Chapter IX: Whaling

Bold, hardy men, with blooming age,
Our sandy shores produce;
With monstrous fish they dare engage,
And dangerous callings choose.

From a ‘Whaling Song,’ by Dr. John Osborn, of Sandwich

Whenever a man speaks of whaling nowadays, he is pretty sure to mention New Bedford in the same breath; and naturally enough, because New Bedford, by almost exclusive devotion to killing whales, brought the business to a degree of perfection that stands unsurpassed. But New Bedford learned the art from Nantucket, and Nantucket learned it from Cape Cod. The fame of the Cape whalemen had reached the ears of the Islanders and excited their admiration as early as 1672, for they held out flattering inducements to one James Lopar if he would move from the Cape to Nantucket and teach them how whales should be killed. For some reason the scheme fell through; but another Cape-Codder, Ichabod Paddock, of Yarmouth, answered a second call about 1690, and carried the light to the Island.

It was a dim and feeble ray, however, compared with the subsequent science of New Bedford, for never has an art developed more brilliantly--or for that matter more logically and inevitably--than the art of whaling. The first Cape-Codders to profit by whales never left dry land; they were in fact not whalemen at all, but farmers, who, quite by chance, found dead whales washed up on the beach, and stripped them of their blubber. Attending to whales of one kind and another that came ashore on the Cape was a pleasant diversion from clearing woodland and cutting salt hay; it was a more frequent pastime, too, than one would suppose, for whales were incredibly abundant. A school of them, it may be remembered, nearly drove Captain Jones out of his senses by playing about the Mayflower as she was standing in for Provincetown Harbor, for he had no harpoons and was in the tantalizing position of the man without a gun. Fall and winter were the best seasons for whales, and by a happy chance these were the off months for farmers, who were able to reap the full benefit of this peculiar crop without neglecting their farms. After the Cape was settled, few whales, gallied at finding themselves in the shoal water of either the Sound or the Bay, ever thrashed themselves to death in vain.

Frequently, instead of a single specimen, a whole school of blackfish (a species of small whale) was stranded on the beach, and then there was need of lively work if all the blubber was to be boiled down before the air became too fragrant for human nostrils. But sanguinary as the job was, the townspeople looked upon it as a lark, particularly since the profits were immediate; and before long some began to wish that whales would come ashore often enough to provide steady work in trying them out. At this point the seed was sown that was to turn the Cape-Codders into whalemen.

The disputes that arose over the dead bodies of stranded whales were many and bitter. Riparian rights at their simplest have always been a Sargasso Sea for lawyers, and when this intricate question, instead of being allowed to drift along in the usual state of uncertainty, was brought to an immediate issue by the arrival of a school of blackfish on a particular stretch of beach, the fat was in the fire with a vengeance. The man who found them said, ‘Findings are keepings; if it hadn’t been for me, nobody would have known they were there.’ The town authorities said, ‘The oil is the town’s, because the shore where the fish stranded is within the town limits.’ Plymouth said, ‘The profits belong to the Colony, for without our consent you would never have had any town.’ The King said, ‘You are all my subjects;--therefore the oil is mine.’ [See notes to Chapter IX.] Here, indeed, was work for lawyers; but there were no lawyers, and there was no time to argue, for such donations of the tide do not improve with age. If the townspeople were wise, therefore, they first tried out the oil and then sat down to see if they could find out whose it was.

The various towns reached different solutions. In 1653, Sandwich, basing its argument on the fact that the beach was common land, decided that the proceeds should be divided equally among the householders of the town. This Utopian solution was too good to last, for Plymouth soon decided that so much liberty was not good for young towns, and demanded one hogshead of oil from each whale. There was a vague idea in the Plymouth brain that this oil was the property of the Crown; but how much of it ever went to lubricate the wheels of government in England does not appear. As a matter of fact, the proceeds from almost every drift whale were disposed of differently. In 1682, for example, a school of blackfish dotted the Sandwich beach, and Jo Holway and some others began immediately to strip them and boil down the blubber. The town then woke up to what was going on and voted to allow Holway and his friends to buy from the town what oil they had already made; the rest was to be sold to others for the benefit of the town. The next year four men were granted a monopoly on all drift whales in Sandwich for ten years, provided they gave half the oil to the town, and deducted from their own half the barrel per whale that must go to Plymouth. Eastham and Truro decided that drift whales were blessings sent by the grace of God, and so dedicated a part of the proceeds to help pay the minister. Each town made up its mind for itself what to do with its share of the proceeds of these valuable carcasses and changed its decision as often as it saw fit--which was about as often as a whale was stranded.

