Leviathan or The Whale

attempted to remain loyal to Britain, their greatest customer. But with the new republic, the ships returned in greater numbers than ever.
    And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits…overrun and conquered the watery world…let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it…There is his home; there lies his business…

    In 1944 Ishmael’s hymn to Nantucket was broadcast to American troops overseas as a means of raising morale, reminding them of an heroic age. ‘Indeed a Nantucket man is on all occasions fully sensible of the honour and merit of his profession,’ Owen Chase had written a century earlier, ‘no doubt because he knows that his laurels, like the soldier’s, are plucked from the brink of danger.’ Here was honour untainted by ‘the luxuries of a foreign trade’. Its reward was God’s bounty for His own country.
    Nantucket was the purest expression of this holy quest. Its houses seem to say it, plain and angled and sharpened against the light, as much ships as they were homes, their shuttered windows and narrow doors facing all fortune and affliction. New England ports sent out more ships a week than old England did in a year, and ‘our sails now almost whiten the distant confines of the Pacific’, boasted Chase. Through whaling, America reached across the world for the first time; whaling exported its culture and ideas. And Nantucket was at its heart. By 1833, seventy thousand souls and seventy million dollars were tied up in whaling and its associated crafts; ten years later that figure had nearly doubled. The United States exported a million gallons of oil to Europe each year. At its peak, no fewer than thirty-eight American ports would pit themselves against the whale, from Wiscasset in Maine to Wilmington in Delaware, although many failed in the attempt.
    The appeal of this filthy business was money: vast sums of it, for some. An owner could expect a threefold return on his investment. The first industrial fortunes in America were built on the whale fishery. In New England it remained an industry controlled by the Quakers, who saw no contradiction between their pacifist beliefs and their daily business. It certainly did not concern Captain Bildad, part owner of the
Pequod
, who ‘though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns and tuns of leviathan gore…very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.’
    Of all the products that were made from the whale, the pure-burning candles produced on Nantucket were the finest, as if the Quakers’ Inner Light shone from the whale itself. The technique of turning whales into candles was introduced to New England in 1748, by a Sephardic Portuguese Jew, Jacob Rodriques Rivera.
    It was a complex process. Headmatter from sperm whales was brought directly from the ships to large wooden manufactories, where it was heated in great kettles to remove water and impurities. It was stored in casks and, over winter, cooled to a coagulate mass. This was placed in woollen bags, which were then compacted in a wooden press from which spermaceti trickled, like juice from an apple press, or oil from olives. This first pressing, the purest, was known as ‘winter-strained’ sperm.
    The remaining matter was made into ‘black cakes’, and stored until the spring, when in warmer temperatures it began to ooze. Re-pressed, this was ‘spring-strained’ oil. After a third and final pressing, a brownish mess remained; heated with wood shavings and potash, it clarified like butter, and the result made pure white wax. It also made fortunes.
    Kezia Coffin was scion of one of Nantucket’s first families, a ‘she-merchant’ famous for her fine clothes, the forbidden spinet she played, and the opium she was reputed to use. She began selling pins, but her merchandising business expanded into whale products. Loyalist Nantucket continued to trade with Britain, and during the Revolution Kezia made a private deal with a British admiral to ship oil and candles to London, along with smuggled goods sold at inflated prices. Kezia was a paradigm of feminine fortitude and enterprise on an island of women used to the