Chapter Twenty

FADING AWAY

PAINTING BY JOHN BERTONCCINI, SHOWING THE ARCTIC FLEET WINTERING OVER AT PAULINE COVE OFF HERSCHEL ISLAND, CANADA. THE SEVEN STEAM-POWERED WHALESHIPS ARE BANKED IN SNOW, AND THE CREWS ARE PLAYING SOCCER AND BASEBALL IN THE FOREGROUND.

PROUD AND VIBRANT AT MIDCENTURY, WHALING WAS BY THE LATE 1870s already becoming a relic of bygone glory and even a subject for nostalgic reminiscences. The dramatic rise of petroleum, the blazes lit by Confederate cruisers, the ineffectual sinking of the Stone Fleet, the crushing disasters in the Arctic, and the growing scarcity of the oceans great leviathans all combined to severely diminish the American whaling industry. A contemporary writer observed that, “Twenty or thirty years ago, on visiting the large whaling ports down east…the wharves were literally alive with business in discharging the arrivals of whale ships…. Visit those places now and you will find them almost utterly deserted.”¹ The whaling fleet, which had once numbered more than seven hundred strong, now shrank to fewer than two hundred.² Of the more than sixty ports that had sent whaleships to sea, only about a dozen remained, and many of them were just barely surviving. The whaling aristocracy—the men whose wealth was built by oil, baleen, and precious lumps of ambergris—increasingly found more productive ways to invest their money. The pages of the Whalemen’s Shipping News, once replete with stirring stories of great catches and new whaling grounds, now offered its readers a litany of pessimistic predictions for the future. But it was not yet time to pen the obituary of the industry. Another half century would elapse before the last wooden whaleship left an American port.

With every revolution of an oil well pump and every mile of gas line laid, whale oil’s days as a major illuminant faded further into the past. By the end of the nineteenth century, whale oil still burned primarily in lighthouses and churches, where spermaceti candles could be found adorning the altars. This left the lubrication of some machinery, the manufacture of a few textiles, and other niche applications as the last markets of any consequence where whale oil was of service. Declining whale oil prices exacerbated the industry’s predicament. The halcyon days of the mid-1850s, when American sperm oil commanded nearly two dollars per gallon and whale oil approached eighty cents were long past. In 1888 sperm oil sank to sixty-two cents per gallon, and then in 1896 it tumbled to a low of forty cents, and stayed below sixty-three cents until the outbreak of World War I, when it experienced a slight rise in price.³

Nevertheless, with each uptick in the price for oil, no matter how slight, whaling merchants tried to delude themselves that the worst was over and the industry was set for a rebound, but prices invariably slipped, and each year more whaling owners decided to abandon this obsolescent industry. Given how successfully they had been hunted in previous decades, whales were now harder to find, forcing whalemen to take longer, more expensive cruises to get a good catch. Finding insurance for whaling trips proved very difficult, and while it was one thing to send a ship on a multiyear journey in search of uncertain profits with the confidence that should something terrible happen the insurance policy would kick in, it was quite another to send forth a ship with no insurance policy at all. As insurers became less willing to bet on the whaling industry, whaling owners became less willing to bet on themselves. All this was compounded by the reality that the whaling fleet had become decrepit, in need of extensive repairs. It is no wonder, then, that many whaling owners opted out of the industry and turned their entrepreneurial attention to other business pursuits. As early as 1873 the Whalemen’s Shipping List commented on this phenomenon: “The continued purpose to sell whalers,” wrote the editors, “shows the judgment of those who have long and successfully been engaged in the business…that it has become too hazardous, and its results too uncertain to continue it, when capital is promised as safer employment, and surer rewards in enterprises on the land, and in our own city where the products of two large cotton mills equal very nearly the aggregate value of the imports of the [whale] fishery yearly.”⁴ Merchants who continued whaling cut costs to the bone in order to remain solvent, even if only marginally so.

