Chapter Eight

GLORY DAYS

THIS PRINT, BASED ON A PAINTING BY WILLIAM ALLEN WALL, DEPICTS A WHALING SCENE OF 1763, IN NEW BEDFORD (OR DARTMOUTH, AS IT WAS THEN CALLED). A WHALESHIP IS AT THE CENTER, THE TRYWORKS AT THE RIGHT, AND IN THE FOREGROUND ARE MEN MINCING BLUBBER AND LADLING OIL INTO A CASK. SEATED AT THE LEFT, WITH HIS BACK TO THE VIEWER, IS JOSEPH RUSSELL, THE QUAKER MERCHANT WHO LAUNCHED THE WHALING INDUSTRY IN NEW BEDFORD. TO THE RIGHT AND ON TOP OF THE TRYWORKS’ SHED IS THE V-SHAPED LOWER JAW OF A SPERM WHALE.

THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE 1750S AND THE EARLY 1770S WAS A dramatic time for the colonial whale fishery. Trips that once lasted days, weeks, or a couple of months now extended often to a full year, enabling whalemen to reach destinations as far away as Greenland, Guinea, and the Falkland Islands. In doing so colonial whalemen caught more whales and watched their profits rise.

The mid-eighteenth century, with an explosion of urban growth, witnessed a great social transformation in that the cities of Europe and the colonies were becoming lighted, increasingly with whale oil, at a rapid pace. The expanding chain of lighthouses dotting America’s coastline relied on whale-oil lamps to guide mariners safely home. Spermaceti candles shone brightly in the houses and businesses of the well-to-do. Whale oil lubricated an ever-more-mechanical world and provided one of the main ingredients for processing the coarse cloth used to make military uniforms throughout Europe. Whalebone-supported petticoats and corsets, designed to keep the female body in line with prevailing ideas on upper-class beauty, were the rage in fashion.¹ Between 1768 and 1772, for example, the sale of whale oil and baleen provided New England with its single largest source of British sterling, accounting for just over 50 percent of all the remittances coming directly from the mother country.² Even in Massachusetts, where many thought cod was king, whaling had a much greater impact on the local economy.³

To meet the demand for whale products, the number of ships rose during this period from just over one hundred to more than three hundred. These vessels sailed from an increasing number of colonial ports, including the perennial whaling locales of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and Long Island, as well as newer entrants such as New Bedford, Lynn, Boston, Providence, Newport, Sag Harbor, Williamsburg, and Newbern, North Carolina.⁴ Nowhere was this growth more in evidence than on Nantucket, which laid claim to roughly half of the colonial whaling fleet.

A traveler to Nantucket at this time would have witnessed a legion of whaleships arriving, unloading, or preparing for new voyages. The pungent smell of boiling blubber hung heavily in the air, perhaps offending some newcomers, but a sign to Nantucketers that these were prosperous times. The best snapshot of Nantucket comes from the pen of Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who arrived in the colonies around 1760 and traveled widely. Using the pseudonym J. Hector St. John, and dubbed by one historian the “eighteenth-century Thoreau,” Crèvecoeur wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, providing a decidedly upbeat and somewhat idealized vision of rural America.⁵ A large part of the book describes life on Nantucket, focusing mainly on the whale fishery. Calling Nantucket “a barren sandbank, fertilized with whale oil only,” Crèvecoeur marveled at what such fertilization had produced:

Would you believe that a sandy spot of about twenty-three thousand acres, affording neither stones nor timber, meadows nor arable, yet can boast of an handsome town consisting of more than 500 houses, should possess above 200 sail of vessels, constantly employ upwards of 2,000 seamen; feed more than 15,000 sheep, 500 cows, 200 horses; and has several citizens worth £20,000 sterling! Yet all these facts are uncontroverted…they plough the rougher ocean, they gather from its surface, at an immense distance and with Herculean labours, the riches it affords; they go to hunt and catch that huge fish which by its strength and velocity one would imagine ought to be beyond the reach of man.

