Blacks in Whaling

 

I was very interested today to receive a link to an item in the Guardian featuring the discovery of the wreck of a little 94-ton whaler.  A brig. Though the journalists insist on calling it a whaleship, technically it was not.  As it boasted only two masts, it was a brig.

It is pretty certain that it was the brig Industry of Westport, Massachusetts, which was sunk in 1836.  And the evidence that it was a whaler is the block of bricks with two cauldrons set inside: the tryworks, where the blubber was rendered into oil.  You can see it in the photo.

Industry was an old name for many old whaling vessels, a reflection of how hard the men in the trade worked.  There were ships called Industry that sailed out of Nantucket, Boston, New Bedford, and Dartmouth, as well as Westport.  The earliest, according to Judith Lund's compendious Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages, sailed out of Dartmouth in 1758, and the captain was Isaiah Eldridge.  The captain of the Westport vessel when it foundered was Hiram Francis -- or so says Alexander Starbuck, in his ancient History of the American Whale Fishery. 

Very little is known about this particular little craft.  Her builders and owners and managing agents were not recorded, but it does have the distinction of being on the only whaler that sunk in the Gulf of Mexico. Luckily for the 15-strong crew, the Westport brigs whaled in proximity to each other, and so they were rescued by the Elizabeth, which was close by, and which, coincidentally, was captained by the same man who had been the Industry's master the previous voyage, George Sowle.

And it was doubly lucky, as if the crewlist had included runaway Blacks, which happened often, they would have had a bad time if they had been forced to row to shore.

As I found out when researching In the Wake of Madness, which was the grim story of the murder of a Black steward by the certifiable captain of the Sharon (sister ship of Acushnet, where Melville sailed at the same time), the whaling industry was a refuge for runaway slaves.  Dominated by Quakers, the whaling villages welcomed Blacks, and some, like Paul Cuffe and Lewis Temple (the inventor of the toggle harpoon), became prominent in the business.

There is even a statue devoted to Temple in New Bedford, a testament to a liberal past.