USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 23
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Mackerel were dressed and salted on board the ves- sel that caught them, culled (graded) on shore under the eye of a deputy-inspector appointed by the com-
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
monwealth, and barreled by young boys at three to five cents a barrel. Massachusetts-inspected salt mack- erel was distributed all over the country. In 1835 Georgia took thirty-seven thousand barrels, and Philadelphia, one hundred thousand. Toward the end of our period some sharp Yankees who lived in states where there were no inspection laws, began "re-inspecting" Massachusetts mackerel, so that the lower grades could be passed off on inland consumers as number one.
Both mackerel and codfishing were much hampered by the British treaty of 1818, under which the Cana- dian and Provincial authorities undertook to with- draw our ancient access to the shores and territorial waters of Labrador and the Bay of Chaleur. A revival came in the thirties, when Gloucestermen began to frequent the Georges Bank, only a hundred miles east of Cape Cod. For generations fishermen had visited these dangerous ocean shoals without daring to anchor, for fear of being 'drored under' by the tide; and mod- ern drift-fishing with cusk bait had not been invented. After Captain Samuel Wonson had proved one could anchor in safety, winter-fishing on the Georges became the chief supply for the fresh-fish business.
This important branch of the fisheries, nowadays far more lucrative than the salt-fish business, began its first extension beyond tidewater radius about 1837, when some smart Yankee combined ice, fresh fish, and the railroad. The fish were brought alive in salt-water wells in the vessels' holds 1 to Boston, where they were dressed, iced, and shipped inland by rail. As early as the season of 1843-44, one Boston firm was sending almost half a million pounds of fresh cod, haddock,
1 Vessels with wells for keeping fish alive were called 'smacks,' the only use of that term in the Massachusetts fisheries.
308
--- - -----
I
CAPE COD AND CAPE ANN
and halibut to New York, Albany, and Philadelphia. When the railroad reached Gloucester, in 1846, that port began to compete with Boston in fresh-fishing, and two or three years later the Georges Bankers began to carry ice with them, and to chill the fish as soon as caught; a method which enabled even mack- erel to be shipped fresh. Haddock and halibut, formerly a drug in the market, now became valuable parts of the catch.
The market for salt codfish changed radically after the Peace of Ghent. Exports to Europe fell off to al- most nothing by 1832. The West Indies and Surinam, where Gloucester disposed of her hake and lowest- grade dried fish, took over ninety per cent of our foreign exports; but the amount remained constant to the average of Federalist days. All the increase in production was absorbed by the domestic market, which in 1840 took three-quarters of the fish cured in New England. Yankee pioneers saw to it that a taste for salt-fish dinners kept pace with the westward- striding frontier. Consequently there was an increase in the Grand Banks codfishing fleet, parallel to that of the mackerel fishermen.
Although the fisheries made a smaller contribution than whaling to the production statistics of Massa- chusetts, the workers got a much larger share of the profits. In cod and mackerel fishing the share system has continued to this day, and has never become the caricature of communism that it did in New Bedford.
At Gloucester, the vessels were owned by a distinct class of merchant-shipowners, who also kept general stores and acted as wholesale distributers. All sup- plies were furnished by the owners, each fisherman getting half of his catch, and the skipper an addi- tional bonus of six to eight per cent on the gross
309
-
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
amount. On Cape Cod and the other fishing sections, the system was more democratic. The vessels were owned generally in sixteenth-shares; sometimes, in part, by their own crews. Every one fished "on his own hook," furnishing his lines and gear and part of his food. The "great general" - essential food such as salt meat and biscuit, and ship chandlery - was furnished by the owners, who deducted the cost from the "whole stock" (gross proceeds) of the trip before a division was made.1 In some ports there was also a "small general" including firewood, beans, potatoes, and meal, the cost of which was divided among the crew. Prior to the temperance movement rum was considered as necessary for the fisherman as bait for the fish; and every one took from three to six gallons of the liquor to sea with him for a four months' cruise. But "at the present time," writes Dr. Thatcher of Plymouth in 1832, "some vessels go entirely without ardent spirits." Having deducted the "great general," the owners took one-quarter to three-eighths of the net proceeds, and the rest was divided among the crew in proportion to the amount each man caught. In mack- erel-fishing it made a great difference from what part of the vessel one fished; hence every man's station was allotted beforehand.