So all-encompassing was the impact of whaling on Nantucket, according to Crèvecoeur, that the physical makeup of the men on the island was, in fact, transformed. “A man born here is distinguishable by his gait from among a hundred other men, so remarkable are they for a pliability of sinews, and a peculiar agility, which attends them even to old age.” As to what imbued Nantucketers with these long-lasting attributes of youth, Crèvecoeur noted that some believed it was whale oil, “with which they are so copiously anointed in the various operations it must undergo ere it is fit either for the European market or the candle manufactory.” Crèvecoeur found the women, too, deserving of praise and admiration, noting their essential role in keeping the economic and social fabric of the island from falling apart. “As the sea excursions [of whalemen] are often very long, their wives in their absence are necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families…. This employment ripens their judgment, and justly entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives…[and upon returning, the men,] full of confidence and love, cheerfully give their consent to every transaction that has happened during their absence” and tell their wives, “Thee hast done well.”⁶

Whalemen on Nantucket, despite the time they spent away from home and the responsibility they left their wives, were considered exceptionally fine marriage material. In his book, Miriam Coffin or the Whale-Fisherman, published in 1834, Joseph C. Hart claimed that successful whalemen were such a catch that the “daughters of some of the wealthiest men of the island…formed a compact not to accept the addresses of sighing swains, much less to enter into the holy bands of matrimony with any but such as had been on a voyage, and could produce ample proof of successfully striking a whale.”⁷ Although Hart’s book is fictional, and there appears to be no evidence that such a compact ever existed, the animating force behind it is plausible, and even if there was no such compact, there were certainly many Nantucket women who viewed wedding a prominent whalemen as a social coup.

Nantucket’s rapidly expanding whale fishery required ever more labor. Accordingly the labor market for whalemen changed dramatically. The Indians, whom this industry relied on so much for so long, were dying out at a horrendous pace, killed in large part by the continued spread of disease. In 1700, 800 Indians inhabited the island; by August 1763, only 358; and then another epidemic struck. There is no certainty about what happened, but according to one version an Irish brig arrived at the mouth of Nantucket’s main harbor carrying a cargo of death. The first sign of trouble appeared when the bodies of two women from the ship washed ashore. Suspecting that they had died of smallpox, the town decided to send a reconnaissance party to the brig, comprising men who had already had smallpox and, therefore, were inoculated against the disease. It was not smallpox they discovered, however, but yellow fever, a much more dangerous and virulent adversary. The town placed the brig in quarantine, but not before a couple of passengers came to shore for treatment, taking up residence with a local couple. From that initial foothold, the disease spread rapidly, striking down most of the town’s Indians but inexplicably leaving all the whites, with one exception, unscathed.

Despite this legend’s staying power, there is little evidence to support it. It could be that the disease arrived through some other avenue, perhaps on a Nantucket whaleship returning from a voyage. Even the nature of the disease itself is debatable, with other possibilities ranging from yellow fever to the plague to typhus. Whatever the cause and the exact nature of the disease, the outcome is clear. Ultimately 222 Indians died, and by 1764 the island’s Indian population stood at 136. By the end of the century the island’s Indians were nearly extinct.⁸

Given this decimation Nantucket’s whaling merchants were forced to look farther afield for hired hands. Men were sought up and down the coast. This search for labor was aided by the improving profitability of the whaling industry, which filtered down to crewmen in the form of higher lays that were often more than the men could earn on land.⁹ Whereas in earlier years white men often looked askance at joining a whaling voyage as anything other than a captain or one of the mates, now, lured by the prospect of good money, such men were entering the industry in large numbers. By the close of the colonial period, according to historian Daniel Vickers, roughly 75 percent of the oarsmen and steersman on Nantucket ships were white.¹⁰

