Leviathan

Leviathan : the history of whaling in America / Eric Jay Dolin.— New York : Norton, c2007.
479 p., [32] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 25 cm.
Includes index
Bibliography: p. 453-459
ISBN: 9780393060577

1. Whaling -- United States -- History.

639.280973

Following the example of the native inhabitants, the first European settlers in eastern North America began harvesting whales that washed up or were beached on their shores. They were not interested in them as a source of food. You might dine on the liver or turn the brains into “dainty cakes,” but the flesh at best, was something like a course beef, or as Meriwether Lewis described it in his expedition’s journal in 1805, “it resembled the beaver or dog in flavor.” It was the blubber they wanted, the fat that could be turned into oil, a superior source of illumination and lubrication.

Soon, not wanting to await the whims of fate, whaleboats, manned by both Americans natives and English colonists were setting out to attack those whales swimming close to their shores. Prominent among these shore whalers were those with an abundance of shore, the inhabitants of the coastal islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Long Island and especially Nantucket. It was from Nantucket that Captain Christopher Hussey and his crew set out in 1712. Blown far offshore, they encountered and killed the first sperm whales. In the sperm whales’ heads they found an oily substance called spermaceti. It produced even brighter illumination than the oil rendered from blubber. Thereafter large ships that carried the smaller whale boats set out to hunt the whale and not return until their holds were filled with casks of oil, first in the North Atlantic, then the South Atlantic, then around Cape Horn to the Pacific, and by the middle of the next century, the Arctic Ocean.

At its high point in the two decades before the Civil War “American whale oil lit the world.” But, the industry, in some ways foreshadowing the petrochemical industry that would replace it, was subject to boom and bust cycles. Wars: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War were disasters to an industry dependent on international trade and a sea free of privateers and hostile navies. There was also the danger of drowning because most seamen of the period could not swim, so storms or toppling from the rigging into the sea could be fatal. Then there were the whales themselves, some of the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet, who were known to play role reversal with their hunters. The stove boat, as illustrated by the cover of Dolin’s book was an every present fear of the whale boat crew. And on at least two notable occasions the ship from which the boats issued was the focus of the whale’s fury.