Ironically, in 1911, at the moment when the whale oil market was on its shaky last legs, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was actually propping it up.⁵ In prior years, Standard Oil had purchased the entire sperm whale oil catch from the whaleships operating out of San Francisco. When the whaleships returned to port after the 1911 season, they had expected that the agents for Standard Oil would offer the customary fifty cents per gallon. This time, however, the agents, offered only thirty cents per gallon. The shipowners, shocked and angry, refused to sell, and they complained that such a meager price would not even cover the costs of their voyages, much less earn a profit. Take it or leave it, was the agents’ reply. And so the whalemen left it and moored their loaded ships in a nearby estuary, vainly hoping for a change of heart on the part of Standard Oil or the appearance of another purchaser. After a while some of the shipowners began selling their oil to businesses and housewives in the area. Thus the great sperm whale fishery, which had once lit the world, was reduced to a door-to-door retail operation begging for buyers.

 

WHILE SPERM AND WHALE OIL were losing their commercial appeal, however, baleen had suddenly come into vogue again. This versatile material was used in a great variety of products, including “whips, parasols, umbrellas,…caps, hats, suspenders, neck stocks, canes, rosettes, cushions to billiard tables, fishing-rods, divining-rods…tongue scrapers, pen-holders, paper folders and cutters, graining-combs for painters, boot-shanks, shoe-horns, brushes, mattresses,” and even as practice bayonets for cadets at West Point.⁶ But none of these uses accounted for baleen’s rise in the marketplace. Rather it was the vagaries of the women’s fashion industry that suddenly made baleen such a prized commodity. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the hourglass figure made a resplendent, if rather painful, comeback. Baleen had long given corset manufacturers the perfect blend of pliability and rigidity necessary to mold women’s bodies into the unnatural shapes demanded by the dictates of contemporary beauty. Now that the trendsetters of the age were telling women that impossibly pinched waists and uplifted bosoms were the in thing, demand for baleen skyrocketed. This generated a gold rush of sorts in the Arctic, as whaleships headed north in search of bowheads, whose mouths had the longest and most valuable baleen of all.

When the first whalemen hunted bowheads in the mid-nineteenth century, huge amounts of baleen were brought back to port, and although sales were brisk, prices stayed relatively low. Sometimes whalemen even ignored the baleen, letting it sink with the carcass, focusing instead on boiling oil from the blubber. Just a few decades later, however, the situation was reversed. Baleen was the prize, and oftentimes, after the baleen was secured, it was the carcass, blubber and all, that was let go. In 1870 baleen fetched 85 cents per pound; a decade later it had risen to $2.00. Then in 1891 it shot up to $5.38 per pound, and in 1904 it reached an all-time high of $5.80.⁷ Adding to baleen’s meteoric rise was the inescapable fact that bowheads, owing to excessive hunting, were on a crash course toward extinction. As the Boston Globe reported in 1889, whalebone was “becoming so rare and costly that the old whalemen are being drawn away from their firesides once more in the hope of making big money quickly in taking it. A quantity of bone that would not fill an ox-cart was sold last week for $1,800.”⁸ Whaling voyages were now being dubbed whalebone cruises, and with a large bowhead capable of providing upward of three thousand pounds of baleen, the profits for a really successful cruise were simply astounding, as was the case in 1898, when four whaleships returned with whalebone that sold for $750,000.⁹

The baleen frenzy forced whalemen to become more creative hunters. To kill bowheads one had to find them, which was increasingly problematic. By the end of the nineteenth century, whaleships were routinely traveling well to the east of Point Barrow, to the Beaufort Sea, in their search for new grounds. To go so far north and east, and then return south before the ice locked them in, was an almost impossible task for sail-powered whaleships. To solve this dilemma whalemen relied in part on auxiliary steam engines. With these coal-eating, smoke-belching workhorses on board, whalemen didn’t have to wait for favorable winds to get moving. They could go where they wanted and when they wanted, making it possible for them to find and kill whales and leave the Arctic quickly with time to spare. Ice floes and strong currents that had once been impenetrable obstacles to traditional whaleships were less of a problem for steam-powered vessels. Whalemen also used time as an ally in the search for bowheads. Since the problem was getting to and from the whaling grounds in a single season, then why not just stay in the Arctic over the winter and resume whaling when the ice broke up the following summer? This was not a new idea. Since the early 1860s American whalemen had been overwintering in Hudson’s Bay, and now the Arctic whalemen followed suit.¹⁰