Blacks also became more of a presence on whale ships and shared in the bounty. One such whaleman from Nantucket, Prince Boston, certainly lived up to his name, earning the princely sum of twenty-eight pounds as a boatsteerer on board William Rotch’s sloop Friendship for a three-and-one-half-month voyage; a rate of pay, which Vickers points out, equaled what the captain of Britain’s largest slave ship was getting at the time.¹¹ But it was not this particular voyage for which Boston is most remembered but for another one on board the same ship.¹² In 1769 Boston returned to port after being at sea for six months. Shortly after docking, Rotch, an ardent foe of slavery, ordered Capt. Elisha Folger to pay Prince his lay directly, instead of giving it to his purported master, John Swain. This outraged Swain, whose father had first owned Boston’s family, and who claimed that he still owned Boston and was, therefore, entitled to the black man’s wages. Swain sued in the Court of Common Pleas to recover the ownership of Boston and his wages, whereupon the judges awarded Boston his freedom and the money. When Swain took his case to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Rotch vowed to hire John Adams as his lawyer and vigorously fight the appeal. The prospect of crossing swords with Adams, not to mention growing opposition to slavery in Massachusetts, was too much for Swain, who dropped the case, remarking that he was “discouraged by the feelings of the people and the circumstances of the country.”¹³ In relatively short order Nantucket, and then Massachusetts, abolished slavery.

As colonial whalemen built on their success, competition arose from a quarter close at hand. Britain made another run at establishing a whaling industry based in the mother country. The arguments fueling Britain’s renewed efforts were similar to those relied on in the 1720s and 1730s. Britain looked askance at relying on other nations for its whale oil and whalebone, worrying that such reliance made it more vulnerable to external shocks. Building and outfitting whaleships at British ports would benefit the local economy. And there was also the belief that the British whaling fleet would create a nursery of seamen that could be called upon to staff the navy in times of trouble, and given the number of wars and altercations that burdened the Empire, the need for seasoned seaman and a strong navy were particularly acute. The decline of the Dutch whale fishery provided another impetus to Britain. By the middle of the eighteenth century the great Dutch whaling fleet was but a shadow of its former self, the result of a combination of some particularly bad whaling seasons and the increased substitution of seed oil for whale oil in the manufacture of soaps and certain cloths, both markets in which the Dutch had loomed large. In view of all this, it seemed to be a particularly propitious time for the British to reassert themselves.

Parliament increased the bounty on whaleships fitted out in Britain to forty shillings per ton, and formerly skittish British investors rushed to collect. In the year just before the new bounty was put into place, only two British whaleships had been fitted out, but by 1756, after the bounty had been in place a mere six years, the number of ships had soared to more than eighty.¹⁴ Yet despite the best efforts of its government, the British whaling fleet failed to succeed.

Many factors in the 1750s and early 1760s conspired to thwart British ambitions.¹⁵ During the French and Indian War in North America, and its European counterpart, the Seven Years’ War, British whaleships were frequently captured by the French and their crews forced into the enemy’s service, jailed, or killed. Even when the British whaling fleet was relatively unscathed, it witnessed a few lean hunting years, which, combined with fluctuating and sometimes low prices for oil, prevented a boom. Moreover, British whalemen didn’t seem to have as much aptitude for whaling as did the colonists. But maybe the problem was not skill at all but the lack of proper incentives for the crew. Unlike the colonial whalemen, British whalemen, including the captain of the ship, were usually paid a fixed salary, not a lay. Without the prospect of getting a share of the profits, British whalemen could perhaps be forgiven for not throwing their all into making each trip a success. Flat rates rarely inspire zeal.

