The First Whalemen of Nantucket

Abstract

I N the year i690, so a Nantucket story goes, several townspeople were standing on a hill watching the whales sporting with one another off the south coast of the island. There, observed one of them, gesturing toward the ocean, is a green pasture where our children's grandchildren will go for bread.' If the sea was to be their garden, however, these islanders, like other American colonists, were only interested in cultivating it as their own. The thought of purchasing and managing vessels may have ignited their imaginations, but few of them entertained any wish to toil on the deep in the service of other men. Finding help was therefore no easy task. Free men on Nantucket as in most corners of early America had seized upon the easy availability of land to establish themselves as independent producers. Accordingly, those who launched the whale fishery at the end of the seventeenth century, like all colonists who wanted to expand production beyond the limits of the household, found labor hard to procure at any price, let alone one that ensured what they felt was a reasonable rate of return. It was not the gathering of capital that troubled the first whaling merchants, for in the early years the costs of entering the industry were moderate. The demand for whale oil and whalebone was well established and markets were easy to locate, while the sources of supply were clearly visible as they swam along Nantucket's coastline. The real challenge to these early entrepreneurs was to find a few men who understood the techniques of whaling, and above all to recruit a larger group to man the oars. In most parts of the New World the scarcity of obedient and reliable workmen pushed employers to consider the institution of bound labor. Historians of tropical production generally invoke this proposition in their explanations of slavery. But should not the same principle have held true in the thinly populated northern colonies, wherever men were producing for the market? This article investigates how capitalist development in one corner of the New England economy took place without wholesale recourse to slavery or indentured servitude.

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