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"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thar She Blows! (History Magazine)
George Dodge was born with salt-water in his veins.  Growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, he wandered the wharves, captivated by seamen's tales of faraway lands.  In 1831, he left home and headed for Nantucket, center of the New England whaling trade.  On his arrival, he signed onto the whaler Baltic.  He would not see home again for nearly four years.

On the first night at sea, the Baltic’s greenhorn hands could only wonder at what foolishness possessed them to sign on for a long voyage.  Wretchedly seasick, they writhed in their cramped bunks, praying for home.  

As the next days and weeks passed, the seasickness disappeared but the reality of life onboard a whaler hit home.  The mate used a cat-o-nine tails on their backs, and every day was spent in the constant practice of lowering and raising the boats, and learning to handle the long oars.  Soon, they settled into the tedium of the long voyage, or what old salts called the “sailor’s horror” .

A month into the voyage, a cry was heard from the masthead.   “There she bloooooows!  There she breaches!”   Dodge wrote, “The boats were made ready to lower and everything prepared for the chase.”  

George Dodge was about the begin the adventure of his young life.

The Hunt
“The Skipper’s on the quarter-deck
a-squinting at the sails,
When up aloft the lookout sights
a school of whales.
Now clear away the boats, my boys,
and after him we’ll travel,
But if you get too near his fluke,
he’ll kick you to the devil!!”
J.C. Colcord

“There she blows!”  shouted the lookout.  “There she rises!”  As the call was shouted down from the mainmast,  excitement raced through the ship as the crew clamored on deck and lowered the boats.  

Goaded to superhuman effort by the mate, the men rowed hard and fast to catch up with the fleeing whale.   Rowing for all they were worth, the men faced the boatheader, not the whale as they were forbidden to look over their shoulders for fear they would panic at the sight of the great beast.  

When the boat drew close  to its prey,  the harpooner left his position at the oar and braced himself at the bow, his long harpoon at the ready.  When mere feet away, the harpooner struck his lance hard and deep.  

George Dodge wrote that when the whale was first harpooned he took a violent plunge and threw his massive tail or flukes high in the air and lashed the sea.   This moment of initial agony was one of the most dangerous of the hunt.  Would the whale smash the boat or dive to the bottom, taking them with him?

As soon as the harpoon was set, the harpooner tossed out slack line and changed places with the mate.  The crew pulled as hard as they could, backing away from the wounded whale, as line from the harpoon was given a turn around the loggerhead and doused with salt water to keep from burning.

Next, the men braced themselves for a high speed chase across the open sea—the Nantucket sleigh ride.   “After a whale is speared,” wrote Dodge, “he races through the water with the whaleboat in tow.  A sleigh-ride is no comparison.  A fast whale hits about twenty-five miles an hour.”

At times, instead of running, a whale would dive deep.  All eyes were on the line, for fear the whale would breach directly below them.   Dodge relates a time when the harpoon so enraged the whale that it came straight for the boat.  The officer shouted “Stern all, boys, for dear life, or he will knock us all into the briny deep to make food for the sharks!”  

With the men rowing for their lives, they barely missed the huge open mouth of the harpooned whale.  
In due time, the whale tired of the chase,  and the crew took up the line until they were alongside him.  The mate then sunk a lance deep into the whale's lungs, thrusting it up and down to hasten death.  The crew then backed off  as the whale thrashed and the sea turned to bloody foam.  In the end, it rolled onto its side, “fin out”.  

Blubber to Oil
After the whale’s death, the mate cut a hole in its head and attached a line.  The crew then towed their prize back to the ship and the men went to work removing the blubber.  Great “blankets” of fat were cut from the body and thrown onto the deck.   After all of the blubber was removed, and the stomach searched for ambergris—an ingredient in perfume—the carcass was abandoned to the waiting sharks.   
  
On a deck covered with “gurry”—blood and blubber—the crew began the “trying out” process.  Blubber was  cut into large wide pieces which were then cut into smaller "books".  The books were tossed into the  try pots and boiled.  Finally, the oil was bailed out into a large copper cooling tank set next to the brick tryworks.  Once the oil was cool it was bailed into casks which were secured to the bulwarks.  

The men then turned towards butchering the next prize.

The Whaling Trade
Whales have been hunted since ancient times.  The Basques of Spain are credited as being Europe’s first whalemen, although the Vikings hunted whales long before recorded history.  

When the Mayflower sailed the coastal waters of New England,  one of the passengers wrote “and every day we saw whales playing hard by us.”  Indeed, it was the presence of whales that that kept the Mayflower from heading further south.  They knew that the whale could provide an importance source of income to the settlers. 
The coast of Colonial New England was alive with whales.  When the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians were already adept at chasing the leviathans. 

According to a 1605 account in  Waymouth’s Journal, “one especial thing is their manner of killing the whale which they call a Powdawe; and will describe his form; how he bloweth up the water; and that he is twelve fathoms long: that they go in company of their kind with a multitude of their boats; and strike him with a bone made in fashion of a harping iron fastened to a rope, which they made great and strong of the bark of trees, which they veer out after him; then all their boats come about him as the riseth above water, with their arrows they shoot him to death; when they have killed him and dragged him to shore, they call all their chief lords together, and sing a song of joy.”

At first there were so many whales, the whaling ships never ventured far from the coast.  However, in 1712, Christopher Hussey was blown out to sea where he ran across a sperm whale which he killed and brought home.  The oil was superior to that of other whales, so   whalers began to pursue the giants into deeper water.    

