Final Voyage (14 page)

A lamp using a wick burning whale oil was found to be far superior to a flickering, smoky, tallow candle. Sperm oil proved even better, a brilliant, clear, nonsmoking illuminant. Lighthouses, once lit by braziers holding wood and coal fires, sprouted up everywhere once the technique of interlocking granite stones allowed them to be built on rocky outcrops at sea, and in the eighteenth century they were increasingly lit by sperm oil.

The new, faster-moving machines exposed the weakness of tallow: it lost its chemical stability when subjected to the heat and friction of high speeds. As machinery improved, better lubricants were sought and tried. The grease made from whale oil degraded at a much slower rate. Sperm oil, especially, retained its consistency and properties under conditions of extreme friction and temperature, and became highly valued as a lubricant of faster-running and increasingly fine and sophisticated machinery, from watches and clocks to high-speed textile machinery.

The impact of this scientific advance on the whale fishery in America was swift and far-reaching. Thomas Hutchinson, speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1749, later (1771-1774) royal governor of the colony, wrote in his history of Massachusetts, first published in 1765: “The increase of the consumption of oil by lamps as well as by divers manufacturies in Europe has been no small encouragement to our whale-fishery. The flourishing state of the island of Nantucket must be attributed to it. The . . . whale fishery, being the principal source of our returns to Great Britain, [is] therefore worthy not only of provincial but national attention.”

The mid-eighteenth century was a period of rising fortunes in America, and spermaceti candles—brilliant, smokeless, but expensive—quickly became the preferred illuminant for those who could afford them. George Washington, who burned perhaps a dozen spermaceti candles a night at Mount Vernon, figured the cost to him at about £100 per year, a sizable lighting bill for those days. In 1761, the Reverend Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard, who appears to have been thrift-minded, computed that even if he burned the cheapest tallow candles, it was costing him £40 a year to light his house.

Lighting quickly became big business. The production of spermaceti candles became such a coveted industry that it gave rise to the first attempts at monopoly and price-fixing in America, by a cabal of merchants who sought to break Nantucket’s control over the whaling industry. The manufacture of spermaceti candles, from the waxy “headmatter” found in the headcase of the sperm whale, was at first an industrial secret, pioneered by Benjamin Crabb, of Rehoboth, Rhode Island. In 1749, Crabb petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for, and was granted, the sole right to manufacture candles of “Sperma Caeti Oyle” in the colony. He didn’t take up his grant in Massachusetts, however, but moved to Rhode Island, where he set up a candle-making operation for a Providence merchant, Obadiah Brown. Though Crabb and Brown tried to keep secret the details of their process, by 1760 there were perhaps a dozen spermaceti candle-making businesses in New England. Most of these were in Rhode Island. In 1761, in order to avoid cutthroat competition among themselves, and to discourage others, Brown and a group of eight other merchant firms formed the United Company of Spermaceti Candlers. This “Spermaceti Trust,” as it has been called, attempted to control the purchase (mostly from Nantucket) and distribution (among themselves, or for sale to London or Boston) of headmatter, and establish a minimum price for the sale of all spermaceti candles.

Three of the nine firms party to this agreement, and six of the twenty-six individuals representing them, were Jews who had come to America seeking, like the Puritans, freedom from religious persecution. They not only had found that freedom, but also had become among America’s wealthiest and most successful merchants. The great leveler of the transatlantic passage, and the emphasis in America on what a man was capable of doing, rather than who he might claim to be, meant that rank in the colonies was determined almost solely by achievement rather than by any other baggage or perception of worth. The rising merchant class was, from the beginning, the aristocracy in America, and men like Aaron and Moses Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, became its princes.

Brothers José and Duarte Lopez, ethnic Jews who maintained an outward devotion to Catholicism, had grown up in Portugal. As in many other times and places, assimilation was no protection. One of these “New Christians,” as Jews who had converted to Catholicism during and after the Inquisition were called, the playwright António José da Silva, known as “O Judeo”—the Jew—was garroted and burned in public in Lisbon on October 19, 1739, because of his ethnic origin. By that time, José Lopez had already fled, first to England, then to America. Duarte joined him there in 1752, at the age of twenty-one, bringing with him from Portugal his wife and daughter. In America both men openly embraced Judaism for the first time in their lives, underwent circumcision, and formally adopted the names Moses (José) and Aaron (Duarte).

