THE SEA

The story of whaling starts with the sea....

For the sea is the home of the whale.

In the beginning, the sea offered its bounty to those who waited for whales washed ashore by storm or by sickness.

To secure a steadier supply of the leviathan, whalers went to sea in small boats with harpoons and lances to spear the whale and row him ashore. Norwegians, and Basque working in Spain and France, were whaling this way from 800 to 1000 AD.

The earliest colonists in America followed the same pattern.  By 1687, Southampton, N.Y. was organized into 12 separate whaling companies comprising 168 men.

The supply of whales near the ports dwindled quickly.

To catch a whale, whalers had to follow him on his travels across the oceans. From the whaling ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, Ma. , New London, Ct. and Sag Harbor, N.Y. through the treacherous passage of Cape Horn and the Pacific Ocean beyond, whalemen hunted.

In the heat and lassitude of the equatorial doldrums, a boat could drift for weeks without so much as a breeze. In the frozen Arctic wastes, whales learned to hide under ice packs that can crush a wooden boat like a toy.

• The sea, not the captain, was the true master of the whaling vessel.