Word: nantucket
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Captain George Pollard of Nantucket, Mass, had been out in one of the whaleboats himself, that day in 1820, when the whaler Essex began to founder. Nobody could have been more dismayed than Captain Pollard when he headed back to his stricken ship. "My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?" he cried. And from Mate Chase, bobbing with other survivors in a small boat, came the laconic answer: "We have been stove by a whale...
Author Edouard Stackpole, who comes from an old Nantucket clan himself, tells the story of the Essex with a plenitude of details and a sober chronicler's lack of shock. Few whaling men had as tragic a time as the men of the Essex, but whaling, as Author Stackpole describes it in The Sea-Himters, was characteristically a dangerous, grim and dirty business. Stack-pole's book is a serious attempt to set down the round story of how it all started, and how for a few generations it made Nantucket rich and famous...
Around the Horn. The Massachusetts mainlanders who settled Nantucket in the late 1600s, Stackpole believes, had little other choice of occupation. Their small island was hardly suitable for much farming, whereas whale oil could be a rich cash crop...
...first, the men of Nantucket copied the Indian technique of taking whales stranded close in shore. Later on, they pursued them far out into the Atlantic. By the beginning of the Revolution, the pursuit was taking the whalers as far as Cape Horn, and they were bringing back an annual harvest of 30,000 barrels of oil for the lamps and candles of the U.S. and Europe. There was even a highly profitable use for the whalebone: corset stays...
...Paul as a $15-a-month seaman. With the new Marcq St.-Hilaire navigating system learned in school, a refinement of which is now in common use in the Navy, Manning soon distinguished himself as a navigator, and was made quartermaster the second trip out. Then, while making Nantucket in choppy seas one day, he got seasick at the wheel, flubbed the captain's orders and was fired at the end of the voyage. Manning next shipped out to the Pacific for eleven months on the four-masted sailing ship Dirigo...