Codfishermen received, in addition, a bonus of eight to ten dollars a year from the federal government. A Gloucester physician stirred up a tempest in 1840, when he exposed methods by which mackerel-fisher-
1 Illustrated by the "Settlement" of one trip of the Wellfleet mackerel schooner Boundbrook in 1843. The "whole stock" was sold for $836.11. Outfitter's bill was $83.92, and the "great general" (food furnished by owners), $87.65. The owners' share - 25 per cent of the "whole stock" after these items were deducted - was $166.13. Eleven members of the crew divided the rest, the lowest share being $18.78. The skipper . and two others got $54.09 apiece.
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A CAPE COD SHIPMASTER AND HIS HOME Captain Caleb Sprague, Master of Ship North Bend and Clipper Ship Gravina, and his Cottage at Barnstable
CAPE COD AND CAPE ANN
men became codfishermen for bounty-getting pur- poses. But by constantly reiterating the "nursery of our seamen" and "cradle of the American Navy" argument, Massachusetts congressmen managed to retain the federal bounty until 1866. There is no doubt that the men needed it. The average earnings of a Gloucester fisherman, for the working year of nine months, were estimated at one hundred and fifty- seven dollars in 1850. A fair-sized Cape Cod fisher- man's family needed a hundred dollars more than that to carry it through the winter, and the maximum ever made by a lucky fisherman in a banner year was only eight to nine hundred dollars. Their calling was most dangerous. Seventy-eight men of the Cape Cod fleet were drowned in 1837. Truro, Dennis, and Yarmouth lost eighty-seven bread-winners in the October gale of 1841, which swept away the new Sandy Bay break- water on Cape Ann, and destroyed fourteen out of sixteen vessels owned at Pigeon Cove, representing a lifetime's savings of many hard-working men. Eleven vessels from Marblehead, with sixty-five men and boys, went down in the September gale of 1846; and the "Minot's Light" gale of October, 1851, took a fearful toll from every fishing village in New England. Except in the shoemaking region, a season's gains were generally used up by the spring, and a fisherman's family lived on credit in his absence. Bad luck or mis- fortune would prolong the debt to the vessel's owner or the local storekeeper (often the same person), in- definitely. But on the whole, especially on the North Shore and Cape Cod, the fishermen seem to have been a much happier and more independent class of sea- farers than the whalemen or merchant sailors.
The decade 1850-1860 marks the end of an era in the Massachusetts fisheries. On the cod banks, dory
3II
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
hand-lining and trawling commenced. Mackerel-fish- ing was revolutionized by the purse seine; and the clipper fishing schooner was perfected. Gloucester in- itiated and reaped the benefit of these modern im- provements. Her branch railroad, connecting her with Boston in 1846, attracted buyers from all parts of the country. Her vessel owners, commanding more capital than the Cape-Codders, and living in one compact community, were better able to survive years of bad luck and disaster, more prompt to scrap obsolete ves- sels, and to adopt new methods. Isaac Higgins, of Gloucester, invented the modern seine boat, a model which no other builder to this day has been able to improve. The Canadian Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, notwithstanding the competition of Canadian fish, restored access to the inshore "Bay" fisheries, and permitted free import of Newfoundland herring for bait. Foreign immigrants settled in Gloucester in large numbers; and by the close of the Civil War, it was by far the greatest fishing town in America, with a fleet of three hundred and forty-one cod and mack- erel schooners, a tonnage greater than Salem's, and an annual catch worth almost three million dollars. Gloucester, too, has been afflicted (or blessed, if you like) with factories and summer visitors; but Glouces- ter still farms the sea. Her population of twenty-four thousand, in 1920, depends largely on the sacred cod and his humbler cousins.
For Cape Cod, however, the decade 1850-1860 marks a decline both in population and maritime activity. Various are the explanations. Her capitalist class was too small, poor, and conservative to adopt the new methods. Modern purse-seining required strong men, giving no employment to the boys who were useful in jigging. Lack of rail transportation
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CAPE COD AND CAPE ANN
(although the Old Colony Railroad did finally wander into Provincetown in 1873) gave the profits of dis- tribution to Boston wholesalers. After the Civil War the Cape Cod fleet began to concentrate in Wellfleet and Provincetown. Elsewhere wise men imitated Captain Zebina H. Small, of Harwich, who sold his fishing vessel in 1845 and set out a cranberry bog. Others emigrated to Boston, New York, and the West, where the sturdy qualities of their salty upbringing helped many to acquire fortunes, and summer estates on Cape Cod.
CHAPTER XX THE WHALERS 1815-1860
O the whaleman's joys! O I cruise my old cruise again!
I feel the ship's motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
I hear the cry again sent down from the mast-head, There - she blows!