Though Moses first traveled to New York, he soon relocated in Newport. That town, famously blessed with an excellent natural harbor, had become one of colonial America’s major commercial seaports by 1750, its waterfront lined with wharves and warehouses. Newport was home to a large group of “merchant grandees” and was an important market for slaves newly arrived from Guinea and other African coasts. Aaron Lopez joined his brother there.

Their timing was propitious. England’s desire to see settlers in America encouraged even Jewish immigrants. In 1740, Parliament passed an act granting the right of naturalization to every foreign-born Protestant or Jew who resided in its American colonies for at least seven years. Jews were even exempted from the requirements of receiving Anglican Communion, and from taking an oath of allegiance “upon the true faith of a Christian.” (The needs were not the same at home in England: when a similar—domestic—act was passed in 1753, granting naturalization to Jews residing there, so great was the public outcry that the “Jew Bill” was quickly repealed.) But the colonies were not without bigotry, particularly aimed at Jews. Moses Lopez was naturalized in New York in 1741, but when Aaron applied for naturalization in Rhode Island twenty years later (the same year he formed the Spermaceti Trust), he was refused. Rhode Island’s legislators informed him that the intention of the parliamentary naturalization act had been to increase the number of inhabitants in the colonies, now deemed sufficient in number, and to propagate the Christian views with which the colony had been settled. Aaron Lopez’s friend Ezra Stiles, later the president of Yale, commented at the time: “Providence seems to make everything to work for mortification to the Jews, and to prevent their incorporating into any nation; that thus they . . . continue a distinct people.” A year later, after becoming temporarily resident in Swansea, Massachusetts, Aaron was naturalized in Massachusetts as a British subject.

Thirty years old in 1761, Aaron Lopez was a leading figure in the Spermaceti Trust, and one of America’s most successful businessmen. His mercantile interests ranged far beyond candle-making. He was brokering and shipping pewter, indigo, sugar, tea, coffee, molasses, rum, chocolate, and soap. Many of these items he shipped to his premier “headmatter” suppliers in Nantucket, Joseph Rotch and his son, William, who sold these in their stores there. He also bought, imported, and traded slaves, and owned ships that carried them to America from Africa. Aaron Lopez’s residence and business establishments on Newport’s Thames Street were impressive. By the 1770s, he owned at least twenty sailing vessels, and had survived vicissitudes of business that had reduced many of his former partners. But the Spermaceti Trust did not last for more than a few years and was unable to break the de facto monopoly that Nantucket then enjoyed over all whaling-related enterprises. This was due as much to the intractable nature and determination of the Nantucket Quakers as to any other advantage they enjoyed—all of which stemmed in large part from that nature and determination. Henry Lloyd, one of Aaron Lopez’s trust partners in Boston, advised him:

The Nantucketers didn’t like supremacy in another group. In 1770, William Rotch opened Nantucket’s first spermaceti candle-making manufactory, at the head of Straight Wharf in the town harbor, and Rhode Island’s momentary lock on the candle business was over. But in the Lopez brothers and their Jewish partners in the Spermaceti Trust—Jacob Rodriguez Rivera and the Hart brothers (Naphtali, Samuel, Abram, and Isaac)—the Quaker Rotches had discovered formidable rivals and dependable trading partners. They felt comfortable dealing with a clannish group held together by shared religious convictions and habits. They understood the desire for mercantile protectionism as had perhaps no other group since the Hanseatic League monopolized trade in northern Europe between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. In two centuries of Quaker dominance in the American whale fishery, the Jews of Newport were the only rivals the Quakers ever recognized as true peers.

