About 1712, as legend has it, Captain Christopher Hussey was leading his men out
on a short shore whaling voyage to kill some right whales, when a storm blew up.
And he and his men were blown far off shore, far enough where he came across a whale with
a different kind of spout, that he'd never seen before.
Instead of the right whales' upward spout, this one went forward.
He's in the middle of the storm, he kills the whale.
The blood and oil of the whale still the waters in a Biblical fashion; he brings it back,
and this is the sperm whale, the one with the truly high grade oil.
And this was Nantucket's destiny. The sperm whale beckoned them beyond where
they had been before, and they would follow this whale everywhere.
The discovery of sperm whales off the coast of Nantucket sent shock waves rippling through the
island community, which almost immediately began to gird itself as if for a kind of war.
In the head of the sperm whale is a reservoir of spermaceti.
This is the good stuff. It's as clear as vodka, when you first open
it up, but as soon as it touches air, it begins to oxidize and begins to look like sperm.
The sperm whale was the high end of the market, the absolute best oil you could get.
What did whale men do? Whale men turned creatures of darkness - these God-spited vicious monsters
- into the sources of light. Then they have to decapitate the whale.
You bring up the head, you put it on the deck, put a hole in the head, and sometimes one,
two people go inside to ladle out this oil from the head.
And the deck is just messy with oil and blood. Before the petrochemical industry, oil from
these animals was hugely valuable, and the sperm whale in particular had the spermaceti
wax from its head, which could be processed into oil for lighting, and later for lubricants,
and also for cosmetics. In the spermaceti organ was up to 23 barrels
of of spermaceti opil, which was the most valuable of all whale oil.
It's by the light of spermaceti lamps that great authors like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, and Jane Austen write their greatest works.
During the 1800s, it's spermaceti oil that lubes the steam engines and locomotives of
the Industrial Revolution. And it was still used in the gear boxes of
American automatic cars up until 1972. And because it stays liquid even at subzero
temperatures, an urban myth took root that it was used in the Apollo 11 mission to land
on the moon. One of the best estimates is that it was somewhere
in the order of almost 250,000 sperm whales
taken during the bulk of the golden age.
By the end of the 1850s, fewer and fewer whale men could make the numbers work.
It's partly that they'd killed so many whales that are pretty close, and it's harder and
harder to find enough whales to fill a ship, and voyages are becoming longer and longer
and longer, and therefore it's not economically sustainable.
But it was the recovery of a new kind of oil in the hills of western Pennsylvania in 1859
that would spell the real end of the American whale oil industry.
Colonel Edwin Drake in 1859 drilled a well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and up through
the ground came an almost limitless supply of petroleum that could be turned into a flood
of cheap kerosene, and almost overnight the whale oil industry went into steep decline.