Fishing, Whaling, and the Sea

Long before the Pilgrims arrived, European fishermen were working the waters off Massachusetts. The Grand Banks, the shallow underwater plateau east of Newfoundland, were among the richest fishing grounds on earth, and the fishing fleets of England, France, Portugal, and Spain had been visiting them since the early fifteen hundreds. The colonists who followed came partly because the fish were already there.

Gloucester, on the rocky cape north of Boston, became one of the oldest fishing ports in America after its founding in sixteen twenty-three. For three centuries, its fishermen worked the cold Atlantic in schooners, hauling codfish that fed a continent. The Atlantic cod was so central to the economy of colonial Massachusetts that a carved wooden cod was hung in the Massachusetts State House in seventeen eighty-four, where it still hangs today.

But the great industrial drama of Massachusetts maritime life was not cod. It was whaling. The island of Nantucket became the center of the American whaling industry in the early seventeen hundreds, sending ships into every ocean in the world to hunt sperm whales for their oil. By the peak years of the eighteen forties, the port of New Bedford on the mainland had taken Nantucket's place as the richest whaling city in the world. Herman Melville sailed from Fairhaven, across the harbor from New Bedford, in eighteen forty-one aboard the whaling ship Acushnet, spent eighteen months at sea, and wrote a novel about it.

Whaling was brutal, global, and enormously lucrative. The oil illuminated cities across Europe and North America. It also gave the Massachusetts coast a cosmopolitan workforce unlike anything else in antebellum America: Indigenous Wampanoag harpooners, Azorean Portuguese deckhands, freed Black sailors. It is a complicated inheritance, held in the old brick warehouses still standing along the New Bedford waterfront.