Staying in the Arctic through the winter remained a major undertaking. Before leaving port, the ships were loaded with food and supplies, including coal and all of the materials that might be needed to make shipboard repairs. On the way to their final destination, the whalemen traded with Eskimos for fur-pelt clothing and often hired them as crew for the whaling season. Once they arrived on the grounds, hunting proceeded around the clock as long as the weather was good, and when the temperature dropped and the ice started its inexorable creep toward the shore, the whalemen hunkered down. One of the most important tasks was readying the ship and carefully positioning it in the ice to keep it from being crushed. The bow was pointed into the prevailing winds, many of the sails and yards were taken down, seams were caulked, water pipes emptied, and a stove set up in the engine room or one of the cabins for heat. A thick ridge of snow was tightly packed around the ship’s hull to push down the ice and cradle the ship so that it would rise when the ice expanded. The whalemen built enclosures on the deck for protection from the elements, gathered wood, and cut blocks of ice from inland ponds, which would be melted later for drinking water. They bought caribou, moose, polar bear, duck, and other game from the Eskimos, or hunted for it themselves. To feed the huskies, which were brought along as work dogs, the whalemen hauled whale carcasses onto the ice and hacked frozen steaks from them as needed.¹¹

Overwintering Arctic whalemen, along with a smattering of captain’s wives and children, established active communities, replicating many of the amenities of home. They played soccer and baseball, paid social visits to one another, held formal dances and dinners, and even staged plays. One wife who had recently returned from the Arctic said that she had, in classic Victorian parlance, “a delightful trip. The ship was comfortable, and we had a really splendid crew. Officers and men were kind and considerate of each other’s happiness, and the ship was like the home of a big family.”¹² But problems persisted. During the long, cold, dark months of winter, boredom and loneliness took a terrible toll, sometimes leading to depression or suicide. Many whalemen and Eskimos got drunk and rowdy, a situation that precipitated fights and in a few instances led to murder. Whalemen who wandered away from the ship, either to explore or desert, often paid for their trip with frostbite or their lives. And just as whalemen in the Pacific had had sexual relations with the natives, so too did the whalemen in the Arctic, with some taking mistresses and others leaving mixed-race children behind.

The rise of steam whaling and overwintering in the Arctic coincided with another dramatic shift in the whaling industry. This was when San Francisco eclipsed Hawaii as the premier whaling port in the Pacific, a turn of events that no doubt made Mark Twain very happy. In 1866, on assignment in Honolulu for the Sacramento Union, the thirty-year-old Twain, who had yet to achieve any significant literary fame, cabled back a piece in which he urged the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to “make an effort to divert the whaling trade [from Honolulu] to her city.” Pointing out that Honolulu “fits out and provisions a majority out of ninety-six whalers this year, and receives a very respectable amount of money for it,” Twain argued that “San Francisco might manage to get several hundred thousands a year out of the whaling trade if she could get it into her hands, or a million or so, should whaling again reach its former high prosperity.”¹³

Before writing the article, Twain spent a couple of weeks reading statistics and talking to people, all the while trying to figure out why it was “that this remote port, in a foreign country, is made the rendezvous of the whaling fleet, instead of the seemingly more eligible one of San Francisco, on our own soil?” The complaints he heard were many. It was harder to get crews in San Francisco; men could desert more easily on the mainland than they could on an island; the harbor was too small to host the fleet without the ships knocking into one another; in Hawaii the whaleman was “the biggest frog in the pond” and that everyone who came into contact with the whalemen in San Francisco tried to fleece them. But of all the reasons, the one cited most often was legal. “And they say,” Twain quipped, “finally (and then the old sea dogs gnash their teeth and swear till the air turns blue around them), that ‘there’s more land-sharks (lawyers) in ’Frisco than there’s fiddlers in hell, I tell you; and you’ll get ‘pulled’ [snatched up] before your anchor’s down!’ If there is a main, central count in the indictment against San Francisco that is it.”