- Again I spring up the rigging to look with the rest - We see - we descend, wild with excitement,
I leap in the lower'd boat - We row toward our prey, where he lies, We approach stealthy and silent - I see the mountainous mass, lethargic, basking,
I see the harpooner standing up - I see the weapon dart from his vigorous arm:
O swift, again, now, far out in the ocean, the wounded whale, settling, running to windward, tows me,
- Again I see him rise to breathe - We row close again,
I see a lance driven through his side, press'd deep, turn'd in the wound,
Again we back off - I see him settle again - the life is leaving him fast,
As he rises he spouts blood - I see him swim in circles narrower and narrower, swiftly cutting the water - I see him die;
He gives one convulsive leap in the centre of the circle, and then falls flat and still in the bloody foam.
- WALT WHITMAN, "Song of Joys"
WHEN Boston absorbed the foreign commerce of Mas- sachusetts, New Bedford became the whaling me- tropolis of the world. Nantucket, after losing half her fleet of forty-six whalers during the war, began to recover in 1818. By the end of another year she had a fleet of sixty whalers, and fourscore sail in the coasting trade as well. In 1843, the peak year of her population
314
1
THE WHALERS
and prosperity, Nantucket had nine thousand souls, seventy-five hundred sheep, eighty-eight whalers, and the largest output of refined oil and sperm candles of any American community. With a high school, an Athenæum, and a Lyceum; Nantucket, for all her pris- tine simplicity, had caught the cultural waves from 'off-island.' But her whalemen, by following a mis- taken policy of sperm or nothing, ran out of luck. Vessels had to be floated over the harbor bar on 'camels,' at great expense. Population and fleet be- gan to taper down. The last forlorn whaling barque sailed from Nantucket in 1870, but in the summer of 1920 the eighty-year-old Charles W. Morgan of New Bedford was bravely fitting out for another. voyage.
"New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New London or Portland," wrote Emerson, "yet they have all the equipments for a whaler ready, and they hug an oil-cask like a brother." He guessed the secret of New Bedford's success. Her spacious harbor, in con- ' trast to the bar-blocked entrance to Nantucket; her mainland situation, and her railroad connections counted for much; but her persistent specialization in whaling alone, counted most. Other small seaports of New England hugged the delusion that foreign trade would return; New Bedford hugged her oil-casks. Her Quaker shipowners who had made fortunes by neutral trading before 1812, perceived that the palmy days of the carrying trade were past, refitted their merchant- men as whalers, and went out after oil with a spirit and perseverance that made their town within six years the first whaling port of North America. They were as tight-fisted, cruel and ruthless a set of exploiters as you can find in American history, these oil kings of New Bedford. But they were canny as well. By in- telligent specialization they escaped the commercial
315
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
extinction that overtook the smaller Massachusetts seaports; and instead of awaiting the inevitable decline of whaling, they chose the very height of its prosperity to give a new hostage to fortune - the Wamsutta cotton-mill.
Fairhaven, on the opposite side of New Bedford Harbor, became the third whaling center by 1831, although later passed by New London. Edgartown on the Vineyard had a fleet of ten to twenty whalers in the forties and fifties, and Provincetown at one time had as many as thirty. Every little seaport on Buzzard's Bay - Dartmouth and Mattapoisett and Marion, Wareham and Westport, Wood's Hole and Rochester - entered the game. In fact there were few seaports of Massachusetts and Long Island Sound that did not at one time or another go in for blubber- hunting; but all north of Cape Cod gave it up after a short trial. New Bedford's fleet surpassed all others combined, attaining three hundred and thirty vessels in 1857. The population of four thousand in 1820 had tripled by 1840, and almost doubled again in the next twenty years. With its oil refineries, cooper's shops, tool-works, and the hundred-and-one industries sub- sidiary to whaling, New Bedford became a hive of industry; it was the fifth port for shipping in the United States, and was pushing Baltimore hard for fourth place.
The historic process of opening new whaling grounds continued. By 1821 there were five recognized grounds in the Pacific Ocean - the 'on-shore' along the coast of Chile, the 'off-shore' between 5° and 10º south lati- tude and longitude 105°-125° west, discovered by Captain George W. Gardner, of Nantucket, in 1818; the 'country whaling,' among the Pacific reefs and islands; the Indian Ocean; and the coast of Japan,
316
THE WHALERS
which was first visited in 1820 by Captain Joseph Allen, of Nantucket, following a tip from Jonathan Winship, the Boston Nor'westman. In 1835, when Captain Barzillai T. Folger, of the Nantucket ship Ganges, took the first right whale on the Kodiak ground, the vessels extended their cruising grounds to the Northwest Coast and Alaska. Eight years later two New Bedford masters discovered the value of the bowhead whale off the coast of Kamchatka; and by 1851 Melville could write with truth that the oil fleet of Massachusetts was "penetrating even through Bering's Strait, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world." 1
A summer's cruise in the Arctic Ocean gave the keenest delight to owners and skippers, as the mid- night sun enabled them to work their crews twenty- four hours a day.
