mosaics, which, pieced together in their right places, give us a true picture of what a Nantucket whaler looked like! “She was a ship of the old school,” he says, “rather small if anything, with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened.... Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled.... She was a thing of trophies.... All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long, sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.”

And the pride of service was never more eloquently expressed than in Captain Peleg’s remark in connection with the merchant service as opposed to his own. “Marchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?--I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the Marchant Service to me again. Marchant Service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships!” Could anything be more discriminating?

So we think of these veteran vessels as owned by well-to-do, retired Quaker skippers of the most strict narrow-mindedness, yet possessed of such a knowledge of ocean life as could hardly be surpassed by any other seafarers in the world. Those lengthy voyages and their Puritanical personality, and those long hours alone brooding and entering up their journals, created a special type of humanity--strong, independent, fanatically conservative, dominant, of an enclosed kind of piety, yet most wonderfully wide-awake to the main chance of remunerative whaling and a hard business bargain. The life of such a part-owner could be divided into several well bulk-headed chapters, each ending up one separate section of a full career. Cabin boy, boatman, harpooner, mate, captain, ship-owner, sexagenarian, retirement, capitalist. These nine would make chapter headings for the biography of any of these whaler skippers. But right till the end they were the keenest superintendents and the sternest critics of ships and men. Taskmasters? Melville sums one of these old men up in a single sentence. “They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old _Categut_ whaleman, his crew upon arriving home were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”

But if the largest owner of an American whaler were a retired skipper, the other shareholders would consist of widows, fatherless children and chancery wards, each owning “about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.”

Whilst lying in her home port the whaler used to have a kind of wigwam erected on deck abaft the mainmast, made of bone taken out of jaws of the right whale. This tent was the last thing to be stowed before heaving up the anchor; it was symbolical of the packing away of shore authority. But when the vessel was about to leave Nantucket for her three or four years’ voyage, and the last rigger had been sent ashore, she was hauled out from the wharf and the skipper would tell the chief mate to muster all the hands--“blast ’em”--whilst the pilot was busy taking the ship out, his position being forward. Some profane chantey would be presently heard reaching the shore as that mixed crew got active to their work of walking round the capstan. The old man aft would be stamping about in a rage, hating audibly with his Quaker “thous” and “thees,” hurling at them insults and exerting his authority from the very first.

Then at last the pilot would drop over the side into his little sailing-boat, the last tie with the land would be separated and it would be a long time before any of the crew ever was allowed to use his legs on solid earth. We in these days of quick passages in steamships with wireless conversation going on all day and all night hardly realize the utter isolation of a four-year whaling voyage under a tyrannous martinet for skipper. If any man had the least feelings of sentiment, if the comfort of a home port and the heart-strings of affection meant anything at all to him, the beginning of these long trips was something unforgettable. We find this home-sickness, this desperate deep-burning loneliness coming out even in the skippers’ journals, which would never be soiled by a glance from any of their crews: but it is there right enough. The womenfolk would be there on the wharf, tear-eyed, anxious, but hopeful that after a few years the ship would come back full of a fortune. At last a shout from a deep-throated retired captain, a warning to the harpooners not to “stave the boats needlessly ... white cedar plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either, Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s Day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts.” And with this last expression of his crowded, mingled thoughts, the principal proprietor would have watched his old ship gradually get smaller as she made her way to the open sea.

That night the long roll of the Atlantic would begin its game with the ship, the blocks would whine and creak, the rigging would take up its strains, the canvas would belly to the fresh breeze and the mast heads swing backwards and forwards across the sky of stars as the watch below was clewing up its harbour memories till they could be let loose again after many months. Strangers began to size each other up, enmities and friendships began to be formed: but both would be broken and reconstituted long before the first man had deserted at the first opportunity.

As a general rule you will always find that islanders take to the sea in some sort of way: for ships and seafaring can never be allowed out of their minds for long. It used to be the custom for British Greenland whalers on the outward voyage to call at the Shetlands and fill up with the rest of their crew, and on the return trip leave them where they found them. In the Nantucket whalers it was frequently the habit to call at the Azores, outward bound, and ship quite a few natives. American whale-ships had been calling there for years, so you would find in a Nantucket ship North Americans, Portuguese, coal-black niggers, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Manxmen, Maltese, natives from the Pacific Islands, Spaniards, and Britons, too. The ship might be American but the crew were international--or without a nation. If half the failures in this world are caused by men not knowing what they want and not being able to identify it when they see it, then you might say that the fo’c’sle of a whaler was full of failures. The ship attracted men from all parts of the world as sensitively as the magnet affects the compass needle. Some of these hands were just drifting about the globe without any aim other than to remain alive. A ship was synonymous with a home: a whaling voyage was a sort of guarantee that for three or four years any way there would be grub, somewhere to sleep, and possibly a tolerable amount of money to draw at the end.