Twain countered with arguments of his own as to why San Francisco should prevail. The main reason was the cost of labor. Normally whaling captains stopped at Hawaii not only to stock up on supplies but also to sign on local men to fill out the crew. As the sugar economy took off at midcentury and the Hawaiian plantation owners needed more laborers, they and other Hawaiians interested in spurring the local economy cast a covetous eye in the whalemen’s direction. Shouldn’t the Hawaiians who were manning the whaleships stay home instead to pick sugar cane? To encourage labor to flow in that direction, the plantation owners and their supporters persuaded the Hawaiian government to require whalemen to post bonds to gain the right to take Hawaiian crew members aboard. As Twain noted, these bonds, which had started at one hundred dollars, had reached three hundred dollars, and when one added other charges levied by Hawaiian ports, the cost per man reached six hundred dollars. Since a crew might ship as many as twenty or more Hawaiians, that could be a substantial added expense.¹⁴

Three years after Twain wrote his article, San Francisco’s claim became much stronger. On May 10, 1869, the final spike of the transcontinental railroad was driven at Promontory Point, Utah, creating a most effective conduit for trade between the West and East Coasts. From that point forward, whaling owners had the option of shipping their oil and baleen across the country in train cars, getting it there much faster and more cheaply than the traditional route of sailing around Cape Horn or transporting it via rail over the Isthmus of Panama.¹⁵ By the late 1860s whaling owners therefore began shifting their ships to San Francisco, and within a couple of decades this California port became, as one historian dubbed it, “the New Bedford of the Pacific.”¹⁶

 

DESPITE THE BALEEN FRENZY and the emergence of San Francisco as a major whaling entrepôt, the whaling industry continued on its downward spiral as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Contemporary articles mixed romantic images of the industry’s past success with dismal accounts of its current state.¹⁷ Nobody was building new whaleships. Instead these old workhorses were increasingly converted to different uses, left to rot at the docks, or broken up. One entrepreneurial outfit managed to benefit from whaling’s misfortunes by selling the “planking” of old whaleships as “driftwood for open fireplaces.” The wood was taken only from ships whose hulls had been sheathed in copper, for each piece was guaranteed to be “completely impregnated with copper through the action of…salt water.” As a result of the copper, when the wood burned it would “delight the eye” with a “brilliant” display of “changing colors…that breathes out beauty, witchery, mystery, all in one.”¹⁸

Still, even as the whaling industry was disappearing, there remained occasional hope that things would turn around. On September 14, 1902, the New York Times published an article titled, “Whaling Enjoys a New Life,” which painted a rather optimistic picture for the future of the industry, based on an upturn in the prices for sperm oil and the continued strength in the sales of baleen. “The market conditions now favor the whaling business,” the Times noted. “After it had seemed on the eve of extinction, it is again profitable and likely to be continued as a paying industry for many years, if not indeed to undergo something of a boom…. So long as large profits can be made whalers will continue to be built and sent to sea, thereby preserving perhaps the most romantic occupation to which the sea has given rise since pirates went out of business.”¹⁹ Three months later, as if to underscore the newspaper’s prediction, the whaleship Canton returned to New Bedford with 2,200 barrels of sperm whale oil valued at $44,000. But neither the predictions of newspapers nor the Canton’s profitable trip cajoled whalemen into thinking that the worst was past, and that their industry was set for a sustained rebound. As the Boston Globe reported on the Canton’s triumphant return, “This, and an occasional voyage, are exceptional, but they are not regarded…[in New Bedford] as of greater significance than the occasional flare from the dying embers in a fireplace.”²⁰ And indeed, the boom that the Times had predicted became a bust as oil prices dropped again, and, more important, the market for baleen evaporated.