As long as whale oil had any market value, and long after the Cape was sending elaborately equipped whalers to all the seven seas, drift whales continued to be prized and were welcomed ecstatically by the amateur whalemen at home. The cry ‘A whale in the Bay!’ was enough to empty the hall during a town meeting; every able-bodied man rushed to the beach with the same speed that citizens to-day show in leaving church at the alarm of a forest fire. There is a story of a Truro youngster who abandoned some cows he was driving to pasture and, unaided, captured and killed a porpoise that he saw floundering about on the flats. The boy held him by the tail to prevent his thrashing his way into deep water, and then, after dispatching him with a knife, stripped off the blubber with the skill of a professional. All was fish that came to the townsmen’s net provided it contained a gallon of oil, and every chance prize--from the lone porpoise of the Truro boy to the record school of two thousand blackfish taken at Provincetown in 1884--was drained to the last drop. By 1850 findings were keepings; in that year Captain Daniel Rich cut his mark in the sides of a school of seventy-five blackfish on the beach between Wellfleet and Truro and thereby established an indisputable claim to them. Within twenty-four hours he had sold them as they lay for $1900. That the Standard Oil Company has not altogether changed the Cape-Codder’s attitude toward drift whales was illustrated in July, 1928, when eighty blackfish came ashore at Eastham. The lucky man who found them collected twelve dollars apiece from parties in New Bedford, who hurried to Eastham and took the ‘melon’ from the head of each blackfish. Since the ‘melon’ contains oil which, when properly tried out, brings upward of sixty dollars a gallon, it is safe to say that New Bedford lost nothing by the transaction. On the other hand, a lone dead finback, sixty-five feet long, which drifted into Barnstable Harbor in the autumn of 1928, had to be towed to sea at the town’s expense lest he pollute the water and spoil the clams.

Not every school of blackfish, however, or every lone whale that was sighted offshore, was unlucky enough to be stranded on the flats. More than once the citizens who lined the beach, waiting for the prize to blunder into shoal water, were chagrined to see it turn seaward and vanish. One or two such experiences changed the townspeople from watchful waiters into pursuers. Their tactics at first, at least as regards blackfish, were not very aggressive, for most of them were farmers and more dexterous with a pitchfork than with a harpoon. Their method was to surround the fish in a fleet of small boats and, by beating the water with the flat of their oar blades, to drive them ashore in a panic. This maneuver was an exciting one to execute and it produced good results. It is easy to imagine a fleet of dories half a mile off shore, spread out fanlike beyond a school of blackfish, and slowly closing in with yelling and splashing until the fish struck the sand. Then the fun was over and the work began, the proceeds usually being divided equally among the boats that had taken part in the pursuit.

It must be clearly understood that these men were in no sense of the word whalemen. They were not professionals but amateurs. None of them owned any whaling gear, or would have known how to use it if he had owned it. To them a harpoon was a dangerous weapon--not a tool of their trade. They were no more whalemen than a man who shoots a skunk in his henyard is a hunter. But some of the youngest had the makings of whalemen in them. They had tasted the wine of pursuit, and it was an insidious vintage; it urged them to try a deeper draught by cruising round the Bay and harpooning whales.

This was called shore-whaling, and though the men who practiced it never went on long voyages, and though the Cape-Horners who came afterwards regarded them much as deep-water shipmasters regarded coasting skippers, they were nevertheless real whalemen, and experienced the same thrills of pursuit and capture as their successors who cruised to Davis Straits or the South Pacific. Furthermore, they had the advantage of being able to operate their farms in spring and summer. The tactics of the shore whalemen were simple. They watched from the shore until they saw a spout or the rounded backs of a school of blackfish. Then they shoved off in clinker-built cedar whaleboats, and the chase began. If they came up with the monster and succeeded in planting an iron, they played him in the regular way, paying out line around a post in the bow of the boat as long as they could, and, as a last resort, heaving overboard a drag--or heavy buoy--with the end of the line made fast to it. When finally they came close enough to the exhausted whale to reach ‘the life’ with a lance, the excitement was over and the toil began, for the carcass had to be towed ashore--sometimes a distance of a good many miles. When their boat grounded, they dragged the carcass up the beach with heavy tackle rigged to a capstan. There the blubber was boiled in the try-yard near by, and the bone was scraped and cleaned.