Whaling towns like Nantucket and New Bedford sprang to life, their lively economy based on the booming whale trade.  Whale oil provided fuel for lamps and lubrication for machinery.  Everyone needed it and the whalers had it. 
The economy wasn’t the only part of New England life based around whaling.  The girls of  Nantucket formed a secret society, vowing not to marry a man until he had struck a whale.   George Dodge wrote, “To get a wife in Nantucket you had to double Cape Horn three times, fasten to a whale, and do everything else appertaining to a whaling voyage.”
A story is also  told of a Nantucket youngster who tied his mother’s darning cotton to a fork and hurled it at the cat yelling “Pay out, mother! pay out!  There is sounds through the window!”  

The whaling industry thrived in America, especially during the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War.  During the “Golden Years”, Yankee whalers sailed the oceans of the world in search of the great whales.  They were some of the first to round Cape Horn and enter the South Pacific.  They were the first to enter Japanese waters and explore the Artic Ocean.  The ports they visited were remote and exotic.  They stopped in Honolulu and Lahaina for refitting and crew liberty, in the Galapagos for turtles and fresh water, and in the Azores for supplies.  San Francisco was a favorite port for refitting and liberty until crews deserted en masse during the California gold rush.  

New grounds were located in the Arctic and millions of dollars flowed through towns like Nantucket, Provincetown, New Bedford and Bristol.  By 1857, New Bedford alone had 329 whalers in its fleet.  However,  the first rings of the death knell sounded in 1859, with the discovery of petroleum.  

The Whales
Who were the leviathans hunted almost to extinction?  

A favorite target for whalers was the right whale, so-called because it was just right to capture.  Slow,  and heavy with oil, it was easy prey for the hunters.  And, once killed, its body didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea.  Right whales were almost 50 feet in length and yielded over 200 barrels of oil.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was a sperm whale, the largest whale with teeth.  Males grew to over 60 feet in length and yielded 160 barrels of oil.  Sperm whales were notorious for attacking boats and ships.  In 1819, a  sperm whale was responsible for ramming and sinking the Essex in less than 10 minutes,  and in 1850 the Alexander.  The sperm could dive to a depth of 3,000 feet and when he sounded whalers prayed their boat were clear of his path.  

Other targets were the massive blue whale—the largest whale on earth—growing to over 100 feet long and weighing over 100 tons, and the smaller humpback.  Whalers knew the humpback as the “dancing whale”, because of its ability to leap clear of the water, and to stand on its nose and beat  the water into foam with its flukes.  Found in all the oceans of the world, the humpback  is difficult to capture because it sinks when killed.  To prevent loss of their prey, whalers tried to drive the humpbacks into shallow water where their carcasses could be retrieved.   

Whaling Ships and Their Men   
Whalers were built for service and durability, not speed.  Among the gear they carried were pots, cooling tanks, housing to boil blubber, whaleboats, gear for the boats, spare boats, supplies for a three or four year voyage, and casks for oil.
The spacious officers’ quarters were in the stern, the crew were packed up forward in the forecastle, and the specialists like the harpooners, coopers, carpenter, blacksmith and cooks slept amidships.  

The whale boats themselves—the small boats used to chase down the whales—were sleek and fast.  Captain William M. Davis wrote in 1874, “. . . The whaleboat is simply as perfect as the combined skill of the million men who have risked life and limb in service could make it . . . it is 28 feet long, sharp and clean cut as a dolphin, bow and stern swelling amidships to 6 feet, with a bottom round and buoyant.  . . Here we have a boat which two men may lift and which will make ten miles an hour in dead chase by the oars alone.”

In addition to carrying six men to paddle, the small whale boats carried 18,000 feet of line, a hatchet, a sharp knife, water keg, candles, lantern, compass, bandages, and a dragging float.  

Whaling men like George Dodge, actually spent very little time in pursuit of whales.  Ships took months to get to and from the whaling grounds, with no guarantee of finding whales once there.  

The men were plagued with more leisure time than they could fill.  To help fight boredom, they carved and engraved the teeth and jaw bone of the sperm whale into scrimshaw.  First, the rough teeth were rubbed smooth, then original designs or designs taken from newspapers or magazines were engraved on the surface.  Next, paint or tar or soot were rubbed into the etchings to bring out the design.

Crewmen lived in crowded and filthy quarters, often shared with bugs and rats.  Their only ventilation was a small hatch in the ceiling, which was closed during rain or heavy seas.  The ceiling was so low that a man of average height couldn’t stand up straight.  

In whaling’s heyday, profits were huge and owners paid shares to the officers and crew.  However, seamen were docked for various items they charged at the ship’s store, including clothing, tobacco, needles and thread.  Mary Lawrence, wife of the captain of a New Bedford whaler, wrote that the ship charged double what items cost, with a 25-cent sheath knife being sold for 74-cents, and a $1.60 pair of pants going for $3.00.  Seamen were also charged a share of outfitting the ship’s medicine chest.  In some instances, they actually returned to port in debt.

Once back home, the crew members with money in their pockets were set upon by “land sharks” who enticed them to spend their money and sign up for another voyage.  

An 1860 issue of Harper’s magazine wrote,   “A cart rattles by, loaded with recently discharged whalemen—a motley and a savage-looking crew, unkempt and unshaven, capped with the head-gear of various foreign climes and peoples—under the friendly guidance of a land shark, hastening to the sign of the “Mermade”, the “Whale,” or the “Grampus,” where, in drunkenness and debauchery, they may soonest get rid of their hard-earned wages, and in the shortest space of time arrive at that condition of poverty and disgust of shore life that must induce them to ship for another four years’ cruise.”

Going Home
George Dodge returned to Nantucket in 1835, nearly four years out on the Baltic.  His share of the profits was $125.00.
He had learned all there was to know about whaling,  survived life onboard ship, seen faraway places and discovered something about courage.  In his mind, he had made a good voyage.  It was his last.