One such pursuit was scrimshandering, the craft of using a jack-knife or needle to engrave designs into bone and ivory obtained from whale teeth and walrus tusks.

This scene was carved by Edward Burdett and is in the collection of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. For although maritime life was arduous and sometimes frantic, a sailor or passenger over the course of months at sea could find time for reflexion and creativity and turn their hand to a variety of artistic pursuits. The second type of record was the unofficial journal, which might be maintained by anyone on board a ship. The first was the logbook, an official, often tedious account kept by captains and first mates, which held administrative and financial information required by a ship’s owners. And so, incentivized by these convincingly healthy markets, well-off Nantucket merchants outfitted single-masted sailing vessels with dedicated crews and pursued their prey northward into the deeper waters.ĭeeper-sea voyages made for longer expeditions, meaning that whalers might spend up to four years at sea, and as a consequence, two sorts of written and illustrated records emerged. The collapse of the Dutch North Atlantic fisheries, combined with increased demands for oil in Britain and America, had driven oil prices upwards from around eight pounds sterling per barrel in 1725 to 10 pounds in 1730. But by this point, Nantucket’s whaling market was booming. By 1730, the waters around Cape Cod and Nantucket had been overfished and the number of whales woefully depleted. This method of shore-fishery was gory, lucrative, and unsustainable. The blubber was boiled for oil, which was cooled, poured into casks, and sold alongside scrubbed whalebone at markets in New York, Boston, and farther afield. The dead leviathan was then hauled back to the bay, where blubber and baleen were flensed from its carcass and transported to try-houses. If a boat drew even with the whale, then the animal would be harpooned and, following a chase, lanced and brought down. Once a whale was spotted, a crew of up to six men, including indentured Wampanoag and Nauset Native Americans, would board 20-foot-long cedar boats in pursuit of their prey. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library/Public Domain Library of Congress Geography and Map Division/Norman B. Nantucket looking particularly whale-like in a map from the 1780s. Their migratory route took them within a few miles of Nantucket. Sightings might take place any time from November to April as during these months hordes of right whales-so called because they were the rightwhale to catch-returned from a summer of feeding in the far reaches of the North Atlantic.

Initially, whaling took place close to Nantucket’s shores, where viewing platforms from which whales could be spotted were erected. In its early days, Nantucket whaling looked very different from the hub of activity that Melville, writing from his own experience, described. Such was its success that in 1851 Herman Melville in Moby-Dick marveled, “What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! … thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders.” This declaration proved prophetic, as for some 200 years Nantucket dominated the global whaling market. Here, they watched whales breach the Atlantic’s surface and pronounced the ocean “a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread.” So they looked to the sea (according to legend, quite literally) in 1690, when town selectmen climbed a sloping hill overlooking the southern coast. The word Nantucket is a Native American one, meaning either “far-away land” or “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one.” And the colonizers soon found it thus-too small and infertile to accommodate the number of agricultural plots necessary to support their growing population. They built homes, Quaker meeting houses, and cattle farms, swiftly and forcibly colonizing the island, which was until then inhabited by 2,500 Wampanoag Native Americans. The first European settlers arrived at Nantucket, an isolated island some 30 miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1659. This story originally appeared on The Public Domain Review, and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Whale artclip