As long as the supply of local whales held out, shore-whaling on the Cape was profitable and immensely popular. Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Truro reserved whaling grounds for the use of their citizens. No doubt other towns made similar provision. Chatham, at any rate, offered to exempt the Reverend Daniel Greenleaf, of Yarmouth, from all taxation if he would settle somewhere in Chatham and follow shore-whaling. But the minister apparently decided that empty souls in Yarmouth were more important than empty oil casks in Chatham, for he did not move.

Most of the young men, after a taste of this sport, found farm work dull, forsook the plough for the harpoon and lance, and lived in whale-houses alongshore. Two hundred Barnstable men were shore-whalers in 1715 for three months of every year. And no wonder, for sometimes stranger creatures than blackfish challenged their skill. In 1719, a sea-monster appeared in Provincetown Harbor and defied the combined efforts of a whole fleet of shore-whalemen; B. Franklin (uncle of the celebrated Benjamin) has left a racy account of its appearance:

Boston, Sept 28, 1719. On the 17 Instant there appear’d in Cape-Cod
harbour a strange creature, His head like a Lyons, with very large
Teeth, Ears hanging down, a large Beard, a long beard, with curling
hair on his head, his Body a bout 16 foot Long, a round buttock,
with a short Tayle of a yellowish colour, the Whale boats gave him
chase, he was very fierce and gnashed his teeth with great rage when
they attackt him, he was shot at 3 times and Wounded, when he rose
out of the Water he always faced the boats in that angry maner, the
Harpaniers struck at him, but in vaine, for after 5 hours chase, he
took to sea again. None of the people ever saw his like befor.

Provincetowners, it would seem, were still fond of strong waters! Captain John Thacher, whose duty it was to draft recruits for the French and Indian Wars, had great trouble in rounding up the young bloods who were shore-whaling. In a letter to Governor Stoughton he says: ‘All our young and strong men are employed in whaling and mostly have their rendivous remote from the towns, and if they see any man coming towards them, presently mistrust; make a shout and run into the thickets.’

So jealous was each town of its whaling rights that trespassers were instantly detected and either warned off or forced to pay for the privilege of fishing the local waters. By 1711, the barren stretches of Sandy Neck in Barnstable had caught the eye of strangers as being a good base for whaling stations. Some of them squatted there, to the displeasure of the Proprietors, who promptly voted that ‘every stranger, both English and Indian, that shall come and settle at Sandy Neck to go on whaling voyages ... shall pay for their fire wood each person three shillings, at entry.’ The amount of fuel consumed in the try-houses must have been enormous, and this was one of the many factors in the demolition of the Cape forests.

Not content with challenging strangers who came poaching whales, the authorities of the various towns kept a sharp eye on the activities of their neighbors. Thus, in 1758, Eastham considered measures for preventing Harwich enthusiasts from pursuing whales at Billingsgate. Drift whales, too, were still bones of contention, particularly when they came ashore near town lines. A contemporary jingle states the situation exactly:

‘Down on East Harbor bar there lays a cow and a calf;
Provincetowners swear they’ll have the whole;
Truroers swear they shan’t have but half.’

But such difficulties were easy to settle compared with the disputes that arose over whales that had been wounded in the Bay by men from one town, had escaped, and had afterwards died and been washed ashore within the limits of another. Did the oil belong to the boat’s crew that struck the whale; to the town where the body had been found stranded; to the man who found it, or to the owner of the strip of beach where the carcass came ashore? Here, for example, is an affidavit signed by a Barnstable man who found himself trying to harpoon a whale off Truro:

Dec. 7th, 1725; The declaration of John Lewis in Barnstable.--I,
being at sea near a place called Hogg’s Back, with the boat’s
company, I then and there struck and wounded a whale fish, she lying
soothing under water;--my iron took her upon the rising of her bulge,
but she drawing my iron made play, and was soon struck and wounded
by James Bearse, and after awhile drawing his iron, she still making
play, was in a few moments struck by Thomas Thatcher, and they and we
soon killed said whale.

