The great days of Nantucket as a whaling port were passed before the Revolution wiped out her ships and killed or scattered her sailors.It was later discovered that larger ships were more economical, and Nantucket harbor bar was too shoal to admit their passage.For this reason New Bedford became the scene of the foremost activity, and Nantucket thereafter played a minor part, although her barks went cruising on to the end of the chapter and her old whaling families were true to strain.As explorers the whalemen rambled into every nook and corner of the Pacific before merchant vessels had found their way thither.They discovered uncharted islands and cheerfully fought savages or suffered direful shipwreck.The chase led them into Arctic regions where their stout barks were nipped like eggshells among the grinding floes, or else far to the southward where they broiled in tropic calms.The New Bedford lad was as keen to go a-whaling as was his counterpart in Boston or New York to be the dandy mate of a California clipper, and true was the song:
I asked a maiden by my side, Who sighed and looked to me forlorn, "Where is your heart?" She quick replied, "Round Cape Horn."Yankee whaling reached its high tide in 1857 when the New Bedford fleet alone numbered 329 sail and those owned in other ports of Buzzard's Bay swelled the total to 426 vessels, besides thirty more hailing from New London and Sag Harbor.In this year the value of the catch was more than ten million dollars.The old custom of sailing on shares or "lays" instead of wages was never changed.It was win or lose for all hands--now a handsome fortune or again an empty hold and pockets likewise.There was Captain W.T.Walker of New Bedford who, in 1847, bought for a song a ship so old that she was about to be broken up for junk and no insurance broker would look at her.In this rotten relic he shipped a crew and went sailing in the Pacific.Miraculously keeping afloat, this Envoy of his was filled to the hatches with oil and bones, twice running, before she returned to her home port; and she earned $138,450 on a total investment of eight thousand dollars.
The ship Sarah of Nantucket, after a three years' cruise, brought back 3497 barrels of sperm oil which sold for $89,000, and the William Hamilton of New Bedford set another high mark by stowing 4181 barrels of a value of $109,269.The Pioneer of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan, was away only a year and stocked a cargo of oil and whalebone which sold for $150,060.Most of the profits of prosperous voyages were taken as the owners' share, and the incomes of the captain and crew were so niggardly as to make one wonder why they persisted in a calling so perilous, arduous, and poorly paid.During the best years of whaling, when the ships were averaging $16,000 for a voyage, the master received an eighteenth, or about nine hundred dollars a year.The highly skilled hands, such as the boat-steerers and harpooners, had a lay of only one seventy-fifth, or perhaps a little more than two hundred dollars cash as the reward of a voyage which netted the owner at least fifty per cent on his investment.Occasionally they fared better than this and sometimes worse.The answer to the riddle is that they liked the life and had always the gambling spirit which hopes for a lucky turn of the cards.
The countless episodes of fragile boats smashed to kindling by fighting whales, of the attack renewed with harpoon and lance, of ships actually rammed and sunk, would fill a volume by themselves and have been stirringly narrated in many a one.Zanzibar and Kamchatka, Tasmania and the Seychelles knew the lean, sun-dried Yankee whaleman and his motto of a "dead whale or a stove boat."The Civil War did not drive him from the seas.The curious fact is that his products commanded higher prices in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly decreased.
Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital preferred other forms of investment.The leisurely old sailing craft was succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford man or Cape Verde islander.
Roving whaler and armed East Indiaman, plunging packet ship and stately clipper, they served their appointed days and passed on their several courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight.The souls of their sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go.They were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and imperishable to the story of the United States.Down the wind, vibrant and deep-throated, comes their own refrain for a requiem:
We're outward bound this very day, Good-bye, fare you well, Good-bye, fare you well.
We're outward bound this very day, Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound.
