A Legacy Endures

The scene was still common in the very early 20th century: 1905 photographs show the MORNING STAR, a brig employed as a whaler, docked at New Bedford, Massachusetts, after two years at sea. Its small fleet of double-ended whaleboats, normally on deck or slung from davits along the ship’s sides, were brought dockside and tied together, presumably for maintenance after hard use at sea. Barrels of whale oil, still valuable as a high-quality lubricant despite competition from land-based petroleum, were lowered to the pier to await transport to a refiner nearby. Tourists visited the ship; some bought scrimshaw and other souvenirs from the Portuguese crew; others snapped pictures with their Kodak box cameras.

A century and a quarter later, the faded pictures give us a glimpse of various technologies—sailing a square-rigged ship to pursue whales on distant seas, building wooden whaleboats, and manning these boats at sea in one of the world’s most dangerous fisheries—that made 19th- and early-20th-century whaling profitable enough to persist until the whales were nearly gone.

This traditional whale fishery and its associated technologies died out around much of the world during the 20th century as more efficient methods—fossil-fuel-driven steam power, exploding harpoons, and the like—made it possible to kill more whales in less time with less risk to the humans who sought them, all while the demand for whale oil decreased.

An exception was the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the eastern North Atlantic whose surrounding waters were home to the sperm whales long favored by the New Bedford ships. As the rest of the whaling world was mechanizing in the 20th century, communities in the Azores continued whaling the old way, from small boats like those tied alongside the MORNING STAR and other sailing vessels at the New Bedford docks in 1905.

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