Feature Stories from Best Read Guide Martha's Vineyard

Whaling
"Oars! Oars!...grip your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God...pull, men." - Starbuck, Moby Dick

Whaling shaped life on Martha's Vineyard during much of the last century. This profitable industry, the life-blood of the Island's economy, affected several generations of old Vineyard families. Little boys grew up here eager for the day when they would ship out on a whaler seeking fortunes and adventure. Captains' wives, separated from their voyaging husbands, had to raise families by themselves.

Edgartown and Holmes Hole (later Vineyard Haven) were major ports where captains outfitted ships for voyages to the Pacific and Arctic whaling grounds -- voyages sometimes lasting four years. These captains and the investors backing them made fortunes selling whale oil, which was used to make candles, light lighthouses, and lubricate machinery. With these fortunes they built stately homes on the Vineyard, overlooking the sea. About one hundred of these houses still stand, looking much as they did during the grand days of whaling.

This Island did not throw itself into whaling as early as Nantucket did, mostly because the Vineyard's abundance of fertile farmland made it less dependent on the sea. Nor did Martha's Vineyard ever own a great fleet of ships like that of New Bedford, where businessmen rich from mainland industries poured their wealth into whaling ventures. The Island's main contribution to whaling lay, as one historian has said, "in the remarkable number of its men who became expert whalemen and whaling masters. A good part of this contribution, too, was in whaling wives, many who remained at home, and some who went to sea with their husbands."

Indeed, the old ships' logs kept by Vineyard whaling wives are a major source of information about life on these voyages; many logs are in the library at the Dukes County Historical Society on School Street in Edgartown

After whalers rounded Cape Horn and began hunting whales in the new Pacific whaling grounds during the early 1800s, the Vineyard surpassed Nantucket as a major center of whaling. This occurred because, in order to make Pacific voyages profitable, whalers had to build ships big enough to carry many more barrels of oil. The new ships were too large for Nantucket's shallow harbor, so many captains started outfitting and supplying their ships at the deeper harbor of Edgartown. The wharves of Edgartown in those days were often lined with barrels of whale oil covered with seaweed to keep the wood from drying out and losing a tight seal.

Edgartown's Dr. Daniel Fisher built a factory on the hill above the harbor for processing the oil into candles and other products; this and other ventures made him the richest man in town. The Wampanoag Indians of Gay Head were reputedly highly sought after as crewmen on whaling vessels. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville called them "the most daring harpooners." And Melville's character, the Indian harpooner Tashtego, hailed from Gay Head.

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