whalers and whales
Imagine a creature roughly ten times as long as your height, and about five hundred times your weight. Now imagine attempting to kill this animal with nothing more than a stick and with a sharpened steal tip while it violently dashes through the ocean beneath your feet. This sort of event was not uncommon for an ordinary man aboard and American whaling ship. They lived a life of unbearably long fits of boredom, of which could be broken up momentarily by life-threatening danger. The life style of whaling is so startling, that a classic American novel was written about the subject called Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. The book is fictional, but tells many truths about the lives of sailors, and the lives of the whales they hunted. Although whales are often mistakenly thought of as fish, whaling should never be compared to fishing. In truth, whaling was not just a job, but a war fought not only against giant beasts, but against fierce elements and time. American whaling did not begin with the colonists, but rather with the people who already inhabited the region prier to colonization. Native Americans are the people responsible for the beginnings of whaling in America. They only hunted whales inside
Any sought after whalebone was then removed from the whales mouth when the head was hoisted on board, and the whale was also checked for ambergris. The tackles then lifted the hook as the whale rotated, and a strip of blubber was peeled off (Melville 357-58). After being removed from the whale, the strips were cut into smaller chunks before they were ready to be boiled. The filth and smell was unbearable, and was cleaned up immediately after the whale was done being processed (Currie 31). Whales were also useful for their baleen, which is a cartilage found in their mouth. Sperm whales were the most prized of all, because of the more wholesome oil found in their heads, called spermaceti. It was added to perfume to keep its scent unsullied (Currie 6-8). The crew had to row fast in order to keep pace with the whale, but they also had to be careful not to scare it. The whale chase was a very unpredictable event, and the duration and the outcome were things no one could forecast (Currie 24). Whales could come out victorious by diving deep enough that the crew had to cut the rope in order to keep from being pulled under. When the engagement did go in favor of the whalers, the whales' future was not a bright one. Sailors often played games, sang songs, wrote letters to home, or made crafts when they were not steering the boat or on lookout duty. To boil the blubber down to oil, the whaling ships put the chunks into large stoves call tryworks. Besides trying to stay out of danger, lookouts had to keep a keen eye for spouting whales, which were sometimes very far from the ship and extremely hard to see. The whaling industry was an extremely profitable business, and this was due to how valuable whales actually were.
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