California whaling surged with the large-scale entrance of New England hunters into the Pacific Basin in 1819, beginning a bonanza that lasted to the 1860s. During the course of three - to five-year voyages around Cape Horn and eventually into California waters, they sought sperm, right, and humpback whales. The sperm whale was larger and more esteemed than the right. It measured from 30 to 70 feet in length and weighed between 35 and 65 tons. Humpbacks, like sperm whales, were huge, sometimes 50 feet in length, and weighed between 34 and 45 tons. On sighting a spouting behemoth, a ship’s lookout would yell: “Thar she blows,” alerting his crew to prepare immediately for the chase and harpooning.
In the pre-petroleum era of Mexican California, and of the world as well, whale carcasses served a variety of purposes. For example, from a sperm whale of the size just mentioned crewmen might obtain 2,000 gallons of high-quality oil to be used as a fuel for lighting and as a machine lubricant. The large teeth could be exchanged as ivory for the products of Pacific islanders, including wood, food, and water. Ambergris, a secretion from the giant mammal’s intestine, was used in perfumes, spices, and as an aphrodisiac, that is, an enhancer of sexuality. One whale captain claimed to have received $10,000 for 800 pounds of the substance. In addition to being valued for their oil, right whales were prized for their baleen, that is, for the elongated comb-like strainer in the mouth of the creature that when processed sold for $3 a pound. Baleen was used in chair springs, buggy whips, and corsets.
By 1840 American whalemen had found that their prey migrated throughout the Pacific Basin. Accordingly, Yankee hunters began traveling a seasonal circuit. To avoid the worst weather at Cape Horn, they rounded the tip of South America during the southern hemisphere’s summers, hunting in the coastal, “onshore” fisheries of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.
Then they sailed west to the Society, Samoan, and Fiji islands. Next, they crossed the equator, arriving in the Hawaiian ports of Honolulu, Lahaina, and Hilo for repairs, storage of oil, reprovisioning, and rest. By then the northern hemisphere’s milder weather had set in, and voyages continued to Japan’s whaling grounds. From there, whale ships proceeded north to Siberia’s coastal fisheries, and then on to the Arctic’s whale habitats. Whalemen then sailed southward along the Northwest Coast to California for a hunt, and back to Hawai’i for the usual repairs, storage, and reprovisioning. On the arrival of summer in the southern hemisphere, whale fleets sailed for the waters of the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand before backtracking to the fisheries off Antarctica. Yankees, who dominated the Pacific whaling circuit, established small supply stations at most of these sites.
California’s role in this transpacific whaling circuit, as noted, increased after 1819. For one thing, the achievement of Mexican independence in 1821 resulted in an opening of California’s harbors to foreign commerce. Of 20 vessels known to have been along the province’s coast in 1822, at least six were whalers that had anchored in San Francisco for refitting and supplies. The enormous bay there did not provide a hunting ground due to its narrow opening at the Golden Gate; instead, its shoreline was dotted with whaling supply and repair stations. Doubtless, few sea captains foresaw the not too distant time when San Francisco would become the world’s leading whaling port. Regardless, in 1825 at least 17 whalers had been counted along the province’s coast. An early Californian reported to a newspaper during the Mexican period that he had seen “as many as forty sail of whaling craft in the harbor of Monterey in one season. . . .” French whalers often hunted along the coast near that port. In a letter published in the New York Journal of Commerce in the early 1840s, Consul Thomas O. Larkin wrote: “There now [are] 500 to 1000 American whalers with 20,000 seamen in the Pacific. Half of them will be within twenty days’ sail of San Francisco.” In short, whaling, like many of California’s other maritime activities, contributed to the internationalization and especially the strong Pacific connections of the province by the mid-1840s. Officials in Washington, D. C., were not content for the United States simply to remain one among the several nations competing for whales and the other bounties of North America’s Pacific coastline.
World History
