In 1718 the people on this island began to build ships with great kettles in them for rendering the oil on board the ships.  The brave Nantucket men, and the men on the coast near by, soon began to send their ships into very distant seas.  Some of them sailed among the icebergs in the Arctic regions; others went to the Southern Ocean; and some of the Nantucket and Cape Cod ships went round Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean.  The hardy whalemen ran great risks during their long voyages, but, if they were fortunate in killing whales, they made a good deal of money.

There are still whaling vessels in our times, but not so many as there used to be.  We do not need whale oil so much, because we have kerosene, gaslights, and electric lights.  There are not so many whales to be found as there used to be.

When the men on a whale ship in the old times discovered a whale, they fitted out their boats and rowed toward it.  The whale would go down out of sight.  Each officer would place his boat where he thought the whale would come up.  When the whale came up to get breath, the men in the nearest boat would row toward it.  The officer who stood in the bow of the boat would then throw a harpoon, which would stick fast in the whale.  As soon as the whale was struck with the harpoon, he would go down into the water.  There was a line fast to the harpoon, which was coiled in a tub standing in the whaleboat.  Sometimes the whale would run down so far, that it would take more line than the boat carried, to keep hold of him.  When this was likely to happen, another whaling boat would come alongside, and tie its line to the line of the harpoon that was fast to the whale.  In some cases nearly five thousand feet of line were drawn out of the boats before the whale came to the top again.  Whales breathe air as we do, so the whale that had been harpooned would have to come up again.  Then the whaling boat would run close to him, and the officer would try to kill him with a sharp lance.  When a whale was killed, the men drew him alongside the ship.

A whale’s body is covered with a great mass of fat called blubber.  When the dead whale was lying alongside the ship, the whalemen would fasten a hook in the blubber.  They then cut the blubber into a long strip running round the whale.  As they pulled on the hook with ropes, the strip of blubber came off the whale, the whale rolling over and over.  The men unwound the blubber from his body in this way, pulling it up on board the ship, and cutting it into pieces.

If it was a sperm whale, they would cut a hole in his head, to reach a place where there was a great quantity of oil.  This oil they dipped out.  Sometimes forty barrels of oil were dipped out of the head of a whale.  From the fat of some very large whales more than two hundred barrels of oil could be secured.