Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
one of the few important original sources for the history of whaling,
and the most readable. Melville expresses repeated indebtedness
to Macy. Macy’s record has the tang of first-hand experience, and
the flavour of local records. Because of the fact that many of the
records from which this fine old antiquary of whales drew have since
been destroyed by fire, his book enjoys the heightened authority of
being a unique source. According to Anatole France, the perplexities
of historians begin where events are related by two or by several
witnesses, “for their evidence is always contradictory and always
irreconcilable.” The fire at Nantucket blazed a royal road to truth.
Daniel Ricketson, in his _History of New Bedford_ (1850) attempted to
emulate Macy. And though Ricketson’s sources, as Macy’s, have been
largely destroyed by fire, his authority, though irrefutable in so far
as it goes, is less detailed and comprehensive.
Of published personal narrative of whale-hunting, Owen Chase’s
_Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Ship Wreck of the
Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket_, published in 1821, as well as F. D.
Bennett’s two-volume _Narrative of a Voyage Round the World_, published
1833-36, were drawn from by Melville in _Moby-Dick_. The account of
the sinking of the _Essex_ is important as being the source from which
Melville borrowed, with superb transformation, the catastrophe with
which he closes _Moby-Dick_. The sinking of the _Essex_--recounted
in _Moby-Dick_--is the first and best known instance of a ship being
actually sent to the bottom by the ramming of an infuriated whale,
and in its sequel it is one of the most dreadful chapters of human
suffering in all the hideous annals of shipwreck. “I have seen Owen
Chase,” Melville says in _Moby-Dick_, “who was chief mate of the
_Essex_ at the time of the tragedy: I have read his plain and faithful
narrative: I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles
of the scene of the tragedy.” Melville may here be using a technique
learned from Defoe.
Though in _Moby-Dick_ Melville makes several references to J. Ross
Browne’s _Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes on a Sojourn on
the Island of Zanzibar_, mildly praising some of his drawings while
reprobating their reproduction, he owes no debt to J. Ross Browne.
Melville and Browne wrote of whaling with purposes diametrically
opposed. Melville gloried in the romance of whales, and horsed on
Leviathan, through a briny sunset dove down through the nether-twilight
into the blackest haunted caverns of the soul. Browne provokes no such
rhetorical extravagance of characterisation. He sat soberly and firmly
down on a four-legged chair before a four-legged desk and wrote up his
travels. “My design,” he says, “is simply to present to the public
a faithful delineation of the life of a whaleman. In doing this, I
deem it necessary that I should aim rather at the truth itself than
at mere polish of style.” So Browne made a virtue of necessity, and
convinced that “history scarcely furnishes a parallel for the deeds of
cruelty” then “prevalent in the whale fishery,” he sent his book forth
“to show in what manner the degraded condition of a portion of our
fellow-creatures can be ameliorated.” In a study of Melville’s life,
Browne is important as presenting an ungarnished account of typical
conditions aboard a whaler at the time Melville was cruising in the
_Acushnet_. Useful in the same way are R. Delano’s _Wanderings and
Adventures; Being a Narrative of Twelve Years’ Life in a Whaleship_
(1846) and Captain Davis’ spirited overhauling of his journal kept
during a whaling trip, published in 1872 under the title _Nimrod of the
Sea_.
Though whales and Pilgrim Fathers would, at first blush, seem to belong
to two mutually repugnant orders of nature, yet were they, by force
of circumstance, early thrown into a warring intimacy. And strangely
enough, in this armed alliance, it was the whale who made the first
advances. Richard Mather, who came to Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635,
records in his journal, according to Sabine, the presence off the New
England coast of “mighty whales spewing up water in the air like the
smoke of a chimney ... of such incredible bigness that I will never
wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.” From
this and other evidence it seems undoubted that in early colonial days
whales were undaunted by the strict observances of the Pilgrims, and
browsed in great numbers, even on Sabbath, within the sight of land.
Yet, despite this open violation of Scripture, the resourceful Puritan
pressed them into the service of true religion. Believing that
Whales in the sea
God’s voice obey,
they tolerated leviathan as an emissary more worthy than Elijah’s
raven. And whenever an obedient whale, harkening to the voice of God
in the wilderness, was cast ashore, a part of his bulk was fittingly
appropriated for the support of the ministry.
Tower establishes the fact that among the first colonists there were
men at least acquainted with, if not actually experienced in whaling.
And it is quite generally accepted that the settlement of Massachusetts
was prompted not only by a protestant determination to worship God
after the dictates of a rebellious conscience, but by a no less firm
determination to vary Sunday observances with the enjoyment on secular
days of unrestricted fishing. As a result of this double Puritan
interest in worship and whaling, the history of the American whaling
fishery begins almost with the settlement of the New England colonies.