JOHN LEWIS
Attest, JOHN SNOW--_Town Clerk_

Clearly this affidavit was connected with a dispute over the ownership of the whale, and Lewis and his friends were indeed in a dilemma. It was out of the question to tow the carcass all the way to Barnstable; if they brought it ashore at Truro, the townsmen would probably warn them off or charge rent for the beach. And Lewis’s predicament was only one of many like it. The only solution in such cases was to equip boats with casks to hold chunks of blubber that could be cut up at sea and carried home to be tried out in the local try-yards. This practice was followed for a time, and from then on it was only a step to the last stage in the development of whaling. Men went farther and farther from shore in bigger and bigger vessels that carried try-works built into their decks, until at last cruises of four years were not uncommon. Scarcity of whales now drove men to sea oftener than disputes. The constant activity of hundreds of shore-whalemen had chased the monsters out of the Bay so effectively that by the middle of the eighteenth century only an occasional whale was sighted. Shore-whaling was a thing of the past--it was now a question of deep water or nothing. The Cape chose deep water.

But the vanishing of the shore-whaleman’s livelihood must not be taken lightly. It was a very real disaster to scores of Cape families, some of whom had neither the capital nor the courage to follow the whales to sea. In 1739, only about half a dozen whales were taken in Provincetown waters, and a number of families decided to move away. Ten years later, the citizens of Yarmouth were so impoverished by the failure of the whale-fishery that they were barely able to give the minister an increase in salary they had promised him. It was only by the titanic exertions of the wealthiest and most energetic citizens on the Cape that money was raised in each town and fleets equipped for deep-sea whaling.

Truro was the pioneer in this hazardous business. In 1758, one of her citizens, Captain Henry Atkins, cleared from Boston for Davis Straits in the ship Whale, and filled in the gaps between whales by trading with the natives. He soon found that this was by far the quickest and cheapest way to get bone, for in return for ten shillings-worth of trinkets they gave him whalebone valued at one hundred and twenty pounds! Other Truro whalemen cruised along the shores of Africa, and two of them, Captains David Smith and Gamaliel Collins, won fame that reached the ears of the British Parliament when in 1774 they pursued whales as far south as the Falkland Islands. Not content with this bleak outpost, others soon rounded the Horn and pursued sperm whales in the uncharted waters of the South Pacific.

Wellfleet, during the years preceding the Revolution, devoted almost her entire energy to whaling. Nearly every man in town was a whaleman--and the result of thus putting all the eggs in one basket was that the declaration of war in 1775 and the immediate blockading of the Cape ports utterly prostrated the town. The citizens could not pay the Provincial tax and, in a petition to the General Court for exemption, they declared that nine tenths of the townsmen had been engaged in whaling and were now left with no source of income. Exaggerated as this statement may appear, it is borne out by statistics, which show that four hundred and twenty men and twenty or thirty vessels were thus employed at Wellfleet up to the beginning of the war. The local honors were divided about evenly between Captain Jesse Holbrook, whom the British employed to teach them the art, and Colonel Elisha Doane, who, having learned in his youth how to handle a harpoon, spent the latter years of his life financing the voyages of others and reaping the profits--with such success that he died one of the richest men in Massachusetts. After the war, Wellfleet tried to launch her fleet again; but none of the citizens had capital enough to build new vessels, and the old ones had perished during the seven years of disuse. In 1802, her fleet had shrunk to five schooners, and these set sail half-heartedly; they lacked the confidence that is necessary for success, and were quite as much fishermen as whalers, carrying salt and fish lines as well as whaling gear.