Baleen’s fall from grace actually had begun many years before. The high prices for baleen toward the end of the 1800s had created an incentive to find cheaper materials for corset stays, and soon steel bands, celluloid, and other substitutes began to take over the task of reshaping women’s bodies. But while these substitutes were deemed good enough for inexpensive corsets, they simply would not do for those worn by well-bred women, whose corsets continued to be made with baleen supports, and whose purchases kept the demand for and price of baleen high.²¹ It was not just the availability of substitute materials that was eroding the market for baleen stays; medical concerns also played a role. For many decades, doctors had been warning women about the dangers of corsets. In 1868 the British medical journal The Lancet argued that “it is certainly much to be regretted that any Englishwoman would torture herself or her children by employing tight or unyielding [corset] stays or belts.”²² As the Edwardian age loomed, efforts were even made to outlaw corsets. In 1902, for example, a Parisian doctor urged his countrymen to pass a law that would make it illegal for women under the age of thirty to wear corsets, thereby keeping them from ruining their bodies. This doctor was, as an American newspaper article noted, “a bold man” who had the “courage of his convictions,” for “Paris is the stronghold of the corset; all the good ones come from there.”²³

Although doctors’ efforts persuaded some affluent women to cast aside their “whalebone prisons” and allow their bodies to regain a more natural form, it took a much more powerful force to get those women to take off their corsets en masse.²⁴ Around 1907 Parisian designer Paul Poiret “introduced,” as fashion historian Elizabeth Ewing points out, “a slim, up-and-down fashion line, banishing at a stroke the curved ‘S’-shaped figure and its accompanying melee of elaborate underwear.”²⁵ And with that, women all over the world literally breathed a sigh of relief. Whales, too, got a reprieve, for although the fashion trend Poiret initiated did not cause corsets to disappear, it did reduce their use dramatically enough to virtually eliminate the need for baleen stays. Whaling merchants watched these developments with alarm, and as baleen began its dramatic fall in value, a group of them banded together to create the “whalebone trust,” their goal being to purchase all the supplies of whalebone and then control its sale so as to drive prices up. This last ditch effort, however, ultimately failed. By 1913, the trust had disbanded and the remainder of America’s once mighty whalebone industry lay wrapped tight in neat bundles in warehouses in New Bedford waiting for a market that never resurfaced.²⁶

The surest sign that the American whaling industry had nearly run its course came six months after the outbreak of World War I in Europe, on December 29, 1914, when the Whalemen’s Shipping List published its final issue. “And a good journal,” wrote the editors in their farewell column, “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] Journal is to be hauled out on the beach. Its activities at an end.”²⁷ The Shipping List, first published in 1843, had given a keen and occasionally literary voice to the American whalemen for seventy-two years. The newspaper, which one writer has appropriately dubbed “the Wall Street Journal of the whaling market,” had witnessed the dramatic rise and fall of the industry.²⁸ It had chronicled the heady days of the golden age and watched as port after port entered the industry hoping to cash in, and then fell by the wayside. The Shipping List had reported on the rise of petroleum, the horrors of the Civil War, the dangers of the Arctic, and the industry’s struggle to survive in a modernizing world. It had seen the American whaling fleet grow from 675 to a high of 735 in 1854, and then begin its long decline, shrinking to 321 in 1870, 178 in 1880, 97 in 1890, 48 in 1900, and just 32 whaleships on the eve of its last issue.²⁹ In its early years the paper’s pages were full of information and advertisements related to the whaling industry, and little else; as the industry shrank so too did the portions of the paper that covered it. By the late 1800s the Shipping List regularly included filler pieces reprinted from other publications that had absolutely nothing to do with whaling, and during the paper’s last few decades such pieces often made up the bulk of the copy. A reader of the Shipping List in 1912 and 1913, for example, would have found articles on the dangers of guzzling liquor, African ants, and the National Civic Federation’s plans to encourage working women to take more vacations.³⁰ Given this trend, it is perhaps fitting that the swan song issue of the Shipping List offered not only its own requiem but also an entire column of jokes. Thus, after the reader had become thoroughly depressed by the issue’s miserable whaling news, he could simply turn the page for some levity.