By the end of the seventeenth century, whaling was established as a
regular business, if still on a comparatively small scale, in the
different Massachusetts colonies, especially from Cape Cod; from the
towns at the eastern end of Long Island, and from Nantucket. With the
very notable exceptions of New London, Connecticut, and New Bedford and
the neighbouring ports in Buzzard’s Bay, every locality subsequently
to become important in its whaling interests was well launched in
this enterprise before 1700. New London did not begin whaling until
the middle of the eighteenth century. New Bedford, though almost the
last place to appear as a whaling port--and this immediately before
the Revolution--was destined to stand, within a century after its
beginnings in whaling, the greatest whaling port the world has ever
known, the city which, in the full glory of whaling prosperity, would
send out more vessels than all other American ports combined.
The earliest colonial adventurers in whaling were men who by special
appointment were engaged to be on the lookout for whales cast ashore.
Emboldened by commerce with drift-whales, these Puritan whalemen soon
took to boats to chase and kill whales which came close in, but which
were not actually stranded.
In 1712, through the instrumentality of Christopher Hussey, Providence
utilised a hardship to His creature to work a revolution in whaling.
Hussey, while cruising along the coast, was caught up by a strong
northerly wind, and despite his prayers and his seamanship was blown
out to sea. When the sky cleared, Hussey’s craft was nowhere to be
seen by the anxious watchers on shore. After awaiting his return for a
decent number of days, his wife and neighbours at home gave him up as
lost. But in the middle of their tribulations, a familiar sail dipped
over the horizon, and Hussey slowly headed landward, dragging a dead
sperm whale in tow: the first sperm whale known to have been taken by
an American whaler.
Hussey’s exploit marked a radical change in whaling methods. All
Nantucket lusted after sperm whales. The indomitable islanders began
immediately to fit vessels, usually sloops of about thirty tons, to
whale out in the “deep.” These little vessels were fitted out for
cruises of about six weeks. On their narrow decks there was no room for
the apparatus necessary to “try out” the oil. So the blubber stripped
from the whale was cast into the hold, the oil awaiting extraction
until the vessel returned. Then the reeking whale fat, its stench
smiting the face of heaven, was transferred to the huge kettles of
the “try houses.” There is an old saying that a nose that is a nose
at all can smell a whaler twenty miles to windward. The New England
indifference to the stenches of whaling suggests that the Puritan
contempt for the flesh was not a virtue but a deformity.
Other whaling communities ventured out after the sperm whale in the
wake of Nantucket. Year after year the colonial whalemen pushed further
and further out into the “deep” as their gigantic quarry retreated
before them. In 1774, Captain Uriah Bunker, in the brig _Amazon_ of
Nantucket, made the first whaling voyage across the equinoctial line to
the Brazil Banks and, according to local tradition, returned to port
with a “full ship” on April 19, 1775, just as the redcoats were in full
retreat from Concord Bridge.
The Revolutionary War dealt a terrific blow to American whaling.
Massachusetts was regarded as the hotbed of the Revolutionary spirit,
and that colony was also the centre of the fishing industries. Hence,
in 1775, “to starve New England,” Parliament passed the famous act
restricting colonial trade to British ports, and placing an embargo
on fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland or on any other part of the
North American coast. It was this same measure which inspired Burke in
his Speech on _Conciliation_ to his superbly eloquent tribute to the
exploits of the American whalemen. When the war began there were in
the whole American fleet between three and four hundred vessels--of an
aggregate of about thirty-three thousand tons. The annual product of
this fleet was, according to Starbuck’s estimate, “probably at least
45,000 barrels of spermaceti oil, and 8,500 barrels of right whale oil,
and of bone nearly or quite 75,000 pounds.” Of all whaling communities,
the island of Nantucket held out most stoutly,--aided by Melville’s
grandfather, who was sent to Nantucket in command of a detachment to
watch the movements of the British fleet. Yet when the war ended in
1783, Macy says that of the one hundred and fifty Nantucket vessels,
only two or three old hulks remained. In Nantucket, the money loss
exceeded one million dollars. So many of the young and active men
perished in the war that in the eight hundred Nantucket families there
were two hundred and two widows and three hundred and forty-two orphan
children.
But even in the face of such prodigal disaster, the fiery spirit of
Nantucket was unquenchable. When the news came of the peace of 1783,
the _Bedford_, just returned to Nantucket from a voyage, was hastily
laden with oil and cleared for London. This was, as a contemporary
London newspaper remarks, “the first vessel which displayed the
thirteen rebellious stripes of America in any British port.”
Through the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the American
whale fishery lived a precarious existence of constant ups and downs.
The whaling voyages were greatly lengthened during this period,
however. In 1789 Nantucket whalemen first went hunting the sperm whale
off Madagascar, and in 1791 six whaleships fitted out at Nantucket for
the Pacific Ocean.
The years between 1820 and 1835 were marked mainly by stable conditions
and by a steady but gradual growth. In 1820 the Pacific whaling was
extended to the coast of Japan, and within the next few years the
whalers were going to all parts of the South Sea and Indian Ocean. And
these years marked, too, the falling of Nantucket from her hundred
years of pre-eminence in whaling, and the emergence of New Bedford as
incomparably the greatest whaling port in the history of the world. It