Bullen’s description of a New Bedford whaler bears out Melville and the rest. “Truculent-looking men accompanied us to our several boarding-houses, paid our debts for us, finally bringing us by boat to a ship lying out in the bay. As we passed under her stern, I read the name _Cachalot_, of New Bedford: but as soon as we ranged alongside, I realized that I was booked for the sailor’s horror--a cruise in a whaler. Badly as I wanted to get to sea, I had not bargained for this, and would have run some risks to get ashore again; but they took no chances, so we were all soon aboard.... A more perfect contrast to the trim-built English clipper-ships that I had been accustomed to I could hardly imagine. She was one of a class characterized by sailors as built by the mile, and cut off in lengths as you want ’em, bow and stern almost alike, masts standing straight as broomsticks, and bowsprit soaring upwards at an angle of about forty-five degrees. She was old-fashioned in her rig as in her hull.... I was rudely roused from my meditations by the harsh voice of one of the officers, who shouted, ‘Naow then, git below an’ stow yer dunnage, ’n look lively up agin.’... Tumbling down the steep ladder, I entered the gloomy den which was to be for so long my home, finding it fairly packed with my shipmates. A motley crowd they were. I had been used in English ships to considerable variety of nationality; but here were gathered, not only the representatives of five or six nations, but ’long-shoremen of all kinds, half of whom had hardly ever set eyes on a ship before! The whole space was undivided by partition, but I saw at once that black men and white had separated themselves, the blacks taking the port side and the whites the starboard.”

You can imagine this motley crew on the first night out. The greenhorns, prostrate with seasickness, were wondering why they had been such fools as to come aboard for an adventure of this sort. The officers, often enough bullying and sometimes of Portuguese nationality, were trying to get the ship into full working order, yet half the crew were just waking up to the fact that this was no home after all. But after a few days Portuguese and nigger, American and Briton, would settle down to the life and to the salt junk, hard biscuit and hot drinks sweetened with molasses. Only one thing aboard the ship was really satisfying: and that was the long sleep after the trick at the helm. Steering? This was a strange mechanism in the old ships, for the wheel was fixed to the tiller and the whole affair was moved athwart the ship, so that it needed no ordinary sailorman to control her.

But if she was aged and her fo’c’sle was foul, yet on deck she was kept spotlessly clean. Flush-decked, she was of about 350 tons, with the try-works measuring about ten feet by eight erected in the waist. Right aft were the galley and skylight by the taffrail, the wooden cranes for the boats being of course along the bulwarks. These boats were each fitted with a centreboard, a mast and two spritsails in addition to the oars and other gear, so that by the time her men had launched and got into her she was already well loaded. Having slipped across the Atlantic and reached the sperm grounds, there were plenty of eyes looking out so as to earn that bounty of extra ’baccy which went to the first man who should report a whale. Plenty of false alarms came from the greenhorns, and it was usually the veteran who won the prize. And then the comparative comfort of passage-making gave way to frantic energy--hunting the whale in the boats for hours, then towing him alongside, slinging him securely, flensing him, and keeping the try-works going all through the night, and finally cleaning ship once more.

Out of a crew of say thirty-seven, twenty-four would be ordinary seamen. Fresh water except for drinking was forbidden. After all what was the sea for besides floating ships? But it is hope and the expectation of the future which keep men going as it did in those ships. The shares of profits, or as these shares were known, “lays,” had been reckoned in accordance with each man’s duties and usefulness. One two-hundredth share of oil at 200 dollars a tun meant £4 a barrel, but a greenhorn might be allotted only one two-hundred-and-seventy-fifth share of the clear net profits. This was just better than nothing and referred to as “a long lay.” But from that would have to be deducted the charge for that assortment of fairly good but high-priced clothes which the captain issued from the ship’s slop chest; in addition to the tobacco, matches and soap, also bought from the ship at extortionate terms.

Thus the whaler’s life was likely to appeal only to three classes of men: those who had been compelled to leave the land to avoid gaol or starvation, those who thought they were going to see the world and gain adventures, and those who were determined to work their way up till they owned a whaling ship of their own. It was only the latter who ever stuck to the occupation for voyage after voyage. No one who sympathizes with humanity can wish that those conditions should ever return. Better education has raised the standard of living aboard all kinds of ships: the difference between then and now is really much more than merely half a century.

You remember Melville’s account of how the Nantucket _Pequod_ whaler met the British whaler _Samuel Enderby_ at sea and hailed her with “Ship ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?” and Ahab ordered his boat to be manned and lowered with him in it to the water, and rowed alongside the London vessel. Ahab had lost a leg, so how was he to clamber up the English ship’s side? It was then that the English skipper took in the situation. “I see, I see!” he shouted. Then to his men, “’Vast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.” The _Samuel Enderby_ had only recently been cutting up a whale and the great tackles were still aloft and the massive blubber-hook still attached to the end. So this hook was lowered to Ahab, who slid his solitary thigh into the curve and was swung on board and exchanged yarns with the London skipper.