Given these considerable drawbacks, the British whaling industry was in a steep decline by 1763, fielding only forty ships, while the colonial fishery was vibrant and growing stronger. This latter circumstance was not lost on the British, who more than ever before needed whale oil and whalebone to meet demand. Thus the British government revised its whaling regulations in 1764, lifting some of the most onerous duties on colonial whale products. Prime Minister George Grenville was well aware that an unencumbered colonial whale fishery would eclipse the British, but he supported the change in regulations for purely pragmatic reasons. “Though we resign a valuable Branch of Trade in their favour,” said Grenville, “…the Preference is given upon truly national Considerations, when the inhabitants of America and of Europe are looked upon as one People.”¹⁶

In the colonies the positive feelings engendered by Grenville’s gesture did not last long. During the summer of 1765 Hugh Palliser, “Governor and Commander in Chief in and over the Island of Newfoundland, the Coast of Labradore and all the Territories dependent thereupon,” issued a declaration in which he restricted whaling in his domain. The declaration required whaleships “to carry the useless Parts of such Whales as they may catch, to at least three leagues from shore,” to avoid damaging the neighboring cod and seal fisheries. This meant that once the whale was brought to the beach and the blubber stripped, the carcass had to be towed back to sea. Whaleships were also “not to fish for any other [fish] than Whale on this Coast.”¹⁷ In Palliser’s mind these were good policies because they not only protected the cod and seal fishing grounds from being contaminated by rotting carcasses, but they also retained more of the valuable cod for Britain’s home-based fishing fleet.¹⁸

The colonists, however, had a decidedly less generous view of the declaration, and they were most upset by the command that they “fish for” whales only. Colonial whaling vessels that ventured north to the grounds of Newfoundland and Labrador were traditionally dual-use operations. When whales were scarce, the vessels fished for cod to fill their holds and cover costs. Palliser’s decree eliminated the cod safety net. Soon after the decree went into force its effects could be seen in colonial whaling ports, where ships returned half empty. The anger that colonial whalemen felt was amplified by the circumstances that had reopened the northern fishing grounds. One of Great Britain’s goals in the French and Indian War was to take Canada from the French. That goal was achieved in 1760, and much of the burden of fighting and defeating the French fell on the shoulders of colonial soldiers, who died alongside their British counterparts. With the French gone, colonial whaleships that had avoided Canadian waters during the war returned in force. Now, with this decree, the very waters that had been liberated with colonial blood had, for all practical purposes, been closed to the colonial whalemen. As a further insult to the whalemen, some colonial whaleships that were found to be in violation of Palliser’s decree were detained and boarded by British warships, whose crews not only treated the colonials with derision, but also confiscated their cod.¹⁹

Hoping to correct these injustices, colonial whaleship owners petitioned Parliament to repeal Palliser’s decree. London merchants who had a vested interest in the whaling trade with the colonies added their voice to the chorus calling for Parliament to act. Parliament, however, wasn’t alone in hearing these complaints. Palliser was listening, too. And in August 1766 he issued a supplementary decree, in which he acknowledged colonial concerns but hardly backed down. After claiming that he and the men under his command had always assisted and encouraged colonial whaleships that fished in the region, Palliser contended that his restrictions on whaling were no different from those that had always been enforced to protect the cod fishery, and that they would, for the most part, continue to be enforced. Then, having dispensed with the conciliatory approach, Palliser gave vent to what was really bothering him and issued a threat. He argued that colonial whalemen were “guilty of…plundering whoever they find on the coast too weak to resist them,” destroying local fishing operations, and “taking away or murdering the poor Indian Natives.” As a result Palliser argued that the “Coast is in the utmost Confusion, and with Respect to the Indians is kept in a State of War.” To put a halt to this Palliser proclaimed that the king’s officers would be stationed along the coast, where they would apprehend all such offenders and bring them “to me to be tried.” To ensure that the intended audience was sufficiently warned, Palliser ordered that his proclamation be posted in “the ports within the Province of Massachusetts, where the Whalers mostly belong.”²⁰

