The Charles W. Morgan: Last of the Wooden Whalers

Docked at Chubb's Wharf here at Mystic Seaport sits a ship that should not exist anymore, the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world, and the oldest commercial vessel in the United States.

She was built in eighteen forty-one at the yard of Jethro and Zachariah Hillman in New Bedford, Massachusetts, constructed of live oak frames and white oak planking at a cost of roughly forty-eight thousand dollars. Her principal investor was a Quaker merchant named Charles Waln Morgan, and she was designed for one purpose: chasing sperm and right whales across every ocean on earth.

Over eighty years, the Morgan made thirty-seven voyages under twenty-one different captains. Most voyages lasted three years or more. She survived being locked in Arctic ice, survived a fire aboard ship, survived what one account describes as an encounter with hostile islanders in the South Seas. By the time she completed her thirty-seventh and final whaling voyage in nineteen twenty-one, she had brought home fifty-four thousand four hundred and eighty-three barrels of whale oil, earning roughly one point four million dollars for her owners. Only two of her thirty-seven voyages failed to turn a profit.

She was already built to last twenty-five years. She lasted a century of hard ocean work.

After her retirement the Morgan sat preserved at a private estate in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, until nineteen forty-one, when she was towed to Mystic Seaport, which had been founded just a decade earlier to rescue exactly this kind of artifact from oblivion.

In twenty fourteen, ninety-three years after her last whaling voyage, the Morgan went back to sea for what Mystic Seaport called her thirty-eighth voyage, visiting historic New England ports. She is a floating relic of an industry that powered the lamps of the Western world before petroleum, crewed by men who signed on knowing some voyages lasted four years and some men never came home.