Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
was a Nantucket whaler, however, who in 1835 captured the first right
whale on the northwest coast of America, thereby opening one of the
most important grounds ever visited by the whaling fleet.
The Golden Age of whaling falls between 1835 and 1860. In 1846 the
whaling fleet assumed the greatest proportions it was ever to know. In
that year, the fleet numbered six hundred and eighty ships and barks,
thirty-four brigs, and twenty-two schooners, with an aggregate of
somewhat over two hundred and thirty thousand tons. The value of the
fleet alone at that time exceeded twenty-one million dollars, while all
the investments connected with the business are estimated, according
to Tower, at seventy million dollars, furnishing the chief support of
seventy thousand persons. This great industry, so widespread in its
operation, emanated, at the time of its most extensive development,
from a cluster of thirty-eight whaling ports distributed along the
southern New England coast from Cape Cod to New York, and on the
islands to the south. The greatest of all the whaling ports, from 1820
onward, was New Bedford.
During the really great days of the whale fishery, the Pacific was by
all odds the chief fishing ground. During the early eighteen-thirties,
the Nantucket fleet began cruising mainly in the Pacific, and after
1840, the Nantucket whalers hunted there almost exclusively. The
Nantucket fleet was soon followed by the majority of the New Bedford
fleet, and a large proportion of the New London and Sag Harbor vessels.
These vessels, manned by a mixed company of Quakers, farm boys, and a
supplementary compound of the dredgings of the terrestrial globe, would
usually be gone for three years, not infrequently for four or five.
As long as the craft held, and the food lasted, and an empty barrel
lay in the hold, the captain kept to the broad ocean, eschewing both
the allurements of home and the seductions of tattooed Didoes. When
at last they sailed into the harbour of their home ports, weed-grown,
storm-beaten, patched and forlorn, they usually looked, as Verrill
says, more like the ghosts of ancient wrecks than seaworthy carriers of
precious cargo manned by crews of flesh and blood. After a few months
of repair and overhauling in port, these vessels were refitted for
another cruise, and off they sailed again for another space of years.
It thus happened that the veteran whalers of Nantucket and New Bedford
and the sister ports could look back upon whole decades of their lives
spent cruising upon the high seas: a fact that Melville amplifies with
a cadence he learned from the Psalms. Of the Nantucketer he says: “For
the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen
having but a right of way through it. He alone resides and riots on
the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and
fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. _There_ is his home;
_there_ lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt,
though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea,
as prairie cocks on the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the
land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman. With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of
land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very
pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
The number of supplies, and the variety of articles required in fitting
out a whaling ship for a cruise, was, of course, prodigious. For aside
from the articles required in whaling, it was necessary that a whaling
vessel should sail prepared for any emergency, and equipped to be
absolutely independent of the rest of the world for years at a time,
housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers,
doctors, bakers and bankers. Aside from the necessary whaling
equipment, there were needed supplies for the men, ship’s stores and a
dizzy number of incidentals: “spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines
and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and a
duplicate ship.... While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff,
to be transferred to foreign wharves, the world-wandering whale-ship
carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants.
She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is
ballasted with utilities. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have
gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of
ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one
grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like
themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had
come; they would answer--‘Well, boys, here’s the ark!’” N. H. Nye, a
New Bedford outfitter, published in 1858 an inventory of _Articles for
a Whaling Voyage_: a shopping list totalling some 650 entries, useful
once to whalers with fallible memories, useful now to landsmen with
lame imaginations.