Parliament viewed the situation between Palliser and the colonists with growing alarm, and soon suspended the decrees until it could review them in full. But while the decrees had been in effect only a little more than a year, much damage was done. Faced with a hostile government to the north, and the inability to fish for cod, colonial whalemen simply ramped up their efforts to the south, where they had already been whaling with great success for years. In the lower latitudes, off the American coast, the whalemen were beyond Palliser’s reach and they could pursue their trade without interference. Any satisfaction that Palliser might have gained from having scared off the colonial whalemen didn’t last long. In 1767 Parliament repealed his decree, and soon whaleships from colonial ports were once again pursuing whales off the Canadian coast in increasing numbers.²¹

Dealing with Palliser was not the only obstacle confronting colonial whalemen during this period. In fact, wherever colonial whalemen fished, they faced the threat of attack. During the French and Indian War, whaling off Labrador, Nova Scotia, and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a treacherous occupation for any vessel with British connections. In 1756 and 1757 alone, six Nantucket whaleships were attacked and burned by the French, and the captains and crews were taken prisoner. The risk of capture was not restricted to the waters off Canada. Farther south, both French and Spanish privateers and pirates often took advantage of poorly armed and relatively slow-moving colonial whaleships. In 1771, for example, three whaleships from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, were taken by Spanish forces near Hispaniola, and their crews were sent home on another colonial whaleship.²²

Colonial whalemen not only faced danger from enemy ships but also from whales, as attested by the infrequent but hardly rare notices of whaling related deaths in newspapers. On July 26, 1764, for example, the Massachusetts Gazette reported that “Jonathan Negers of Dartmouth” was thrown overboard when a whale struck his boat and then pulled him under water, breaking his arm and thigh; he “died in a few Days, after enduring the most exquisite Pain.”²³ In 1766 the Boston News-Letter wrote about a sperm whale near George’s Bank that struck a whaleboat with such “violence” that the captain’s son was thrown high into the air, landing in the whale’s “devouring jaws.” The boy “was heard to scream when…[the whale] closed her jaws, and part of his body was seen out of the mouth, when she turned, and went off.”²⁴ Four years later John Claghorn, a whaleman from Martha’s Vineyard, was killed at sea, an event immortalized in a poem inscribed on a headstone marking the grave on Martha’s Vineyard, which contained the bones of John’s wife, whom he had married barely a year before leaving on his final voyage.

JOHN AND LYDIA

THAT LOVELY PAIR

A WHALE KILLED HIM

HER BODY LIES HERE²⁵

Not all encounters with attacking whales ended in death or even serious injury. In 1752 a nineteen-year-old oarsman on the Seaflower wrote in his diary how a harpooned whale went into a flurry and “made a Miserable rack of our boat in a moment.” Although a few of the men “were sadly puzzled under water,” none were hurt.²⁶ A Boston paper, in 1771, ran a story about a whaleboat that had been bitten in two by a sperm whale, which then took one Marshal Jenkins “in her mouth and went down with him; but on her rising,” spit him out. Despite Jenkins’s serious bruises, “he perfectly recovered.” Lest anyone question the particulars of this story, the article pronounced that the account came from an “undoubted Authority.”²⁷ Legend has it that impressions of the whale’s teeth were evident on Jenkins’s body for the rest of his life.

The elements themselves presented enormous danger, particularly in the Far North, where ice and the bitter cold were ever-present threats. One of the most horrific tales of this sort occurred in August 1775, when a whaleship, captained by a Mr. Warrens, made a startling discovery near northern Greenland. As Warrens’s ship was dodging ice floes, a crewmember spied another ship in the distance. Warrens and a few of his men lowered a whaleboat to investigate. The mystery ship bobbed gently among the swells and presented a ghostly appearance. Its masts were bare, its hull damaged and worn, and its decks covered with snow and ice. Warrens hailed the ship but received no response. On boarding, Warrens went down to the cabin and found a man, holding a pen, in repose in a chair at a writing table. The man was frozen stiff, his face covered by a thin green patina of mold. On the table before him lay the ship’s logbook, open to a page on which were written the following words. “November 11, 1762. We have now been enclosed in ice seventeen days. The fire went out yesterday, and our master has been trying ever since to kindle it without success. His wife died this morning. There is no relief.” On further inspection Warrens found other bodies throughout the ship, none of which had moved an inch for thirteen years. Although many have, with good cause, questioned the validity of this story, labeling it apocryphal at best, its message is incontrovertible.²⁸ The frozen north did and would continue to send many whalemen to an early grave.