 

AS AMERICAN WHALING sailed into oblivion, the whaling industry was acutally flourishing overseas, with Norway leading the way. While the Americans relied heavily on traditional hunting techniques—sailpower, whaleboats, and hand-propelled harpoons—to pursue an ever-dwindling number of right, humpback, and sperm whales, the Norwegians took full advantage of innovations in whaling to hunt not only those species but also the still relatively plentiful blue and fin whales, and other rorquals, which the Americans had largely avoided because they were considered too fast and too strong to capture. Foremost among the innovations the Norwegians adopted was the whaling cannon, which had been perfected in the 1860s by their countryman Svend Foyn. This fearsome weapon shot a massive four-pronged harpoon that was connected to a thick wire cable and tipped with a bomb that exploded on impact. By mounting such cannons on the bows of highly maneuverable, steam-powered chaser boats, the Norwegians could easily track down the fast-swimming rorquals. And if the harpooner aimed true he could kill even the largest of whales with a single shot. For those whales that were not dispatched immediately, the Norwegians had a backup plan to make sure that the whale didn’t wrench itself free of the harpoon with one strong tug and escape or, worse, sink to the bottom as rorquals had a tendency to do. Using a system of pulleys and springs on the chaser ship, to which the harpoon’s thick and strong cable was attached, the Norwegians were able to minimize the strain on the cable, letting out wire when needed and reeling it back in as the whale tired. To overcome the problem of sinking, the Norwegians relied on powerful winches attached to the cables, as well as lances that injected air into the carcasses to make them more buoyant.

Beyond capitalizing on hunting abundant whales, the Norwegians also processed whales more efficiently than the Americans. While the latter focused on rendering oil from blubber, the Norwegians used industrial-size boilers to extract oil from the entire whale—blubber, meat, and bones—and then, rather than discard the carcass, they used it for meat and ground what was left it into fertilizer, bonemeal, and feed for livestock. The resourceful Norwegians also used whales to produce glue, vitamins, and the strings for tennis rackets. And with the introduction of hydrogenation in the early 1900s, which minimized the pungent smell and taste of whale oil and solidified it into fat, the Norwegians found yet another outlet for their whale oil in the production of high-quality soap and margarine, the latter of which in particular was in great demand elsewhere in Europe.³¹

Norway was not the only country to take up where the Americans left off. In the early twentieth century Japan and Russia came into their own as whaling powers, and as the century progressed, these and other countries, including Germany, Holland, and Britain, forged a new path for the whaling industry to follow, one that would foster the growth of enormous fleets of efficient factory whaleships that would in a single year kill more whales than the Americans, at the height of the golden age, had been able to kill in nearly a decade.³²

World War I provided a short respite for the fast-disappearing American whalemen. War-induced shortages of raw materials along with the fact that spermaceti was the highest-quality lubricant for battleship engines because of its ability to withstand intense heat and pressure, caused the price of sperm whale oil suddenly to climb. The small American whaling fleet took advantage of this shift in demand, and posted a few highly profitable cruises. The Viola of New Bedford, for example, returned from the South Atlantic with 1,300 barrels of sperm oil worth about 85 cents per gallon, for a total of $35,000. The Viola had been doubly lucky because in addition to the oil, it also brought back one-hundred-twenty-one pounds of ambergris, worth $37,000.³³ Success such as this led some to talk of a turnaround in the whaling industry. “If the whales all aren’t blown out of the water on account of being mistaken for submarines,” wrote the editor of the Newark News, “it is likely that a revival of the old-time whaling industry may follow the war, or even be witnessed before the war ends.”³⁴

Although American whalemen might have been buoyed by such predictions, they were also very nervous every time they left port. Enemy submarines didn’t pose much of a threat to whales, but they most definitely were a serious threat to American whaleships, two of which returned to New Bedford in early July 1918, just four months before the war’s armistice, after a close call in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Hatteras. According to Capt. J. T. Gonsalves, a submarine surfaced near his whaleship, the A. M. Nicholson, on June 5, and fired a shot across his bow. Believing it to be an American submarine, Gonsalves raised the Stars and Stripes, whereupon the submarine submerged. When the submarine resurfaced a short while later, Gonsalves raised his flag again, and this time the submarine raised one, too—only it was German. An officer on the deck of the submarine ordered Gonsalves to “heave to” and to place his men, twenty-five in all, in the Nicholson’s whaleboats and come alongside the submarine, which he did.

