Whaling in the United States

Women's corsets, umbrella and parasol ribs, crinoline petticoats, buggy whips and collar-stiffeners were commonly made of whalebone.

Public records of exports of these three raw materials from the United States date back to 1791, and products of New England whaling represented a major portion of the American GDP for nearly 100 years.

[6] Prior to this, they chased pilot whales ("blackfish") onto the shelving beaches for slaughter, a sort of dolphin drive hunting.

Well into the 18th century, even when Nantucket sent out sailing vessels to fish for whales offshore, the whalers would still come to the shore to boil the blubber.

[16] Since a whaleman's pay was based on his "lay", or share of the catch, he sometimes returned from a long voyage to find himself paid next to nothing, or even owing money to his employers.

Richard Boyenton of the "Bengal" only earned six and a quarter cents after five months at sea, but occasionally sailors got lucky and brought home a significant amount of money after just a couple of voyages.

After his romantic interlude among the Typees on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, Melville joined another whaler that took him to Hawaii, from where he sailed for home as a crewman on USS United States.

Many whalemen (including captains and officers) abandoned the crew in San Francisco there, leaving abundant ships deserted in the bay.

The first New England whalers rounded Cape Horn in 1791, entering the Pacific Ocean to hunt the cachalot or sperm whale.

At first they only fished off the coast of Chile, but by 1792, the sperm whalers had reached the coast of Peru, and George W. Gardner extended the fishery even further in 1818 when he discovered the "offshore grounds," or the seas between 105–125° W and 5–10° S.[21] In 1820, the first New England whaleship, the Maro, under Captain Joseph Allen, hunted sperm whales on the Japanese ground, midway between Japan and Hawaii.

In 1829 the New England fleet numbered 203 sail; in five years time it more than doubled to 421 vessels,[23] and by 1840 it stood at 552 ships, barks, brigs, and schooners.

From 1846 to 1851, the trade averaged some 638 vessels,[25] with the majority coming from such ports as New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts; New London, Connecticut; and Sag Harbor, Long Island.

By far the largest number sailed from New Bedford, but Nantucket continued to host a fleet, even when they needed to use "camels," or floating drydocks, to get over the sandbar that formed at the mouth of the harbor.

Thomas Welcome Roys, in the Sag Harbor bark Superior, sailed through the Bering Strait on 23 July 1848, and discovered an abundance of "new fangled monsters," or later to be known as bowhead whales.

During the American Civil War, Confederate raiders such as the Shenandoah, Alabama, and Florida captured or burned 46 ships, while the United States purchased forty of the fleet's oldest hulls.

[31] At first, the steamers only cruised during the summer months, but with the discovery of bowheads near the Mackenzie River Delta in 1888–1889 by Joe Tuckfield,[32] ships begin to overwinter at Herschel Island, off the Yukon coast.

[34] During the peak of the settlement, 1894–1896, about 1,000 persons went to the island, comprising a polyglot community of Nunatarmiuts, Inuit caribou hunters, originating from the Brooks Range; Kogmullicks, Inuit who inhabited the coastal regions of the Mackenzie River delta; Itkillicks, Rat Indians, from the forested regions 200 miles (320 km) south; Alaskan and Siberian ships' natives, whaling crews and their families; and beachcombers, the few whalemen whose tour of duty had ended, but chose to stay at the island.

[36] New England whaling declined due to the mid-nineteenth century industrial revolution and the increased use of alternative fluids like coal oil and turpentine.

[5] The 1979 Packwood-Magnuson Amendment to the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 extended the federal whaling ban to foreigners who chose to come within 200 miles of the U.S.

The participation of Black and indigenous whalers in the industry was an example of the agency that these groups acted upon in the midst of oppression, land dispossession, indentured servitude, slavery, disease, and discrimination.

[14] Black and indigenous men were instrumental to the success of the whaling industry contributing their labor, and were able to make lives for themselves and their families, even when subjected to the smatterings of racism that were present on board.

[43] Black and indigenous men often made up a large portion of the whaling vessels in turn leading to the economic success of many captains.

Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, was a black man who escaped from slavery and found work on a whaling vessel before his death in 1770.

[47] In a recovered narrative of a Narragansett man who met his father on a whaling vessel, "Charles", a name used to protect his identity and acclimate into dominant culture, describes how his grandfather accumulated debt, and needed to sell land to Americans, weeding out the community of Narragansett people, leading them to find work at sea.

During the early 1960s, a small whaling fishery was developed near Astoria, Oregon as a collaboration between a local fishing family and the processing firm BioProducts.

A single-ship operation was successful during the early 1960s, making a profit through sales of meat to local mink farms and whale oil to NASA.

A large number of crewmen on American, British, and other countries vessels that participated in whaling in the 19th century created scrimshaw.

Scrimshaw is the practice of drawing on whale teeth or other forms of ivory with various tools, typically sailor's knives or other sharp instruments.

It is believed that some instruments used by sailors to perform scrimshaw included surgical tools, as with the work done by whaling surgeon William Lewis Roderick.

Other forms of scrimshaw included whalebone fids (rope splicer), bodkins (needle), swifts (yarn holding equipment) and sailors' canes.