The industry’s progress was marked by its distance from the beach. Early colonists practiced drift whaling — essentially, beachcombing for carcasses. In some coastal towns it was finders keepers. In others, town fathers appointed spotters “to view & espie if there be any whales cast up” after storms, with the spoils divided among all citizens.

Seeing profit in the whale harvest, colonists began shore whaling in the 1650s. Shore whaling involved posting a lookout atop a tall timber pounded into the sand. When the lookout gave the cry (“Whale off!”), the land-based crew pushed out in a small boat and pierced the whale with a harpoon attached to a rope secured to the boat. Then it was hang on for your life. “A whale barreling along at the surface would take the men on the proverbial Nantucket sleigh ride, a bone-jarring, terrifying and, at times, no doubt exhilarating trip over the waves,” Dolin writes. When the whale tired, the men rowed up to it and stabbed it with a long steel knife. “Success would show itself as a geyser of crimson blood gushing from the whale’s blowhole, which caused whalemen to cry out, ‘Chimney’s afire!’ ”

Given our modern affection for whales, you might wonder if the whalemen felt any pangs of conscience. Probably not. “There is no doubt that some whalemen marveled at sperm whales when they saw them, and thought about their form and beauty even as they were preparing to kill them,” Dolin writes. “But such musings ... were not foremost in the whalemen’s minds. When whalemen looked at sperm whales they mainly saw three things that could make them money — blubber, spermaceti and ambergris.” (Spermaceti is a waxy substance found in the head cavity of sperm whales; it made excellent candles. Ambergris is part of the whale’s intestinal lining; perfumers once used it to stabilize scent.) Dolin, the author of the “Smithsonian Book of National Wildlife Refuges” and other works, avoids casting moral judgments, and rightly so. Back in the day, whaling was seen as nothing more than a form of fishing. The author makes it clear that he’s chronicling the history of the American whaling industry, not international whaling, which allows him to steer clear of contemporary battles over Japanese and Norwegian whaling practices.

Image Credit... John F. Leavitt/Mystic Seaport Collection

That’s not to say the old whalers were wise stewards of the resource. By the early 1700s they’d depleted their near-shore whaling grounds, so they began outfitting ships with dozen-strong crews and venturing farther out into the Atlantic. The industry’s dominant port was Nantucket, home to a community of savvy, frugal whaling merchants. “Quakers with a vengeance,” Herman Melville called them. London’s introduction of oil-burning streetlamps in 1736 stoked demand for whale oil. The invention of the spermaceti-oil candle expanded the market further. From the 1710s to the 1740s, Nantucket’s annual oil production grew from 600 barrels to 11,250. (One whale could yield 120 to 200 barrels of oil.) Nantucket’s whaleboat captains and owners prospered.