If you were wondering why and how this industry became so big, what the narrative arc of it was, or my real reason as using this post to, at the end, share my favorite secondary sources on the history of American whaling, here you go!
This will be an exceedingly brief overview of the scope of the New England whale fishery (which came to dominate the world in terms of whaling), and existed from the 17th-19th centuries (with some straggling holdouts in the early 20th century).
Europeans had been commercially Right whaling for longer, particularly the Basques, Dutch, and English. By the time colonizers came to North America there was already an understanding of the value of whale parts. And, off New England, there were also waters full of whales that hadn’t yet been bothered by the industry. In the early 1600s New England colonists didn’t hunt whales. There were so many of them that a whale washing up on the beach wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Everyone would just rejoice and then process it there on the beach. And that was fine for a time.
In the late 1600s, though, they began shore whaling. This process was both observationally referenced from and taught by indigenous people—the Shinnecock on Long Island and the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, to name some—who had been subsistence whaling off the coast for centuries. With this type of whaling, a lookout would be stationed ashore and would sing out when a whale was seen. Then people would row out in light boats, kill it, and tow it back to land. There the blubber would be stripped and processed in a tryworks set up on shore (big cauldrons in a brick oven). Nantucket really started to solidify itself as a center for whaling during this time because it was farther out to sea and whale migration paths were just off the coast.
By the mid 18th century, tryworks started to be built right on the ship which enabled processing at sea instead. Larger ships were built, the voyages were longer as old cruising grounds were overfished, and American whalers just…traversed the entire world in pursuit of whales as the technology allowed for it. British politicians complained about how American whalers had a foothold in every ocean they found themselves in, and warned that it might make the colonies a bit more powerful than the British would like. In 1791 American whalers were rounding Cape Horn for the first time to get to the Pacific and what would become the most popular whaling grounds. There, they were no longer after just right whales, but more so for the sperm whale and the spermaceti in their heads from which the most superior oil and candles were manufactured. Spermaceti really changed the economic game, and the pursuit and sale of it was what led to whaling having such a huge part in the American economy. Then, new cruising grounds were broken in 1848 up in the Arctic, with the hunt for the ‘newly discovered’ bowhead whales. Some voyages dabbled in the Indian ocean, especially in the last legs of the industry as other locations got overfished, but it wasn’t the most popular destination.
In terms of the dominant US port by this point, the heart of the world’s whaling shifted from Nantucket to New Bedford in the 19th century. This was partly due to big losses to the Nantucket fleet during the American Revolution and War of 1812, but also because of New Bedford’s deep harbor and connections to mainland resources (trees! shipbuilding!) and mainland markets. A lot of old Nantucket families moved there and by the mid 1850s New Bedford was the richest city per capita in the world, and whaling became the country’s 5th largest economic sector. 1830s-1850s was the golden period of US whaling. Then the discovery of petroleum in the US happened. And then the loss of dozens of whaleships during the Civil War, both at the hands of Confederate raiders targeting them, but also from whaling captains deliberately sinking their ships to blockade Charleston Harbor. Lastly, in 1871, a significant portion of the fleet was lost in the Arctic, being bound up in ice. These were the three nails in the coffin for the industry as a whole. While the major whaling port did shift and was active in San Francisco in the last decades of the 19th century, by the end of the 1920s the whaling industry—as it was known for the past century, at least—was kaput.
The last issue of the Whalemen’s Shipping List (1843-1914) bid adieu to its readers on December 29th, 1914, exemplifying the state of the industry in their farewell:
“THE LAST ISSUE—Often in the career of a reporter it is part of the days work to write the obituary of a man, to say a few kind words concerning his activities in business, public office or social life. Rarely does the occasion arise when one is permitted to pass on the life of an institution.”
[The writer then gave an overview of the story of the US fishery, before coming to the closing paragraph.]
“And a good journal goes the way of many a staunch old whaling bark. It has outlived its usefulness, there is no demand for it; its subscription list has fallen off and it is not self-sustaining. So then the Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants Journal is to be hauled out on the beach, its activities at an end, yet we shall expect to hear, when news comes in of one surviving whaler in trouble, sunk or disabled, “Where’s the last Shipping List?” and look up to see the shipnews man, through force of habit, asking for his Bible that he may find the correct text.”
AND NOW, onto the main reason why I wanted to make a little overview post. To shill my favorite scholars and books on the topic of American whaling. Here you go:
Rites and Passages by Margaret S. Creighton is my absolute favorite whaling history book. It’s a slim little book but is a wealth of information on the social dynamics of whaleships, and was one of the most interesting and human approaches I’ve read on the subject. This gets into the emotional perspectives of the men who found themselves aboard.
My other absolute favorite is Nancy Shoemaker’s Native American Whalemen and the World. As the title states, it looks at indigenous men from New England who worked in the commercial whale fishery, and the complexities of the perception of race depending on where they found themselves. Incredibly comprehensive and nuanced, using a great deal of information from logbooks kept by native men, and phenomenally structured.
Whaling Captains of Color by Skip Finley dives into men of color, particularly Black men who found themselves in the industry. In addition to providing specific context to the work, he uncovers and profiles the personal histories of over 50 captains in a way that other books have not.
Joan Druett is another favorite scholar of mine, and much like Creighton and Shoemaker focuses on The People. Her book Petticoat Whalers is a great look at wives who accompanied their husbands on whalers and the different ways they interacted with the world.
Rough Medicine, also by Druett, looks at whaleship surgeons and what medicine was like in the Age of Sail.
Whaling Will Never Do For Me by Briton Cooper Busch…his vibe towards other scholars and their focus / contributions to the wider scholarship rubbed me the wrong way in places, to be honest—I almost grudgingly include it. But…still a good resource in terms of some of the nitty gritty of the (terribleness) of the work and social dynamics on board.
Leviathan by Eric Jay Dolin is a good easily readable primer in whaling history before you dive deep.
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is also very good in terms of a historical primer—it’s centered on the sinking of the Essex but brings in a lot of good context too.
There are others, but, those are the ones I got the most out of!