Taken by and large, Provincetown has done most for Cape whaling. Provincetown, indeed, ranks with Truro as a pioneer in the business, and continued it long after the last Truro whaleman was in his grave. The town was virtually depopulated when, in the middle of the eighteenth century, twelve whalers were equipped and manned in its harbor and set out simultaneously on long voyages. The Revolution gave the Provincetown whalemen pause, but did not stop them altogether, for after the war, they started out again with a determination unequaled anywhere else on the Cape, and succeeded in bringing the business back to a prosperous basis. The Civil War dealt it another blow; several of the whalers burned by Confederate cruisers were owned in Provincetown. But even this--a heavy loss for so small a town--did not kill the business. With high courage, the citizens began once more to sharpen their harpoons, and in 1876 they had seventeen whaling vessels at sea. Thanks to the energy of such men as Captain John Cook, the Cape flag was flying on the whaling grounds until 1916. During the last century about one hundred and seventy-five whaling vessels have hailed from Provincetown.

The history of these three towns, Truro, Wellfleet, and Provincetown, comprises the bulk of the history of the Cape long-voyage whale-fishery. But no town was immune. Eastham was represented until the eighties by Captain Edward Penniman, who commanded half a dozen different barks out of New Bedford, and, on retiring, handed the torch to his son Eugene, who continued until the business died. Falmouth has a goodly list of vessels and commanders to her credit, the most celebrated of whom--Captain Silas Jones of the Awashonks--will demand further attention presently. Barnstable now and then sent out a whaler, and was credited with two at the beginning of the Revolution. During the Civil War, Semmes burned one of Sandwich’s two representatives, the brig Ocean.

But not even Provincetown and Wellfleet, in their palmiest days, were in a class with Nantucket in its time. Long before the Revolution the pupil had far outstripped his teacher, and the men who a century before had sent to the Cape for a whaling instructor were now in a position to instruct Cape-Codders. Forty men left Harwich for the new whaling headquarters in 1760.

Yet the Cape whalemen, before they yielded the palm to Nantucket, and afterwards as well, were leading lives of adventure in remote seas that made them something more than mere killers of whales. They were not always successful, either. Captain Solomon Sturgis, for example, who sailed his sloop out of Barnstable on a whaling voyage in 1741, was no match for a Spanish privateer who seized his vessel but let the chagrined Captain escape. Then there was the question of storms. As a matter of fact, whalemen were better off in bad weather than their more aristocratic brethren of the merchant service, for their barrel-bottomed, apple-cheeked hulls, built for capacity and without a thought for speed, were as good dirty-weather sailing vessels as have ever been built. Unlike the clippers, they were not heavily sparred; the crew had no towering skysails or moonrakers to struggle with, and the Captain never hesitated to snug down at night, for there was just as much danger of sailing past a school of whales in the dark as there was of not coming up with one. So the whalers rode out in comfort many a storm that would have brought the overcrowded spars of a merchantman crashing down on the heads of the overdriven crew.

But no ship is safe at sea, and even the stout barks of the blubber-boilers were sometimes in trouble. In 1881, Captain Caleb Hamblin, of Sandwich, commander and half-owner of the brig Henry Trowbridge, was returning from a combination whaling and sealing voyage below Cape Horn. In the tricky latitudes of the West Indies, a hurricane tore down on his vessel and swept her decks clean, carrying both masts over the side. When the storm was over, Captain Hamblin rigged jury masts, set what sail they could carry, and worked his way to the Azores--a distance of about a thousand miles. This achievement is important, not because it is unusual--hundreds of shipmasters have done as much--but because it answers an accusation that is sometimes heard, to the effect that whalemen were not sailors. If this means that they did not spend their time making Flemish eyes or hoisting coach-whip pennants, the statement is true. But such frills were refinements of the sailor’s art, not essentials of it. When it came to sending down a sprung spar, setting up new shrouds, or reeving off running rigging in a high sea, the whalemen were as good as any British East-Indiaman. They had to be, in fact, for their cruises took them for months at a time to unfrequented corners of the world far from any ports where they could put in for repairs. The best they could hope for was the shelter of an atoll where the natives were friendly and would let them work in peace. At worst they could set up new spars and rigging at sea--as Captain Hamblin’s crew did in the South Atlantic. Resourcefulness beyond the usual resourcefulness of sailors was the prerequisite for the captain of a whaler; and it is fair to say that resourcefulness is as valuable an asset to a sailor as knowing how to make a Flemish eye.

