The Wild Seas of the Whaling Era

Can you imagine a whaling captain’s wives at both ends of the globe, one in Edgartown, the other in Pago Pago, each saying, “Honey, before you sail, I need money for three years of kerosene and castor oil”?

In the Golden Age of whaling on Martha’s Vineyard—roughly from the 1820s through the 1860s—it was rumored that sea captains had wives in South Seas ports of call. Historians point out that this was erroneous, if not downright impossible, since sailors had to follow the whales’ migrations, no matter where that took them. There was no negotiating with Moby Dick: “Hey, big boy, let’s swing past the Marquesas, I’ve got a hot date lined up.”

But on the subject of hot dates, there were those aplenty. In Tahiti, Samoa, all over East Polynesia, young ladies termed “lascivious” by travel writers of that era were so eager for (paying) male company, they rowed in small crafts to meet the sailing ships, and clambered aboard to get the orgies rolling. The great explorer, Captain James Cook, when he wasn’t being eaten by cannibals in Hawaii, wrote about native girls thronging the deck to entice sailors to have sex with them.

In "Memoir of An American Sea Captain," by Charles Tyng (1808–1833) he notes that on a tropical island he was required to kiss a native king’s wives “lying on a mat like three brown hogs, naked, their skin oiled.” We’ll have to forgive him the political incorrectness of his description; he was undoubtedly hiding his delight in this wildly exotic manner of saying “Pleased to meet you!”

Sensuality was so blatant in these Southern climes, it’s been theorized that the men on the HMS Bounty staged their 1789 mutiny because they dreaded returning to cold weather and frigid girls. In point of fact, they were already possessed of Polynesian wives who, once the sailors ditched the nasty Captain Bligh, accompanied them to Pitcairn Island to get the new generation of mutiny babies rolling.

All over the world in the 19th century, not only in tropical latitudes, bordellos were booming. Even in super-staid Boston, recent archaeological digs have uncovered artifacts from prostitutes’ daily ablutions. Apparently these gals took better care of their personal hygiene than anyone in the general citizenry. This included the use of toothpaste, surprisingly absent in Victorian households. In addition, these sex workers zapped venereal disease by injecting themselves with mercury, arsenic or vinegar. Unhappily, they must have died from the cure before they could develop symptoms of syphilis.

It makes you wonder, however, if our Vineyard whalers brought back unpardonable ailments from their bawdy adventures in Rio, Canton (the port of floating pleasure barges) and Malang. But again, in those days there were so many opportunities to die of something other than venereal disease that a little case of the clap probably went unnoticed.

As for our Vineyard captains, a number of them escorted their wives to sea, which certainly accounted for keeping the boss out of trouble. Of course we all recall the old superstition about a female on board bringing ill fortune. But clearly an exception was made for conjugal accommodations in the captain’s quarters. In fact, when researching her new book "The Sea Captain’s Wife," Beth Powning discovered that thousands of wives accompanied their husbands on lengthy voyages.

Notably on the Vineyard, Chilmark’s Joshua Slocum (1844–1909), who wrote "Sailing Alone Around The World," interrupted his maritime bachelor-hood in 1871 to marry Sydney lass Virginia Albertine Walker. Virginia’s feet rarely touched terra firma again: For the next 13 years, on a variety of vessels, she bore seven children at sea and finally, off the coast of Buenos Aires in 1884, became suddenly ill and died.

Another tale that touches on an entirely different scenario—i.e., a captain’s wife who detested the whole business of sailing—involved Capt. D. Fisher of Edgartown who in mid-century, at the age of 50, wooed and won a blushing 20 year-old bride. For their honeymoon he carried her over the threshold of a three-year whaling voyage. She quickly grew sick of the sea—and presumably of him; them’s mighty tight quarters, those captain’s staterooms.

On their return to the Vineyard, she vowed to never again even look at a shoreline. The captain wasn’t listening; he built his home on North Water Street (recently the Tuscany Inn) in the 1800s directly facing the harbor. (There was no Murdick’s Fudge to block the view.) Mrs. Fisher left in a fit of pique. Capt. Fisher holed up in his third-floor attic bedroom and, it was generally believed, died of a broken heart. 

He would have been better off kissing native king’s naked wives, and visiting his own wife in the traditional manner, for a few weeks’ shore leave every three or four years.