New England whalers led ‘2nd Great Age of Exploration’

by Barry Hastings

(Writer’s Note: About half of this story is taken from a story I wrote for the Nantucket Map & Legend in early summer, 1988; the remainder comes from further reading on the subject, a two day visit to the New Bedford, MA Whaling Museum, in 1990, and countless visits to the Nantucket Whaling Museum, reading log books, written records of shipboard stores, trades of various skilled whalers, studying whale-ship models, whale-men’s scrimshaw, whaling tools, and implements, during the seven — plus years I was a “down-Easter.”

When Herman Melville wrote the words, “They penetrated into the the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world,” regarding Nantucket whalers, the words meant more than the author knew. Log books, journals, hand-drawn maps, and hand-written letters of the island’s whale hunting men contributed immensely to the reconstituted science of geography, and laid foundations for the new sciences of oceanography and anthropology.

The whale-hunting men made their first contributions to the modern earth sciences while Americans were still fighting the war against Great Britain to preserve our political revolution. During those troubled years, while the King’s Royal Navy kept Nantucket harbor closely blockaded, the Quaker, Francis Rotch, formed America’s first “multi-national” company, a group of whaling ships backed by small investors, and crewed by sailors working on shares. They operated out of Dunkirk (scene of the Brits’ early World War II military disaster), and sailed under flags of convenience — American, French, English, as spirit or necessity dictated.

While French warships and soldiers combined with George Washington’s Continental Army to tighten the net around an English army at Yorktown, Virginia, Nantucketers aboard the whale ship Beaver were rounding Cape Horn, and charting rocks, reefs, islands, winds, and currents (a habit common to most all whale ship skippers). Soon they were pushing on out to mid Pacific, seeking sperm whales (and later bowheads). They were followed by Rotch’s ships, working out of Dunkirk. Soon, other American whaling men were rounding South Africa, then pushing into the Indian Ocean seeking their quarry.

As the whaling business developed, it made many a ship owner/captain very wealthy. Evidence is the many still beautiful examples of classic architectural styles surviving. They were very expensive homes of successful ship owners and captains — built at Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and New Bedford in Massachusetts. Also in New London, Connecticut; and far to the West, at San Francisco. Further West, still, Honolulu was hub for the business. From the 1850s, Pacific, and Arctic whalers often operated from both.

As New England whalers pursued sperm whales in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans (and later, bowheads, in the Arctic areas North of Alaska where few whalers had earlier ventured), they made important contributions beyond supplying whale oil for lamps, and other products (buggy whips, candles, umbrella and corset stays, fertilizer and lubricating oil). By continuously sailing ever deeper into unknown and uncharted areas of the seas, they became the only explorers of the Arctic seas. At least half of all early polar discoveries were charted by them.

They’d grown familiar with probing unknown regions, and according to historian of whaling, Richard Ellis, “In their search for whale bone and oil, the roving whalers opened the Northern world, much as 16th century Europeans had the temperate zones in their quest for riches of the Indies.” American whale men were among the first to sail around Cape Horn and into the South Pacific Ocean. They were also first to sail into Japanese ports, and had a large part in opening the secretive, long isolated nation to foreigners.

As whalers pushed ever deeper into unknown waters from Brazil to Africa, from Chile to Japan, and from North Pole to South, they discovered (and accurately charted) more that four hundred islands, and gave many of them American names. An early contribution to oceanography was charting of the gulf stream current, as well as the ebb and flow of tides, and flow of currents across the wide­spread regions in which they operated.

As early as 1828, a report submitted to the the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, listed 250 Pacific Ocean reefs and islands, accurately charted, then reported, by whaling ship crews. Many had previously been unknown. Just two years before the Nantucket whale ship Essex was rammed (repeatedly), smashed, and sunk by a whale (her crewmen, survived in boats, eventually drew lots, and ate several shipmates to survive), in the mid-Pacific “off-shore whale grounds.” Nantucket skipper G.W. Gardner discovered the area while commanding the whale ship Globe.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick makes clear to modern readers the wealth of nautical knowledge accumulated by whalers, and their understanding of the far ocean reaches. They’d charted water temperatures, currents, prevailing winds, tidal flows,and other pertinent information. They stored their log books in home port facilities, and made the accumulated knowledge available to other captains and to scientists.

The whale men’s systematic compilation of such information entitles them to recognition as the first modern oceanographers. Data they gathered and recorded on tribal customs of isolated Arctic and sub-arctic peoples, and other isolated Pacific area groups — Eskimos, Patagonians, etc., contributed greatly to the science of anthropology, by raising serious questions among scholars regarding the development of cultures.

The accurate maps and charts of Lt. Matthew F. Maury, USN, published in the middle years of the 19th century, owed much to groundwork done by New Bedford, Nantucket and other New England whaling captains, their officers and the brave men who pushed ever deeper into unknown reaches, recording data as the went. Many hundreds of them were lost at sea in sinking ships, or in shipboard accidents, but their observations and records of wind, tide, current, temperatures, and general weather and ocean conditions across the world’s “big waters” played a huge role in making ocean travel safer, and in expanding knowledge of our planet.