Like many of the wives of whaling captains, Mrs. Hamblin, herself the daughter of a shipbuilder, went several voyages with her husband, and after the two came ashore for good and settled in Falmouth, she had something more interesting to talk about than the outrageous behavior of the neighbors. She had been round the world, had had one child born at sea in the cabin of the Eliza Adams, another in New Zealand, and a third in Australia. Hers was the horizon that bounds the seven seas; she liked Falmouth, but she knew that Falmouth was not the world. Captain Hamblin, too, was more than a seaman. Early in his career, while second officer of the Congress, he found himself half in and half out of the mouth of a sperm whale that was fifty feet under water and headed for the bottom. The whale had a harpoon in his side, and before the monster had carried out all the line, Hamblin managed to take a couple of turns with it around his hands. It jerked taut; the whale was captured; and the young whaleman, half drowned, his arms pulled almost out of their sockets, and with a wide gash the length of one leg, was hauled into the boat--ready for the next encounter. It is dangerous to generalize about human nature, but it is a reasonable guess that such a man, when he retires and settles down at home, is not likely to go to law if an overenthusiastic young marksman breaks his henhouse window with a stone.

Silas Jones, of Falmouth, was twenty-one years old when, in 1835, he started on a four-year cruise as third mate of the whaler Awashonks. After the ship had been a year or two at sea, Captain Coffin hove to in a squall in the lee of Baring’s Island in the South Pacific. It had not been his intention to trade with the natives of the island; in fact, according to the chart it was uninhabited. But as soon as the squall blew over, a number of canoes put off from shore and headed for the Awashonks. The chief, followed by a group of naked savages, clambered over the rail, and the crew began to barter with them for cocoanuts and breadfruit while the Captain and Mr. Gardiner, the first mate, went below for dinner, leaving Jones in charge. Scrap iron was the currency the natives chiefly desired; soon they had turned over all their fresh fruit for some bits of this metal, and with the usual curiosity of primitive peoples, were nosing about the deck examining everything with the greatest interest. The gleaming blades of the cutting-in spades, neatly ranged in their racks, seemed to fascinate them particularly; they tried the edges with their thumbs, their eyes wide in admiration.

The Captain, who had finished his dinner and come on deck, good-naturedly showed the natives how they were used on whales. Their excitement and wonder grew; they began to jabber in their outlandish dialect and more canoes appeared alongside. Some of the newcomers were armed, and young Jones, who felt vaguely uneasy, gladly obeyed the Captain’s orders to disarm them before they came on deck. While he was thus engaged, he heard a whoop from behind, and turned to see the natives making a rush for the spades. They got most of them and in the twinkling of an eye had sliced off the Captain’s head, killed the first mate, and were starting operations on the crew. The second mate dived overboard and was never seen again. This left Jones in command. He jumped into the midst of the fight, grabbed a spade from one of the islanders and thrust at him with it so hard that the blade was embedded in the woodwork of the deckhouse, and he was left unarmed. He attacked one native with his fists, but was confronted by three more, one of whom had a spear. Realizing that in another second it would be lodged in his breast, Jones leaped down the open hatchway into the forehold. Here he picked up one or two recruits, and they made their way aft below decks and forced an entrance to the cabin.

Here there was a moment’s respite, which was used in loading all the firearms the ship carried, and from the shelter of the cabin Jones and his followers, one of whom was desperately wounded and another useless from fright, directed a musket fire that for a moment silenced the yells of the savages, who were now masters of the deck, with their chief standing in childlike pride at the helm, though he knew as little of its use as a baby at the wheel of a motor-car. He was invisible from the cabin, but, realizing that some one was monkeying with the steering-gear, and alarmed lest the ship might go aground, Jones and one of the crew fired at the same moment through the cabin roof in the direction of the wheel, and by great luck killed the chief. This was the turning-point of the fight. Some of the natives took to the canoes; others stood undecided, their thirst for blood still unquenched. It was the strategic moment for a sally, and Jones led the way on deck with a loaded musket. He found that the battle was over. The last of the savages had gone over the side and was swimming for shore in the wake of the departing canoes. The vessel was promptly headed away from this ‘uninhabited’ island, and Jones, keenly aware of his new responsibility, divided his time between sewing up the gashes of his men and navigating his ship. After fifty days he dropped anchor in Honolulu Harbor and turned the Awashonks over to the American Consul.

