Whaling started in New England even before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. It grew into an important industry because whale oil burned efficiently, and whale bones made for flexible corsets and hoops for women's clothing. Except for when the British navy blockaded New Englanders from leaving their ports, from the earliest colonial days until electric lamps and spring steel made it less profitable, whaling was a major New England industry.
History
Jacques Cartier was the earliest explorer to describe seeing belugas and other whales in the St. Lawrence River and off the coast of what would become New England in 1535. Ten years before the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to New England, Samuel de Champlain noted that Basque whalers were hunting in the Atlantic Ocean near the St. Lawrence River. Then the Pilgrims wrote about seeing right whales, Eubalaena glaciata, swimming in the waters off of the Massachusetts coast. They recognized the benefits of hunting these animals for their oil and bones.
Function
The earliest New England whalers used the "shore-surf" method of whaling. First, a whaler on shore would observe a whale in the water. Immediately a team of whalers would launch out in small boats armed with harpoons. They would chase the whale until they got close enough to shoot it with their harpoons. Tied to each spear was a wooden float attached to a long rope. Once the whale was pierced with a spear, it would swim frantically until it got tired. Then the whalers located the animal and towed it back to the shore.
Features
Once the whale was dragged onto the beach, the whalers cut out the blubber. They rendered it into oil by boiling it in large iron "try-pots" right on the beach. They also took out the baleen, or bone, from the whale's mouth, and left the carcass to rot on the beach. Some New England whalers continued to use the shore-surf whaling method until the late nineteenth century, as illustrated by an engraving by William P. Bodfish, "Whaling Off Long Island," which appeared in "Harper's Weekly" on January 31, 1885.
Effects
Beginning around 1720, the whale population in the waters just off the New England shore declined, so a new method of whaling had to be developed for deep sea whaling. New England whalers began sailing whaling sloops with square sails far off-shore to Newfoundland and farther north. They removed the blubber and stored it in barrels until they returned to port. They also harvested the baleen and threw the carcasses back into the ocean for the sharks.
Time Frame
The New England whaling industry could not function between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 because of the blockades and other naval actions against the Americans by the British. Following the War of 1812, there was a resurgence of New England whaling, which peaked in 1857. There were a total of 329 sea whaling ships worth a total of $12 million. The industry employed 10,000 men. It continued to expand as the United States grew westward with a new whaling port at San Francisco that hunted whales in the Arctic and upper Pacific Ocean. However, after the electric lamp replaced the oil lamp around 1879, the need for whale oil diminished. The industry was further challenged and made redundant after spring steel was invented in 1906, replacing baleen as a flexible solid material for fashion and other commercial uses.
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