Had he lived long enough, Aaron Lopez might have figured larger in the growth of the whaling industry, possibly in New Bedford after Joseph Rotch made his move there in 1765, or in the development of Newport—already a thriving international seaport when New Bedford was an isolated backwater—into a serious competitor. While Lopez and his family were visiting Providence in May 1782, the horse drawing him in a sulky (a light, two-wheeled carriage) veered too deeply into a pond, and the sulky began to sink. Lopez, aged fifty-one, who had never learned to swim, drowned in full view of his wife and children, who sat in another carriage on the nearby shore.

 

 

 

FOR ABOUT A CENTURY, from the 1750s to the 1850s, American whaling perfectly matched and complemented a rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution was greased by whale oil. It in turn drove the productivity and evolution of the whale fishery to its greatest heights. Joseph Rotch’s relocation to Dartmouth came in tandem with this exponentially growing market for whale oil across the Atlantic—where most of the oil produced in America was then shipped.

Only four whaling vessels—owned by Joseph Russell, his brother Caleb, and a William Tallman—sailed to and from the try houses and “oyl” sheds on the Acushnet in 1765, the year Rotch arrived. Within ten years there were eighty ships, averaging eighty-one tons, operating out of Dartmouth, mostly from the west (New Bedford) bank of the Acushnet, and nearly all of them had been built there. Nantucket was still the industry leader, with 145 whaleships sailing from its harbor in 1775, but Dartmouth had become America’s second-largest whaling port and was growing at a rate never seen in Nantucket. Boston, for all its merchants, money, ties to London, and long-established infrastructure, was a distant third—all these many Bostonian concerns were the discrete businesses of many, rather than, as in New Bedford and Nantucket, the single preoccupation of an entire population.

Most of the oil that landed in New England was shipped on to London. The early Nantucket whalers had sold their oil to Boston merchants, who simply transferred the barrels to their own ships and sailed them to England, at great profit. But, as with candle-making, the Nantucketers saw no need to hand the raw materials of a profitable business to someone else. In 1745, a Nantucket ship was sent to London in an attempt to bypass the Boston middlemen. The trip was doubly successful, for after the sale was made, the ship returned laden with British iron, hardware, hemp rope, sailcloth, and various other goods needed at home. American whaling merchants quickly built and began using their own “merchantmen” to take cargoes directly from the wharves in Nantucket and Dartmouth to London’s dockyards, and to return, often by way of the West Indies, carrying sugar and molasses. Joseph Rotch’s first large ship built on the shore of the future New Bedford was not a whaler but a merchantman, intended for this transatlantic trade. Her keel was laid under a grove of buttonwood trees beside the Acushnet, and he christened her
Dartmouth
.

This secondary trade further spurred the growth along Dartmouth’s waterfront, which proceeded at a pace not seen before on American shores. Wharves, sheds, houses, and roads were quickly built along the Acushnet’s west bank. Workmen from all over Massachusetts and their families arrived and settled. The area boomed with the raw ugliness of a gold-rush town. Local sawmills processed immense quantities of timber into lumber for ships and the unpainted houses that appeared up and down the river’s west bank. The hill rising inland from the former lonely Russell tryworks—that now rises across the river from the Moby Dick Marina in Fairhaven, carrying traffic along I-195 between Cape Cod and Providence—and the woods on the Russell homestead were clear-cut, left stump-pocked, muddy, and scarred as tree trunks were dragged down to the river by teams of oxen. The noises of many businesses—the clanging of blacksmiths, the kerf-biting roar and scream of sawmills, the squeal of coach and wagon wheels, the jangle of harnesses, the pounding of mallets, and the thunk of adzes in the boatyards—carried up and down the river and rose into the nearby hills. Smoke hung everywhere in the air, except during the strong cold northwesterlies. A dark, sooty pall—an oily smog fed by chimneys, forges, shipyards, cooperages, sawmills, and brush fires burning in the surrounding fields—marked the town from far down Buzzards Bay. And as whaleships returned to the wharves every few days, their hogsheads of putrid cargo kept the fires burning nonstop in the riverside tryworks. Emissions of greasy particulate settled over the town like a glaze and gave it the permanent odor of burnt flesh and fat.