 

BEYOND THE DANGERS, whaling voyages were often quite tedious. It might be weeks or months until a whale was captured, followed by days of feverish activity when the whale was processed, and then another down time, usually of considerable duration. This cycle could be repeated many times. To fill the time and relieve the boredom, men would whittle, talk among themselves, and do shipboard maintenance. They would also drink, courtesy of the captains who, desirous of a contented crew, brought libation along. Rum was the drink of choice, and the amount of rum on board depended, in part, on the latitude of the trip; The farther north the trip, the more rum would be needed to assuage the chills.²⁹

Another pastime was writing in journals, most of which were little more than collections of brief observations and random thoughts. Some, however, were more literary in nature, and there were a few in which the author and the medium melded to create truly surprising prose. One of the best examples of this was provided by Peleg Folger, a whaleman out of Nantucket, who began his journal in 1751, when he was eighteen years old, with the following announcement: “Many People who keep journals at Sea fill them up with some trifles or other; for my part, I [propose] in the following sheets, not to keep an over-strict history of every trifling occurrence that happens; only now and then of some particular affair; and to fill up the nest with subjects either mathematical, theological, Historical, philosophical, or poetical, or any thing else that best suits mine inclination.”³⁰ Like all whalemen Folger often thought wistfully of home, and on August 18, 1754, while on the sloop Phebe, en route to the whaling grounds in the Davis Strait, he wrote of those he had left behind. “So it is fine pleasant Weather and a charming day & the Glorious Sun Shines Pretty hot and if the weather is So Pleasant at home it is a charming day for the Young Ladies to go Meeting…. So Remembring all at Home…& wishing them all well & happy & prosperous…while we are Drinking Flip [a heated combination of beer, molasses or sugar, and rum] & Chasing Whales…till we once more meet together which I hope will not be Long.”³¹

Given the length of their voyages, colonial whalemen learned much about the rhythms and ways of the ocean. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin might never have gained fame for charting the Gulf Stream, that warm highway of water that slices through the Atlantic Ocean, had it not been for the knowledge gleaned from whaling expeditions. Franklin’s fame came not from being the first person to reveal this natural phenomenon. The Gulf Stream’s existence had been known for centuries before Franklin’s time, with a few very crude and partial maps of it having been drawn. And many mariners and explorers had witnessed, firsthand, the power of the stream to accelerate or retard a ship’s motion. But it wasn’t until Franklin, a great scientist as well as a great statesman, was asked to solve the mystery that the true scope of the Gulf Stream was first mapped.³²

The conundrum was as follows: Customs officials in London and the colonies had for years wondered why British packets traveling between Falmouth, England, and New York were often two weeks longer in transit than colonial merchant ships going from London to Rhode Island. The distances involved could not explain this major discrepancy. New York and Rhode Island were separated by less than a day’s sail, and before leaving England, the merchant ships had to first navigate the river Thames and the English Channel, while the packets, departing from the southwestern coast of England, could simply sail into the open sea. Even more confusing was the fact that the merchant ships were usually weighted down more heavily and manned by smaller crews than were packets, and therefore should have been the slower of the two. The baffled officials’ first impulse was to order that all packets go to Rhode Island instead of New York, in the hope that by merely changing the destination the transit time would be reduced. But before implementing this plan the officials turned to Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster general of the colonies, to see if he could determine what was happening.