When in 1839 sperm-oil rose above a dollar a gallon for the first time since the war, Nantucket increased her fleet from sixty-four to eighty-one vessels, New Bedford and Fairhaven from eighty-nine to two hun- dred and twenty-one, and others in proportion. Yet the price of oil and bone, after a brief depression, rose to unheard-of figures during this golden age of the in- dustry - $1.77 for sperm and 79 cents for whale-oil in 1855-56, 97 cents a pound for whalebone; although two millions and a half pounds were landed that year as against twenty thousand in 1817, when the price was twelve cents. By 1840 half a million gallons of sperm-oil, four and a half million of whale-oil, and two million pounds of bone were exported from the United States. Whaling and the manufacture of whaling products became the leading industry in Massachu-
1 Moby Dick, chap. cv. All other quotations in this chapter are from the same whaling classic.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
setts after shoes and cottons, and provided commerce with an important export medium.1 .
Little technical advance seems to have been made at this period. A toggle harpoon that locked the iron in the whale's back came into general use. The barque rig became popular for whaling vessels, which now averaged between three hundred and five hundred tons burthen; but little if any improvement was made in the model. 'Spouters,' or 'blubber-boilers,' as the merchant marine called them, were still broad on the beam, bluff-bowed, and "sailed about as fast as you can whip a toad through tar." Capacity, not speed, was the desired quality; hence many ships which had outlived their usefulness in the merchant service were converted into whalers. The whaleboats (rowboats car- ried aboard the whalers, and used to chase the quarry) were beautiful craft, perfected by a century of ex- perience. Double-ended, twenty-eight to thirty feet long, six feet broad, and but twenty-six inches deep amidships, with half-inch cedar planking on white-oak frames, propelled by a spritsail or by five stout four- teen- to eighteen-foot oars, "like noiseless nautilus shells their light prows sped through the sea." For a nautical thriller give us a fifteen-knot "Nantucket sleigh-ride" over great Pacific rollers, in a whaleboat fastened onto a gallied whale, steersman straining on his twenty-two-foot oar to prevent an upset, and the line smoking as it whips around the loggerhead. No wonder that Hawaiian royalty, in its pageants, used a New Bedford whaleboat for triumphal car.
1 A good part, but not all of the oil was handled by Massachusetts merchants. Charles W. Morgan, of New Bedford, sent part of his cargoes to his brother Thomas W. Morgan at Philadelphia, part to Josiah Bradlee, of Boston, and part to Hussey & Macy, a Nantucket firm in New York. He also exported oil in his own vessels to Europe, and imported cargoes of general merchandise.
318
76 .
A SHOAL OF SPERM WHALE OFF THE ISLAND OF HAWAII Whale Ships Enterprise. Wm. otch. Pocahontas. enonon pu
THE WHALERS
It was a golden age for owners. The ship Lagoda, belonging to Jonathan Bourne and others, netted them an average of ninety-eight per cent profit for each of the six voyages she made between 1841 and 1860.1 Several simple Quaker families of 1815 had become millionaires by 1840. The nucleus of the great How- land and Hetty Green fortunes was gathered in 1824, when Isaac Howland, Jr., died. Stately mansions of granite in the neo-classic style, and elaborate Gothic cottages, arose on the high ground overlooking the harbor, amid ample lawns and luxuriant gardens. New Bedford society combined the grace of provincial Newburyport and the power of Federalist Salem .... But it was an iron age for the men who did the work.
Whaling skippers had been proverbial for cruelty and whale-ship owners for extortion, since colonial days; but the generation of 1830-60 surpassed its forbears. The old 'lay' system, it will be remembered, gave each whaleman a fractional share of the proceeds of the voyage. On paper, this sounds so fair and just that a gullible economic historian has called it "the best cooperation of capital, capitalizer, and laborer ever accomplished." Yet by 1830, if not earlier, this cooperation had been perverted into a foul system of exploitation.