Melville speaks enthusiastically about that name Enderby, which will be found mentioned in our present volume more than once. He speaks of this London ship as named “after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which, in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest.” Ever since that memorable year 1775, when this firm fitted out the first English ships that ever went hunting the sperm whale regularly, it had sent ship after ship into southern waters; though ever since 1726 the Coffins and Maceys had been sending their whalers from North America into the Atlantic. When the Enderby ship _Amelia_ rounded the Horn and was the first of all vessels ever to harpoon whales in the Pacific and came home with a full cargo, she was but setting the fashion which was soon to be followed by British and American whalers. It was this same pioneering firm, too, which in 1819 sent out that exploration ship, the _Syren_, and made known the Japanese whaling grounds. Her skipper, however, was Captain Coffin of Nantucket. Melville refers to the _Samuel Enderby_ as a fast-sailing ship, an hospitable ship. “Fore and aft, I say, the _Samuel Enderby_ was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.”

But the first American ship, says Mr. R. McNab in his interesting monograph on New Zealand whaling, to take up bay whaling in the South Island of New Zealand was the _Erie_, which sailed from Newport, Rhode Island, bound for the South Pacific in April 1832, and got back to Newport again in June 1835 with 200 barrels of sperm and 1,800 of black oil. During the next few years, American whalers continued to frequent these waters, and the trade became considerable, for the early American whalers brought home such favourable news of their success. By these ships letters from New England were taken to the South Atlantic and New Zealand. So by 1836 such whalers as the _Samuel Robertson_, _Favourite_, _Mary Mitchell_, _Jasper_, _Erie_, _Vermont_ and others sailed across from New Bedford, Fairhaven, Nantucket, Poughkeepsie and other ports.

In the _Mary Mitchell’s_ journal of 1836, still in possession of the Nantucket Historical Society, we are able to see into the mind of her skipper day by day. Can we not almost see for ourselves the character of this Captain Samuel Joy as he entered up his book after reaching safely Cloudy Bay, on the north-east shoulder of South Island? The date is Friday, April 22nd, and the punctuation is typical of this sailor type:

“Heavy S.E. gale bad Sea steered down past Cape Campbell looking for the harbor. At 5 saw it bearing N.W. steered for it and at 6 happily came to an Anchor. thus after much toil fatigue and Labour we are happily Arrived at our port it now only remains for us to be thankful to God for his preservation and safe Guidance of us thro these dark times--I shall ever esteem it as a merciful interposition in my favor that thro divine Providence I have been enabled to conduct this ship thro this Passage on a Coast without any person on board acquainted with it any more than myself and to the Lord be the Praise Amen Latter strong S.E. wind. Employed Clearing Ship Ther 58 Bar. 30.30.”

Two days later arrived the _Jasper_ and _Erie_. The _Mary Mitchell_ having been moored, yards and topmasts were sent down, and boats were sent out whaling. Lugsails were now made for the boats and the hands kept busy. But we can see that there are always two aspects to ship life: one is as it appears from the angle of the mates and men, the other is as viewed through the anxious captain’s eyes. Everyone who has had command of a vessel knows this well enough: the others are apt to forget this fact. Thus under April 30th Captain Joy writes: “The Second mate is no officer the fourth Mate is worse I can express my opinion of the others hereafter.” Then apparently there was some friction with some of the English whalers, for twenty boats had come into a bay. “Commences with fine weather,” Joy writes under Saturday, May 7th, “at 4 boats returned at 6 heavy S.E. gale sent on shore 22 cedar boards Latter went out myself with 4 boats saw nothing wind blew up from S E heavy came into the Neck landed about 20 boats there and the most Blackguard language used from 5 english boats there Sparing no person at all in Short I hope I shall ever keep clear of English Ships again as they have no Authority.”

Joy was his name but sorrow was his experience, for these daily entries are full of woes and disappointments. Thus Friday, May 27th, was another disheartening day: “fore part fresh S E wind at 4 boats returned 1 calf got today Latter part much fine rain went out with 4 boats the 4 mate a lame hand one of our steersman stopped to Save his oar and did not strike the whale O dear.” And even the next day when his boats captured a whale and a calf he could but exert himself to write: “We now have hope I live in hope Latter part fine weather went out with 4 boats--Sick.”

