This thriving town owed its growth to the deep sea whaling
industry. Soon after the Revolution, Capt. Ephraim Fordham cruised for whales
along the southern shore of Long Island. In 1786, we find ships which had
outfitted in Sag Harbor docking in New London with 360 barrels of whale oil
brought from Brazil. Heretofore trade had been in horses in the West Indies,
and the New London Gazette of that day writes, “Now, my horse jockeys, beat
your horses and cattle into spears, lances, harpoons, and whaling gear, and let
us all strike out, many sprouts ahead, whales plenty, you have them for
catching.” In 1817, we find the good ship Argonaut of Sag Harbor venturing
around Cape Horn into the Pacific and brining home 1700 barrels of sperm whale
oil from a voyage of twenty months. This gallant ship under Capt. Eliphalet
Halsey had made as fair a voyage as that of Jason when in the older day he
sailed in the Argo to find the golden fleece, for whale oil came to be the
“golden fleece” that made the golden years for Sag Harbor and all of eastern
Long Island.
Mr. Harry Sleight in his book, “The Whale Fishery on Long
Island” says, “The Sag Harbor whalemen were the flower of eastern Long Island.
Every boy’s ambition was to become a boatsteerer or master mariner, and a young
man was not considered to have arrived at his majority until he had doubled
Cape Horn. The whalers were a hardy, fearless lot of men, officers and crew
sharing thrilling dangers and emerging form hair breadth escapes with the
stoicism of red Indians. And they were ever to the fore when their country
needed strong arms and cool heads, fired only by the flame of patriotism.” The
whaling business made the whole countryside prosperous. By 1836, Sag Harbor
owned twenty-one vessels, by 1843, more than twice that number. Business grew
in all the trades related to whaling. “There were the coopers who made the
barrels, the block and pump makers, the ship carpenters, sail makers, whaleboat
makers, the masons for trypots, the stevedores, and all the other business that
goes along with Provisioning a crew of a score to fifty men.” The great year
was 1847, when the Sag Harbor fleet numbered fifty vessels with eleven more
from Greenport registered in its custom house, bringing a million dollars into
the town. At the lowest estimate one thousand able-bodied seamen were employed
besides those who found work in the village in connections with the whaling
industry.
All this made a busy and a lively town. To “go to the
Harbor” in those days meant more to the boys and girls of Southampton than the
first trip to New York does today. There were always ships going out to sea,
always some young men of the family or neighborhood to “see off.” It was often
a brother or a father, and we must remember that whaling voyages lasted two or
three years. Duke Fordham’s Inn (where the Sea View House now stands) at the
head of the Long Wharf was a merry place the night before a ship sailed, for
the sailors not knowing whether they would ever see home and friends again made
the most of their time.
And when a returning ship was sighted “down the bay!” “Flag
on the mill, ship on the bay!” the old saying ran from mouth to mouth. People
rushed to the wharf. Long before the ship docked the whole town had gathered to
welcome her home. The ship owners, always a little more prosperously dressed
than their neighbors, would get aboard a small sloop and go out to meet the
ship. The crew, decked in their best with gifts from far away countries, were
welcomed by their friends and loved ones. There was work for all in the
discharging of the cargo of oil and bone that had to be transferred to packet
slops and taken to New York for market. The ships had to be re-fitted and made ready
to sail again shortly. Riggers, carpenters, masons, coppers, and caulkers,
found ropes and spars to be replaced, timber and planks to be renewed and
strengthened, try works to be set up, casks to be stowed and seams to be
caulked. Painters swarmed over the hull, and grocers’ clerks and supercargoes
ran to and fro, taking orders and delivering provisions and supplies for the
outward voyage. But the returning sailors—Long Islanders, Portuguese, Kanakas,
Figians, Malays, and Montauk and Shinnecock Indians—all good whalemen—walked
the streets, flush with money, spending and giving away lavishly. They rolled
along Sag Harbor’s Main Street, frolicking as they went, knowing their fun
would soon be over and they would be aboard ship and sailing for the strange and
unhomelike places of the earth.
For the whalers were explores as well. To them the coast of
Patagonia and the Okhotsk Sea were as familiar as the coast of Connecticut. The
whale ships Arabella, Daniel Webster, and Franklin were the first to make the
long voyages in the Pacific Ocean.
Capt. Royce of the Sag Harbor whaling bark, Superior, was
the first master to pass through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean. He
found whales very tame and easy to spear. Other whalers followed, and the coast
of the Kamchatka and the Sandwich Island became familiar words on the lips of
seamen.
It was a Southampton man and Southampton crew who first
entered the closed port of Japan—Capt. Mercator Cooper in 1845. He had rescued
some Japanese sailors, and in his ship, Manhattan, took them into Yeddo. He was
received courteously and allowed to remain four days, although he was requested
never to come again.
In 1851, the bark Martha carried the first American consul
to Japan.
It was the Sag Harbor whaleship Cadmus that brought
Lafayette to the United State in 1824.
Many an old whaleman, sunning himself on his back porch,
smoking his pipe, could tell us more thrilling tales than the movies could
picture. But whaling was dangerous business and not many whalers lived to die
in their beds. In Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor stands a beautiful whaling
monument to record the names of six captains under thirty years of age who were
lost at sea. The inscription reads: “To commemorate that noble enterprise, the
whaling fishing, and a tribute of lasting respect to those both and
enterprising shipmasters who periled their lives in a dangerous profession and
perished in actual encounter with the monster of the deep. Entombed in the
ocean, they live in memory.”
Roughly estimated, over one thousand brave men lost their
lives every year in whaling trips, and those who returned alive had either grown
rich or lost their all.
The whaling boon died in 1848, when gold was discovered in
California, but many old houses standing today in Sag Harbor, East Hampton,
Bridgehampton, and Southampton point back to whaling days. The Presbyterian
churches in Southampton and Sag Harbor are monuments to these prosperous times.
The Sag Harbor Church was built with a spire two hundred feet high, so high
that the returning mariner could see it as he rounded Montauk Point. The hymn, “Jesus,
Savior, Pilot Me,” was written by a minister of this church, Rev. Edward
Hooper, D.D. He wrote it in memory of those hardy adventurers whom he had seen “go
down to the sea in ships.”
Courtesy Lizbeth Halsey White Files,
Southampton Historical Museum Archives and Research Center
No comments:
Post a Comment