In the first place, the dividend of a voyage was usually computed not on what the cargo fetched, but on oil prices fixed by the owner in advance, at a rate well below the market price, which was constantly
1 These voyages ranged in length between two and four years. On her next voyages, during the Civil War, the Lagoda netted her owners 219 and 363 per cent profit. The average cost of a whaler, fitted for sea, was estimated in 1841 at $20,120, of which about half was the value of the vessel and the other half outfit. The Lagoda's cost of fitting out came very close to this average. She measured 107' 6" X 26' 9" X 18' 4", 371 tons.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
tending upward. The 'lay' or proportion of the catch granted an able seaman declined to one-seventy- fifth or one-ninety-fifth, and that of a green hand to one-one-hundred-and-fiftieth, one-two-hundredth, or as little as ignorant men could be induced to take. Divide fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars, a high average yield for a voyage at this period, by 175, and you get $285.72 to $428.57; a green hand's gross compensa- tion for three to four years' labor at sea.1 Even this
1 The following account of a voyage of the New Bedford whaling ship Benjamin Tucker between 1839 and 1843 is fairly typical of a number I have seen in the New Bedford public library. Accounts of men who did not complete the voyage are omitted.
Lay
Share of proceeds of voyage
Charged for outfit, plus 25 per cent
Captain's bill (slop- chest, and advances of spending money)
Captain.
1/16
$2358.75
. .
First Mate.
1/24
1572.50
2d
I/43
1023.95
. .
. .
3d
1/65
677.38
. .
. .
4th
1/78
564.48
. .
. .
Boat steerer
1/87
506.09
. .
38.98
Boat steerer.
1/95
463.47
74.36
64.12
82.03
Cook
1/150
293.83
90.00
123.48
Seaman
1/170
259.00
21.00
66.02
36.40
52.12
1/160
275.12
107.00
76.66
Landsman
1/190
231.73
107.57
63.46
100.70
76.10
. .
90.68
. .
. .
In addition, each man had charged against him the above-mentioned fees for fitting out, discharging cargo, and medicine chest; but no in- surance. The two landsmen and the last seaman left the ship owing the owners money, at the end of this four-year voyage. After another voy- age on the same ship, one green hand was paid off with $1.31, and another with $16.
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THE WHALERS
beggarly sum was begrudged him by the owners, who devised various means to rob him thereof. On many ships ten per cent was deducted for 'leakage,' and three per cent for insurance; yet if the ship and cargo were lost, all the insurance money went to the owners. Certain owners charged against each lay the value of the casks, and a commission for selling the oil, in spite of judicial decisions against the legality of such practice. Each whaleman was charged eight to ten dollars for fitting out, and the same for discharging the vessel; and a dollar and a half for his share of the medicine chest. For his 'expenses' and 'outfit,' some 'land-shark' outfitter at New Bedford was given a good round sum, on which the owners charged the men twenty-five per cent interest; and the 'slop-chest' absorbed a good part of the rest.
This slop-chest was the skipper's store, from which the men replenished their tattered garments and empty tobacco pouches at a high advance on cost.1 It existed on merchantmen as well. But on many whalers the only way for a man to get spending money at Fayal or Honolulu or Papeete was to buy slops at inflated prices and sell them ashore for a song. Consequently
1 Verbal tradition, and some of the authorities mentioned in the Bibliography, state that several hundred per cent profit was made by the slop-chest. In the ship's disbursement accounts I have examined, the profits were fairly reasonable, judged by 1921 standards. Here are some extracts from the 'slop-chest invoice' of the Benjamin Tucker:
Cost
Sell at
Monkey jackets
$6.50
$10.00
Trousers.
2.40
4.00
Guernsey frocks.
.87
1.50
Scotch caps
·37
.62
Jack-knives
.16 -. 29
.40 -. 50
Tobacco, lb.
...
..
.16
.25
The slop-chest was also used in trading with natives for supplies, and contained bolts of cheap cottons, and other merchandise for this especial purpose.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
many whaling ships returned to New Bedford after a cruise of several years, with every green hand's 'lay' eaten up by his debts to the ship.
Except for the boat-steerers or harpooners, who lived apart from the common sailors and had a 'lay' that netted them something, whaling vessels did not ship seamen. Neither American seamen nor any other kind would have stood for the extortion and cruelty practiced by owners and skippers. Shipping agents, with offices in New York, Boston, and inland cities like Buffalo, circulated lurid handbills depicting the excitement of the chase and the fat profits of a voyage. Their principal victims were farmer boys from New England and New York, bitten with the lure of the sea. Unemployed immigrants and mill-hands, fugi- tives from justice, and human derelicts were also drawn in. Many are the stories of old-time whaling agents. If a raw rustic protested against the size of his lay, the agent would magnanimously grant him one-two- hundred-and-seventy-fifth instead of one-hundred- and-seventy-fifth. A well-known Boston agent, after describing to a Maine ploughboy the imaginary joys of this glorious profession, concluded confidentially: "Now, Hiram, I'll be honest with yer. When yer out in the boats chasin' whales, yer git yer mince-pie cold!"
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