This bloody experience did not discourage Silas Jones. He continued to go on whaling voyages and commanded various vessels out of Falmouth until after the Civil War. One of them was the Commodore Morris, whose figurehead--a grim representation of this maritime celebrity--at present occupies a prominent position in Mr. Hutchinson’s bookstore in New Bedford. Jones himself, after leaving the sea, directed the fortunes of his native town of Falmouth with the same resolution and vigor which he had shown as a lad in shooting the Baring’s Island savages off the deck of the Awashonks.

Another Cape-Codder from the opposite end of the peninsula came within an ace of having his vessel, the bark Parker Cook, stove and sunk by a fighting whale. This was Captain Cook, of Provincetown. In 1850, while cruising in the Atlantic, he lowered for a whale, and two irons were planted in the monster. Like a flash he turned, rising almost out of water, and capsizing the boat. In the mêlée, a turn of line caught the boatsteerer’s leg and almost cut it through. The whale then attacked the Parker Cook, and rushed straight for her bow, hitting the cutwater with such violence that it was driven deep into the creature’s head. The impact knocked the men on deck flat, and the vessel staggered from stem to stern as if she had struck a derelict. The whale suffered more than the bark, however, and though he tried another charge, his ardor was quenched, and Captain Cook dispatched him with three shots from the bomb-lance. The crew of the wrecked whaleboat were picked up, and all hands took savage satisfaction in extracting one hundred and three barrels of oil from this ferocious old bull. The Parker Cook put in to Fayal for repairs to her cutwater, and here the injured bo’s’n received more skilled treatment than was to be had on board.

Whaling captains had to turn surgeon oftener than other shipmasters, for their voyages were measured in months instead of in weeks, and they spent those months in the most hazardous business that has ever been followed by man. Irrespective of what injuries whales themselves might inflict, the constant use of formidable weapons like cutting-in spades, harpoons and lances in the crowded quarters of pitching boats and rocking decks, produced frightful wounds with a frequency that even the unluckiest merchant mariner was spared. And when it came to Arctic cruises for bowheads and bone, the Captain was obliged to treat frozen hands or feet so often that it became almost a part of the routine.

Arctic whaling was, in fact, a separate science, and a grimmer calling it is hard for a steam-heated generation to imagine. It combined all the dangers of sperm whaling in southern latitudes with the perils of polar exploration; and it was besides the bitterest test that human patience can be put to, for the voyages sometimes lasted four years, and of this time only about six months could be spent in whaling; the remaining forty-two consisted of living aboard a vessel frozen fast in an ice-bound harbor and trusting to native hunters to supply venison. Captain John Atkins Cook, of Provincetown, whose book describing his northern whaling voyages has been recently published, is the last of the Cape-Codders who has followed this calling. What can have induced this indomitable whaleman to make voyage after voyage to the Arctic it is hard to imagine. Not the hope of riches, certainly, for a man of Captain Cook’s abilities could have made more money in any one of a dozen callings at home. The only explanation that suggests itself is that the love of encountering and overcoming hardships--of succeeding where many fail--perhaps, too, the lure which the very desolation of the North exerts on some men, kept Captain Cook’s vessel headed time and again for the frozen latitudes of Bering Strait. In addition to his other troubles, the Arctic whalemen had problems of navigation to solve, of which the merchant sailor knew nothing. Here is what Captain Cook himself says on this topic:

These voyages in the Arctic seas present to the master some of the
most intricate problems of navigation that the world has ever known.
As the Arctic navigator, leaving San Francisco in February looks to
the eastern horizon and sees the last blink of the Farallone Light
(off Golden Gate) he realizes that in his lonely watch at night or
when steaming along among the loose ice off the coast of Alaska,
and in search of whales in the Far North among the icefields, that
light is the last guide he will have, and that no beacon by night or
buoys by day are to be seen by him to warn of treacherous shoals or
other dangers. No: he must sail without them and depend upon his past
experience to bring him out safely.