When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel
was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some
interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of
the whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly
every soul in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the
time of continual fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing
in _Moby-Dick_, no one was more active, it will be remembered, than
Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean though kind-hearted old Quakeress of
indefatigable spirit. “At one time she would come on board with a
jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch
of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third
time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic
back.” Hither and thither she bustled about, “ready to turn her hand
and her heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort
and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
well-saved dollars.” Nor did she forsake the ship even after it had
been hauled out from the wharf. She came off in the whaleboat with a
nightcap for the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for
the steward. Such were the conditions in whaling-towns like Nantucket
or New Bedford that there was nothing remarkable in Aunt Charity’s
behaviour. In such communities, “whale was King.” The talk of the
street was, as Abbot observes, of big catches and the price of oil and
bone. The conversation in the shaded parlours, where sea-shell, coral,
and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was,
in an odd mixture of Quaker idiom, of prospective cruises or of past
adventures, of distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and
when they might be expected home. Col. Joseph C. Hart, in his _Miriam
Coffin, or the Whale Fishermen: a Tale_ (1834) offers perhaps the
truest and most vivid picture of life in Nantucket when whaling was at
its prime. Speaking of himself in the third person in the dedication,
Hart describes his book as being “founded on facts, and illustrating
some of the scenes with which he was conversant in his earlier days,
together with occurrences with which he is familiar from tradition and
association.” Though reprinted in California in 1872, _Miriam Coffin_
is now very difficult to come by. It should be better known.
The extended voyages of the American whaleman were made in heavy,
bluff-bowed and “tubby” crafts that were designed with fine contempt
for speed, comfort or appearance. In writing of Nantucket whaling
during the period about 1750, Macy says: “They began now to employ
vessels of larger size, some of 100 ton burden, and a few were
square-rigged.” For over a century thereafter the changes in whaling
vessels were almost solely in size. With the opening of the Pacific,
the longer voyages and the desire for larger cargoes led, as a
necessary result, to the employment of larger vessels. The first
Nantucket ship sailing to the Pacific in 1791 was of 240-ton burden.
By 1826, Nantucket had seventy-two ships carrying over 280 tons each,
and before 1850 whalers of 400 to 500 tons burden were not unusual. The
_Acushnet_, it will be remembered, was rated as a ship of 359 tons.
The vessels used in whaling, built, as has been said, less with a view
to speed than to carrying capacity, had a characteristic architecture.
The bow was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the
masts stuck up straight, without that rake which adds so much to the
trim appearance of a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished
the whalers from other ships of the same general character. (1) At each
mast head was fixed the “crow’s-nest”--in some vessels a heavy barrel
lashed to the mast, in others merely a small platform laid on the
cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the mast above, within which the
look-out could stand in safety. Throughout Melville’s experiences at
sea, in the merchant marines, in whalers, and in the navy, it appears
that his happiest moments were spent on mast-heads. (2) On the deck,
amidships, stood the “try-works,” brick furnaces holding two or three
great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odourless oil. (3)
Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from which
hung the whale boats--never less than five, sometimes more--while still
others were lashed to the deck. For these boats were the whales’ sport
and playthings, and seldom was a big “fish” made fast without there
being work made for the ship’s carpenter.
As for the crow’s-nest, and the business of standing mast-heads,
Melville has more than a word to say. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the
_Garden of Cyrus_ of “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations
of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered,” to
find, as Coleridge remarks, “quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in
earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in
optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything,” so Melville
finds the visible and invisible universe a symbolic prefiguring of all
the detailed peculiarities of whaling. In the town of Babel he finds
a great stone mast-head that went by the board in the dread gale of
God’s wrath; and in St. Simon Stylites, he discovers “a remarkable
instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads, who was not to be driven
from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly
facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.” And in
Napoleon upon the top of the column of Vendome, in Washington atop his
pillar in Baltimore, as in many another man of stone or iron or bronze,
he sees standers of mast-heads.
In most American whalemen, the mast-heads were manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; and this even though
she often had fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail before reaching
her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’
voyage, she found herself drawing near home with empty casks, then her
mast-heads were frequently kept manned, even until her skysail-poles
sailed in among the spires of her home port.
The three mast-heads were kept manned from sunrise to sunset, the
seamen taking regular turns (as at the helm) and relieving each other
every two hours, watching to catch the faint blur of vapour whose
spouting marks the presence of a whale. “There she blows! B-l-o-o-ws!
Blo-o-ows!” was then sung out from the mast-head: the signal for the
chase.