As it turned out, this wasn’t the first time Franklin had thought about the strange current in the sea. More than two decades earlier he had puzzled over why voyages from the colonies to England were “much shorter” than those going in the other direction. He had commented that he wished he had “mathematics enough to satisfy” himself that it was “not in some degree owing to the diurnal motion of the earth.”³³ Taking up the issue once again in the late 1760s, Franklin was as baffled as the customs officials. Nevertheless he quickly dismissed the notion of sending the packets to Rhode Island instead of New York. At most such a move would likely shorten the trip by a day, not two weeks. Thinking that it would be best to gain insights from men who were most familiar with the Atlantic, Franklin paid a visit to his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaling captain. Folger thought that the difference in time was because the captains of the merchant ships, who were from Rhode Island, knew about the Gulf Stream, although not by that name, while the captains of the British packets did not. This knowledge, Folger argued, came from the pursuit of whales, which liked to travel at the edges of the Gulf Stream but not within it. In pursuit of these whales, Rhode Island captains would cross from one side of the stream to the other, and in so doing they experienced the mighty power of the great “river in the ocean.” Indeed, when colonial whalemen came on British packets in the midst of the Gulf Stream, they would often tell them that they were sailing against a current of up to three miles per hour and that they should exit the stream if they wished to make good time. Battling this current during a calm, Folger pointed out, meant that the ships would lose rather than gain ground; and even with strong winds on their side, as long as the ships stayed in the stream, any forward progress they made would be offset by as much as seventy miles per day. “But,” Folger told Franklin, the captains of the packets “were too wise to be counseled by simple American fishermen,” and they stubbornly refused to change course.³⁴

Hearing this quite sensible explanation, Franklin thought it was a “pity that no notice was taken of this current upon the charts,” and he asked Folger to outline it.³⁵ Folger did so, and he also added sailing directions on how to keep clear of the stream on voyages from Europe to North America. Armed with this valuable information, Franklin persuaded the colonial post office to create new maps and to distribute them to the captains of the British packets departing from Falmouth. To Franklin’s great dismay those captains continued to disregard the maps and any advice about the Gulf Stream, apparently still thinking that they were too wise to be counseled by Americans. Nearly 250 years later, the Franklin-Folger map has stood the test of time, and despite dramatic advances in our understanding of the oceans, it still offers a surprisingly accurate outline of the Gulf Stream’s path and speed.³⁶

The great expansion of the colonial whale fishery in the decades preceding the Revolution brought a flood of new investment, as many American merchants flush with income from other mercantile endeavors sought to build on their fortunes by adding whale products to their inventories. One such merchant was Thomas Hancock, who, in the early 1760s, after staying out of the whale-oil market for more than two decades, decided to jump back in. He was not alone.³⁷ At Thomas’s side, as both partner and adopted son, was his nephew, John Hancock. With the conclusion of the French and Indian War, and the subsequent rise in the demand for whale oil, both Hancocks believed that the time was right to reenter the business. Joining with other investors in 1763, the Hancocks fitted out a new ship, the Boston Packet, and filled it with just over two hundred tons of sperm and whale oil for the London market. Expecting to make a large profit on their first venture, the Hancocks were greatly upset when the trip provided only meager returns. There was plenty of blame to go around. The buyer hadn’t brought the oil to Boston quickly enough to take advantage of the strong winter market, when the need for illumination, and therefore the price for oil, was at its highest. The Boston Packet’s captain had sailed too slowly, arriving in London after other ships had already offloaded and flooded the market, causing prices to drop still further. And, finally, too much of the oil on board was common, low-value whale oil.

Instead of reconsidering their decision to sell whale oil, the Hancocks redoubled their efforts. They decided that to be successful, they needed to dominate the oil market. That meant beating the competition, and the best way to do that was to purchase as much oil as possible and get it to market first. In the spring of 1764 the Hancocks went on a buying spree for oil and whalebone. Their main competitor was William Rotch, and as the season progressed the buyers for the Hancocks’ and Rotch’s firms engaged in a bidding war that caused the price for oil and whalebone to rise to astronomical heights. The next stage of the competition played out on the docks, where the goal for each was to get their ships filled and to London first. The Hancocks crowed loudly when their ship set sail before Rotch’s ship. The stars, this time, seemed to be aligned in favor of the Hancocks, but they weren’t. Although the price for oil and whalebone in London was high, John and his uncle had spent so much obtaining these products that the sale price was too close to the purchase price, leaving little room for profit. Thomas Hancock was spared this bad news, however, having died just before the Hancocks’ ships arrived in London.

