How many whaling boats are there

According to Forbes , New Bedford, Massachusetts the center of the 19 th century whaling industry had the greatest concentration of wealth in America at the time, all of it stemming from whale oil. The folks on board the ship doing the work weren't exactly rich, however—and were unlikely to get rich through whaling. As The New Bedford Whaling Museum explains , whaling ships paid the crew through a system of "lays," which were essentially a percentage of the profits.

The master of the ship typically got the largest share, about one-eighth of the profits. And of course if they found no whales or couldn't extract enough oil to make the trip profitable, it's entirely possible the crew would get nothing. Worse, as The National Park Service explains , crew members had to pay for extra provisions from what was essentially a company store on board the ship.

An unlucky crew member who had to purchase replacement clothes or other supplies might end up actually owing money to the ship when the trip was done. The 19 th century and every century before wasn't exactly known as a paradise of race relations. It was the century that gave us a literal war over whether or not to get rid of slavery , after all.

But whaling ships were floating monuments to diversity and even some equality. For one thing, Native Americans had been whaling off the coast of America for centuries before Europeans arrived. They made ideal crew members and could be found on most ships of the time. Black Americans and other ethnicities were welcomed on board as well, and many used a whaling trip to earn money to buy their freedom when they returned.

And as The New Bedford Whaling Museum notes , life on board a whaling ship was not only remarkably diverse, it was also much more equitable than on dry land. While racism didn't exactly disappear, crew members enjoyed the same privileges and did the same work no matter their race. Although Blacks often received the lowest pay, in their daily life on board they were largely treated fairly.

The whaling industry was male-dominated. The crew of a whaling ship was exclusively male throughout most of the industry's history , meaning that anyone who signed on with a whaler might go months or even years without seeing their wife and children, or any other women.

Unless you were the captain or master of the ship, in which case it wasn't all that unusual to bring your family along with you.

In fact, it was so common that historian Joan Druett notes the whalers had terms for a ship with a woman on board: "Petticoat Whaler" or "Hen Frigate. As The Long Island Boating World explains, it was precisely because whaling ships could be out to sea for months or years at a time that many captain's wives chose to travel with their husbands.

The alternative was to live alone, sometimes in poverty. For many of the crew, the captain's wife might be the only woman they interacted with for years at a time. Movies and novels try hard to make the whaling life seem like a great adventure. In many ways it was, of course—you traveled the world, saw incredible things, and learned more about the varying levels of personal hygiene people consider appropriate than you probably ever wanted to.

But in most ways, whaling could be incredibly boring. That's because, as The New Bedford Whaling Museum explains , life on board a whaling ship was actually extremely dull and boring. It wasn't uncommon for whaling ships to go months without seeing a whale—months during which the crew had little beyond routine duties to keep them occupied. While the work of hunting and slaughtering a whale was extremely hard, there was always plenty of downtime in the age before radio, smartphones, and video games.

As the National Parks Service notes , whalers passed this time by playing games and singing, as well as carving scrimshaw from whale bones.

There was also plenty of fighting among the crew—exacerbated by alcohol. Historian Joan Druett notes that although liquor was often prohibited, many crews managed to smuggle it on board, leading to plenty of drunken brawls when the boredom and isolation got to be too much. If you've read a bit about the whaling life of the past and thought that despite the boredom, low pay, and extreme isolation it still sounds kind of romantic, you might reconsider when you learn just how absolutely gross the work of slaughtering a whale actually is.

Feet, hands and hair, all are full. The biscuit you eat glistens with oil, and tastes as though just out of the blubber room. The knife with which you cut your meat leaves upon the morsel, which nearly chokes you as you reluctantly swallow it, plain traces of the abominable blubber.

Every few minutes it becomes necessary to work at something on the lee side of the vessel, and while there you are compelled to breath in the fetid smoke of the scrap fires, until you feel as though filth had struck into your blood, and suffused every vein in your body.

From this smell and taste of blubber, raw, boiling and burning, there is no relief or place of refuge. And there was more. If the head was of a manageable size, it was brought on deck; if not, it was rigged to the side of the ship, nose down. Right, bowhead, and fin whales were relieved of their baleen, while sperm whales had the spermaceti, a substance contained in a head organ known as the case, bailed out in bucketfuls.

In fact, the light given off by candles manufactured with spermaceti was considered so superior to that of other types of candles that it served as the benchmark for all artificial light: One candlepower, as defined by the English Metropolitan Gas Act of , was equivalent to the light of a pure spermaceti candle of one-sixth pound burning at a rate of one hundred and twenty grains per hour. The spermaceti-based unit survived until an international committee of standards agencies redefined the measure in to conform with the luminous properties of the then recently invented electric carbon filament bulb.

Finally, with all the blubber processed, all the spermaceti bailed, and the decapitated corpse left for the sharks and scavenging birds, the crew set about giving the ship a thorough scouring. He successfully destroyed around 20 of those ships that attacked him and escaping all but the last.

According to famed explorer and writer Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Mocha Dick finally met his downfall after observing a mother whale whose calf had just been killed by whalers.

The mother whale first attempted to herd her calf away from the whalers after it had been harpooned, but soon the calf went belly up. When the whale realized her calf was dead, she turned on the whalers and attempted, unsuccessfully, to destroy their ship. Instead, she herself was harpooned and mortally wounded before she was able to strike the ship. Upon observing all this, Mocha Dick decided to get in on the fray and also attacked the whaling ship directly after the missed hit by the mother.

Mocha Dick successfully destroyed one of the smaller whaling boats, but was injured in the process by a harpoon. Here is the account of what happened after, according to Reynolds who collected the story from the first mate of the whaling ship that finally took down Mocha Dick:.

The other whale that helped inspire Moby Dick was a huge sperm whale that destroyed the Essex in around 2, miles west of South America. After the Essex was destroyed, the 21 man crew took refuge on three small whaling boats that had almost no supplies to sustain them.

Their choice at this point was to head for known habitable islands that they feared were inhabited with cannibals, 1, miles away, or head for South America 2, miles away, but about 4, miles by the quickest sailing route due to the winds that time of year. Despite this distance, they chose South America.

During their journey, they did at one point encounter an island that they more or less stripped of its resources to help sustain themselves.

They also left three men behind there, at the time thinking likely to their doom, to help conserve supplies and increase the chances the others would make it back. What followed was an incredibly gruesome tail. As they traveled, they steadily lost crew due to lack of nourishment.

At a certain point, they were forced to give up burying their men at sea and, instead, began eating them and drinking their blood. They eventually even had to resort to not waiting for someone to die, but, rather, drew lots for who was to die and nourish the others with their body. In the end, 95 days after their ship was destroyed, they were rescued with only five left alive aboard the two remaining small ships one was lost along the way with the crew never heard from again.

Miraculously, the three left on the depleted island, though near death when eventually found, survived the event. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Search for:. Boiling blubber onboard a whaling ship.

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