“What is your vessel doing?” yelled the German officer.

“Catching sperm whales,” Gonsalves replied.

“Catching any other fish?” the German asked.

After assuring the German that he was not, Gonsalves pleaded, “For God’s sake…don’t sink this vessel. I am a poor man and it will ruin me, as I am a big owner in her.” The German laughed and reported his conversation to the captain, who soon came topside and called to Gonsalves, “Don’t you know that it is a poor time to buy vessel property when people are at war?” As Gonsalves was telling the German that he had bought the ship “before the war started,” another New Bedford whaleship, the Ellen A. Swift, came into view, and the German asked Gonsalves if he knew what ship it was and what it was doing. When Gonsalves identified it as a fellow American whaleship, the German, apparently satisfied, waved his hand dismissively and said, “You get aboard your vessel, and get home as quick as you can, and tell the other vessel to go in with you, and don’t let me catch you out this way again.”³⁵ With that both whaleships cut short their season and headed back to port, cursing their bad luck but thankful that the Germans hadn’t blown them out of the water.

The war also framed whale meat in a new light. A nation that had never considered the possibility of eating such meat was asked to do so now. Shortages of beef, pork, and mutton led the government to advocate the virtues of whale meat, claiming that by eating it we could help win the war.³⁶ In February 1918, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History held a “conservation luncheon,” during which whale meat was prepared by the head chef of Delmonico’s Restaurant, and served to individuals “prominent in scientific, business, and professional spheres.” The menu featured “Whale pot au feu,” and “planked whale steak, a la Vancouver.” As for taste, Federal food administrator Arthur Williams pronounced the whale meat, which many of the guests compared to venison or roast beef, to be “about as ‘delicious a morsel’ as the most aesthetic or sophisticated palate could possibly yearn for.” The reporter claimed that the speakers at the luncheon “were almost unanimously in favor of having whale meat substituted for beefsteak and urged its immediate adoption as a feature of the national war diet.”³⁷ In addition to eating whale meat to benefit the war effort, some were championing whale meat as a means to end hunger. After returning from a trip to Japan where he learned that the Japanese ate large quantities of whale meat, famed naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews urged Westerners to do the same. “If,” Andrews wrote, “the American and European people could be educated to the point of eating canned flesh of animals which individually yield as much as 80,000 pounds of whale meat, what a wonderful food supply would be within reach of the poor of our great cities.”³⁸ Despite such varied pleas, and assurances as to the excellent taste of whale meat, Americans didn’t rush to trade in their beef, mutton, or pork for whale steaks.³⁹

The end of the war also brought an end to any talk of a comeback of the American whaling industry. New Bedford was by this time America’s only remaining whaling port, boasting fewer than a dozen whaleships, which made occasional and relatively brief forays into the Atlantic Ocean.⁴⁰ The profits were slim, and as the price of oil fell from wartime highs, one by one the old whaleships ceased whaling. Long called the Whaling City, New Bedford no longer lived up to its name. The wharves to which thousands of whaleships had once tied up now stood forlorn, as were the docks and quays where thousands of casks brimming with oil and forests of baleen once blanketed nearly every inch of available space. The coopers, the caulkers, the blacksmiths, and the outfitters were now nearly all gone. And then, for a brief moment, as if part of a mirage, the great days of whaling in New Bedford returned—on the silver screen.

On September 25, 1922, New Bedford’s Olympia Theater hosted the world premiere of Elmer Clifton’s silent movie, Down to the Sea in Ships, a love story that was played out against the backdrop of the golden age of whaling circa 1850.⁴¹ The movie begins with New Bedford Quaker and whaleship owner Charles W. Morgan mourning the loss of his only son, who had died at sea. In his grief, Morgan turns to his daughter, Patience, and makes her promise that she “will never be any but a whaleman’s wife!” At the same time that this promise is being exacted, Jake Finner, the mate on Morgan’s prize ship, the Charles W. Morgan, and his “partner in nefarious schemes,” Samuel Siggs, hatch a plan whereby Finner will take over the ship and sail it to the California goldfields, while Siggs, melodramatically in the finest tradition of the silents, courts the beautiful Patience and makes her his wife. Claiming that he is a Quaker and using false letters of introduction that said he had entered the whalemen’s fraternity by harpooning a whale, Siggs gets hired in Morgan’s counting room and soon asks Morgan for permission to call on his daughter. Morgan consents, but when Siggs asks Patience for her hand, she demurs, and then, before Siggs can continue the pursuit of his prize, the “boy next door,” Thomas Allen Dexter, whom Patience had adored as a child, returns from college and their relationship rekindles.