However, Joy must have withdrawn his animosity towards the British whalers, for on June 2nd he was able to make a satisfactory bargain: “fine weather at 5 boats returned I got an anchor from an English ship for 40 lbs tobacco and a steering oar Latter fine weather went out with 4 boats and the Captain Got a large whale wafted and anchored him.” Other ships arrived from New England, but apparently Joy was not anxious for the society of his fellow humans. Whales were again killed, and then comes this delightful little summary of what happened on June 20th: “fore part cloudy began to boil at 5 boats returned got a Whale anchored him outside at 7 broke the cook’s head for getting rum from the Shore contrary to law Latter part strong N W wind went out with 4 boats the others boiling.”

It is the simple unforced sincerity of this whaling captain which makes his journal so readable in spite of his quaint confusion of thoughts and absence of stops or commas. Joy was not an exception but a product of his time and environment when these wooden whalers contained hard-case seamen and peppery skippers. To criticize the crews is not to free the captains from blame: but discipline had to be maintained, even after a fashion, in these as in any other ships. Joy went on quarrelling with other whaler-masters as we learn from the sentence, “this day I formally noted the different masters that I would not agree in case my boats were stove that I would give up my claim to any Whale obliged to cut from in consequence of being stove.”

Anyone with a little imagination and the knowledge of the ways of men can see how the deadly monotony of the life in such a distant place with Maoris to consort with was bound to make the crews dismal, disgruntled, and disgusted with life generally. There is an expression unofficially used to-day in the Royal Navy which describes exactly the condition into which these whaler men had descended through sheer boredom and mental weariness. Some who read these pages will recognize the phrase “b----y minded.” It is not pretty, but it is truthful. And the first thing that a man in that condition does is to break out of the ship, go ashore and get drunk as soon as opportunity presents itself. Joy’s men were thus disposed whilst the ship lay in semi-commission and the boats hunted for the whales. “John Wood left ship without leave got drunk I floged him and put him in irons Latter raining let the prisoner out of irons on promise of amendment” runs the laconic statement. And a few days later: “I cannot well leave the Ship in charge of the 4th mate he can do nothing in the boat and has been Sick and dozey 1/2 the time we have been here.” But finally this mate who also had “a difference with some of the crew requested his discharge” and went off: “a good riddance,” Joy wrote.

Boats went on being stove, arguments continued between captains, but in August Joy began to refit his ship, topmasts were sent up, and on September 1st he was so pleased with life that he could write: “I feel better to-day.” Presently topsails were bent, the fine weather began to break up, wood and water were fetched from the shore and preparations made for putting to sea. Boats were painted, harpoon lines coiled, the anchors hove in and stowed, and on September 27th, in company with two other New England whalers, the _Mary Mitchell_ got under way. The season there had ended.

Although British, French and American whaling ships were using these New Zealand waters at that time to the number of forty, one-half of these were American, the average size being of 333 tons, but New Bedford and Fairhaven were the principal ports sending ships. In the year 1832 whaler-ships of 350 tons from New Bedford, Nantucket and New London were working to the following “lay” or scale of remuneration: The captain received one-fifteenth, Chief Mate one-twenty-fifth, Second Mate one-forty-fifth, Third Mate one-fiftieth, boat-steerers one-hundredth each, ordinary seamen one-hundred-and-seventy-fifth each, in the South New Zealand whaling; additional help was also obtained from the shore, where a few men who had deserted from some previous whaler could usually get a temporary job and bring along a few Maoris with them.

In one entry Captain Joy wrote that “the Second Mate had his boat robbed in his absence of a bottle of rum, it being customary to carry it here so that in case of a hard drag to give it to the boats crew but they will carry no more from this ship as I will turn it all into the sea first.” The practice was to take a bottle in each boat and give each man a drink after a heavy whale had been brought in. But, unfortunately, there was a rum shop ashore whither the crews were enticed from their duty and came aboard their ship insolent and incapable, with the result that someone’s head got smashed, but it was not always the captain who came off best in the mutual rupture. It was the old story. As Conrad wrote twenty years before he died, “ships and men both rot in ports.”

By the year 1839 the number of American whalers on the New Zealand coast reached the unprecedented number of thirty-seven, whereas five years previously there had been but one. Nothing could be more eloquent of the migration of whales than the change of grounds which these ships from across the world had been compelled to make. Still, as the reader will find in the course of our inquiry, the fleets have been obliged in different generations to do this over and over again. But, as showing the intimate connection that has always existed between whaling and exploration, it may not be out of place to mention that all this American development of Southern Pacific whaling culminated in the natural desire to explore and survey the seas still further south.

And so it all culminated in an American naval officer, Charles Wilkes, taking out from Hampton Roads an expedition in 1838 consisting of six vessels which were reduced to four. The Antarctic continent was discovered, and Wilkes Land shown on the modern maps remains as a further reminder that this industry of hunting leviathans is capable not merely of bringing into existence large fleets and employing considerable numbers of men, but of sowing the seeds for future international complications if ever those extreme southern areas, through the advent of aerial navigation or scientific discovery, become of first-rate importance in the development of the world and its commerce.