John Hancock, twenty-seven years old, was now the head of the house of Hancock and one of the richest men in America, on account of Thomas bequeathing him one hundred thousand pounds. Rather than reflect on his and his uncle’s flawed business strategy, John forged ahead, buying all the oil and whalebone he could, regardless of price. In short order Hancock had amassed an enormous shipment for England, at a personal cost of almost seventeen thousand pounds. Once again, however, the returns were disappointing. Without a sense of his own fallibility, and plenty of money left in his coffers, Hancock was prepared in 1765 to sally forth again in search of as much oil as he could buy, whatever the price, but this time shrewder heads intervened. The London agents for Hancock and Rotch, alarmed by the recent trends in the price of oil, knew that if the two merchants continued their bidding war, the net result would be the ruin of both. Thus the agents urged Hancock and Rotch to agree to keep oil prices in check, which the men did, and 1765 proved to be less tempestuous and less competitive than the previous year.

In 1766, however, John reverted to form, and decided to strike quickly and decisively. He opened his coffers, and the money flowed freely to any merchant who had product to sell. Outspending his competitors at every turn, Hancock further depleted his fortune by roughly twenty-five thousand pounds. Characteristically confident that his strategy had worked, Hancock told his London agents that they would be in a position to dictate the terms of sale because they would be in control of nearly all the supply.

The bad news arrived before Hancock’s last shipment had departed Boston. The price of oil on the London market was falling, not rising. Rather than being price setters, Hancock’s London agents were forced to take what they could get. What Hancock had never considered was that colonial whalemen were not the only whalemen on the seas. At the same time as Hancock’s cargoes were racing to London, so too were similar cargoes from Holland and Germany, as well as other whaling nations, including Britain. Thus, even if Hancock had managed to corner the market on colonial oil and whalebone, he still wouldn’t have enjoyed a monopoly on these products. Instead of dominating the market, as he had hoped, Hancock only succeeded in saturating the market to the point where the buyers held the upper hand and suppliers watched glumly as their profits vanished.

Hancock faced this situation with a measure of equanimity; still, he was hurt by this, yet another setback. And when his agents gently suggested to him that he have his oil “inspected” before it was purchased, to make sure of its quality and avoid disappointment in London, Hancock’s anger erupted. “What you mean, [Gentlemen,] I am at a loss to know. When I am in want of a Guardian, our laws will appoint one…. I will never submit to have a man sent over to inspect my business, to make me the ridicule of the merchants.”³⁸ This bluster notwithstanding, it is clear that the debacle of 1766 had dealt Hancock’s whaling-related ambitions a serious blow. The next year his shipments to London were cut by half, and in the ensuing years they continued to decline. Instead of becoming a whaling magnate, Hancock redirected his energies into politics—a focus that proved to be a boon for him as well as the nation he helped found.

The Hancocks, both Thomas and John, were not the only merchants to lose money on whaling during this pre-Revolutionary era. But for all the losers there were as many or more winners. Numerous ship’s captains and whaling merchants had become wealthy men and pillars of their communities. Whale products were an increasingly important part of local and international commerce. Colonial whaleships had visited the farthest reaches of the Atlantic Ocean and were already eyeing sights even farther afield. This success was truly astonishing considering that it had been barely 150 years in the making. In that relatively brief period of time, the American whaling industry had evolved from an idea into a major force in colonial life, which contributed to the increasing independence of the colonies. And the industry appeared to be poised to grow bigger still.