Captain Cook had his full share of surgery to perform during his many Arctic voyages. On one occasion a Provincetown boy, Fred West, sailed with the Captain and was soon made third mate. During the winter at Herschel’s Island, West obtained the Captain’s permission to go inland on a hunting expedition with another member of the ship’s company. While he was taking a loaded gun from the canoe, the trigger caught, and young West got both barrels in the upper arm. He was brought back senseless and almost dead from pain and loss of blood. Captain Cook and the captains of three other whalers took him to a hut on shore and gave him a tumblerful of raw whisky and a whiff of chloroform. Then they amputated the arm so successfully that, in spite of its loss, West continued to follow the sea in command of coasting schooners until 1923, when he was drowned off the Delaware Capes.

In 1908, Captain Cook turned his attention to sperm whaling in Southern waters, and had the brigantine Viola built for the purpose. In this graceful vessel--which looked like a yacht--the Captain and his wife set sail for a two years’ cruise, and made successful voyages in the South Atlantic and along the African Coast until 1916. This business, strenuous though it was, seemed child’s play to Captain Cook after the rigors of the Northern icefields, and his voyages for sperm were more like pleasure cruises than work. In 1916 he retired for good--the last of the Cape Cod whalemen.

It is easy, dazzled by the glamour of far voyages to palm-fringed islands, to be deceived into false sentimentality toward this great dead industry. Many an up-state farmer’s boy, lured by the will-o’-the-wisp of romance, left his plough in the furrow and went whaling--to end his days a beachcomber, disillusioned and beaten. It was a grim game, with the dollar always at the helm. But the financial side of it, with all its ruthlessness and with all that it led to--hazing men into deserting with money due them; overcharging for shoddy clothing from the slop chest and underfeeding until the hungry crew looked greedily on slices of broiled whale meat--all this was not more destructive to men’s fiber than herding together in a forecastle, compared to which the forecastles of clippers were palatial, a miscellaneous crew composed of round-eyed lads from the Vermont hills and crime-hardened degenerates who ought to have been in jail. Men were not made to live by themselves; wherever circumstances force them to do so, they seek, like water, the level of the lowest and most vicious among them. The forecastles of whaling barks produced these circumstances as perfectly as they have ever been produced in the world, and our fresh-cheeked youngster, who embarked on a voyage as immaculate as a man can be, stood a fine chance of emerging from his four years’ association with the dregs of the water-front, as hardened a character as they.

‘She’d a crew of blacks from the Cape Verde Isles
That spoke in Portagee,
With men from Norway, Finland too,
And the shores of the Irish Sea.

‘She’d whites from the rocky Yankee farms
Mixed up with Sandwich brown,
With a skipper who hailed from New Bedford,
And a mate from Westport Town.’

Beside learning vice, the young whalemen learned violence. A three months’ voyage from New York to San Francisco in a clipper ship, with a ventilated deckhouse for the crew, was enough to beget frequent mutinies; what, then, can we expect from a forty months’ cruise in a bobtailed blubber-boiler? Mutinies there were aplenty, and not without good reason did whaling captains sometimes sign on five mates to help them hold the lid on. Cook went through one Arctic winter with a mutinous crew--the only wonder is that crews in those latitudes ever refrained from mutiny. The sperm whalemen opened the petcock from time to time by calling at Honolulu, or Tahiti, or Guam, where men might desert instead of killing an officer, and where natives could easily be procured as replacements. But captains often neglected this safety valve, and stayed at sea as long as there was an unbroached barrel of salt horse in the hold, or a gallon of ropy water in the butts. Under such conditions, is it surprising that Captain Nathaniel Burgess, of Bourne, who made his last voyage with a crew that represented nine nationalities, called discipline the whaling captain’s most serious problem?

Time has blurred the sharp and cruel outlines of life on a whaler. In our enthusiasm over those who returned victorious, we are likely to forget the many who were left behind, broken and polluted, to drag out the last years of their lives on the beach of a coral island. To-day there are those who lament the passing of this undoubtedly picturesque, though certainly ruinous industry. But the world is a better place without long-voyage whaling than it ever was with it. Keenly as we appreciate the skill and self-reliance and valor that it taught some of the men who practiced it, we cannot forget the merciless malignity with which it shattered the rest. The wreck of the Wanderer, New Bedford’s last whaler, in the summer of 1925, was a happy event for the march of civilization.