Connecticut Whaling and the Sea

When people think of New England whaling they think first of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Herman Melville's port, the city that called itself the city that lit the world. But Connecticut had its own deep relationship with the sea, centered on the old shoreline towns of Stonington, Mystic, New London, and Groton, where the Thames River meets Long Island Sound. New London was the third-largest whaling port in the United States through much of the first half of the nineteenth century, after New Bedford and Nantucket.

Its deep harbor and sheltered anchorage made it ideal for fitting out the deep-ocean voyages that could run three to five years, hunting sperm whales across the Pacific and into the Arctic. At the industry's peak in the eighteen forties and fifties, New London had dozens of whaling vessels at sea simultaneously. The oil those ships brought back lit the lamps of America before petroleum changed everything in the eighteen sixties.

Stonington and Mystic were known more for coastal sealing, the coasting trade, and later for building ships rather than crewing them. The Mystic Seaport Museum, founded and incorporated in nineteen twenty-nine on the site of a nineteenth-century shipyard in Mystic, preserves the wooden-hulled world of that era: tall ships, rope walks, cooperages, and chandleries reconstructed around actual surviving vessels. The Charles W.

Morgan, launched in New Bedford in eighteen forty-one and the last surviving wooden whaleship in the world, is docked there today, the oldest American commercial vessel still afloat. Connecticut shipwrights also built submarines. Groton, on the east bank of the Thames across from New London, became home to the Electric Boat Company in eighteen ninety-nine and has built the majority of America's nuclear submarine fleet since the nineteen fifties.

The U.S.S.

Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, was launched from Groton in nineteen fifty-four.