Not wanting Patience to wed Dexter, Finner and Siggs kidnap him and throw him into the hold of the Morgan, and by the time he awakens and is untied, the Morgan is well out to sea. The situation on the Morgan quickly deteriorates as Finner takes over the ship, then tells the stunned crew that they are heading to California. The crew divides in two, with half of them wanting to go home and the other half wanting to follow Finner. With Dexter in the lead, the men who long for home gain control of the ship. Before heading back to New Bedford, however, the men decide to go whaling, and that is when Dexter, who has been promoted to boatsteerer, becomes a true whaleman by harpooning a sperm whale.

Meantime, back in New Bedford, crestfallen that the love of her life has suddenly left, Patience finally gives her consent to marry Siggs. On the appointed day Patience and Siggs enter the Quaker meeting house to present themselves to the congregation. But just as the supremely sad-looking Patience is about to conclude her oath of marriage, Dexter, whose ship has literally and figuratively just come in, breaks through the meeting house window, pummels Siggs, and reunites with his love in a warm embrace. The movie concludes with a scene showing Patience and Dexter playing with their newborn son, while old man Morgan beams down at them with pride.

The audience at the premiere of Down to the Sea in Ships couldn’t have been more pleased with the movie, especially since many of them had played an integral part in its production. When director Elmer Clifton decided to make the movie, he knew it had to be filmed on location. And when he approached the city of New Bedford, its citizens, foremost among them the descendants of the “whaling aristocracy,” not only formed the Whaling Film Corporation to help finance the venture, but many of them also acted in the film and shared their period homes and clothes to give the film more authenticity. “Their purpose in acting in and partially underwriting the film was,” as one contemporary reporter wrote, “for the honor of old New Bedford, and that the present generation might see the romance and glamour of the past.”⁴²

In addition to actors and historic homes and clothes, the movie also needed whaleships and whalemen. And here, too, the city came through. Two New Bedford whaleships, the Charles W. Morgan and the Wanderer, were hired for duty, with the former being used to shoot deck and interior ship scenes, and the latter for sailing scenes on Buzzard’s Bay.⁴³ These two ships, however, were not enough. A movie that depended so heavily on the theme of whaling had to show a whaleship hunting and processing whales. That role went to the fishing schooner Gaspe, which was chartered in Gloucester, and brought to New Bedford where it was fitted out as a whaleship, replete with newly added davits from which to hang the whaleboats. Veteran whaling captain Fred Tilton mastered the Gaspe on its cruise to the coast of Haiti, with a crew comprising mainly of “husky New Bedford youths,” none of whom had been on a whaleship before, and all of whom, according to Tilton quickly became “exceptional whalemen.”⁴⁴

On the way to Haiti, Captain Tilton taught Raymond McKee, the actor who played Dexter, how to throw a harpoon by practicing on a school of porpoises, and by the time they arrived on the whaling grounds, McKee was good enough so that he didn’t need a double to do his harpooning for him. The whales were plentiful, and the men of the Gaspe soon killed and acutally processed a hundred-barrel sperm, which Tilton claimed to be the largest sperm whale he had ever seen.⁴⁵

At the beginning of the movie, words appeared on the screen informing the audience that “Whalers continue to go out from New Bedford on similar voyages to the one portrayed in this picture. The brawny boatsteerer still throws the hand harpoon.” While this was true at the time, many of the New Bedforders sitting in the darkened Olympia Theater undoubtedly were thinking as they read those words, Not for long. They knew that the movie they were about to see was more of an epitaph for a virtually extinct industry, enlivened by artistic license, than it was a reflection of present-day realities.