The Portuguese Whalers and the Shore at Their Feet

The adobe building at Heritage Harbor has been on this corner since before California was a state. It was built in the eighteen thirties and, starting in eighteen fifty-five, it served as the headquarters of the Old Monterey Whaling Company, run by men who had crossed two oceans to get here.

They were from the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the North Atlantic that had been supplying whalers to the global industry since the seventeenth century. They arrived in Monterey with the specific knowledge of how to hunt gray and humpback whales from shore, using small boats, harpoons, and the enormous physical effort of men who had grown up around the sea. They rendered the blubber on the beach below this building, filling barrels with whale oil that ships carried north to San Francisco and east around the Horn.

The operation lasted fifty years, until nineteen oh four, when the commercial whale population in Monterey Bay had been reduced to the point where shore-based hunting was no longer economically viable. By the end, the Azorean Portuguese families who had run the whaling company were so deeply embedded in Monterey County that their names appeared on ranches, fishing operations, and civic records across the region. They were one of the few immigrant labor groups of the nineteenth century who arrived as contracted workers and remained as landowners.

The whale populations recovered, slowly, over the following century. Gray whales began returning to Monterey Bay in observable numbers in the nineteen eighties. Today whale-watching boats leave from the wharf a few blocks from here. The shore where they rendered blubber is now a restaurant district.

The adobe building on this corner is one of the oldest structures in Monterey. The bones of the industry it housed are somewhere in the bay.