The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth
Published: New York, Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939

CHAPTER 15

Rolling to Hyorky from the Catskill Shore

A snow-white whale curvetting with its brown mate in the swirling waters of the Hudson startled the settlers of Fort Orange in the rainy spring of 1647. A group of Dutch, Irish, Swedes, and Germans lined the banks, fearing the pale beast as an omen of evil. Assurances of those "who had been to Greenland" that the two visitors were natural sea dwellers did not comfort them. Only when the dark one ran aground on an island at the mouth of the Mohawk and died, thereafter permeating the air for six miles in all directions with an intolerable odor, would they accept a realistic explanation of what they had seen.

Then, with practical thrift, they descended on the fat corpse and broiled out of it a great quantity of oil, but not so much as escaped them, for the whole surface of the river was covered with grease for three weeks. This was the first profitable whaling venture of the Hudson valley dwellers, but far from the last.

Although a "considerable large whale" made a tour of Manhattan Island in October, 1773, making itself visible in both boundary rivers, nobody seems to have done anything about it. It was not until more than a decade later that the packets and sloops of the Hudson became accustomed to the stinkers of the whale trade as they tacked up the reaches of the river bound for home ports under the Catskills.

Jenkins Brothers from Nantucket
In the spring of 1783, Seth and Tom Jenkins, brothers native to Nantucket, left Providence, Rhode Island, with $100,000 in their pockets. They wanted a practical place to locate seagoing folk: it was to be as suitable as Nantucket, but less vulnerable. The constant threat of attack by the British Navy had caused islanders many a worrisome night during the past few years and the Jenkinses decided they would lie awake in their beds no more.

They had a look at a possible site in Connecticut and almost bought the Henry Rutgers farm on the East River above New York. Colonel Rutgers wanted $200 more than their price and the brothers were willing to split the difference but the colonel was not, and so the searchers went up the Hudson. They liked Poughkeepsie and would have settled there had they not, with Yankee thoroughness, gone farther and seen Claverack Landing. Here was water for boats of any draught and here was a kindly Dutch settlement of busy farmers who needed seafaring neighbors to trade with for mutual profit.

In July Tom and Seth bought land at Claverack and went back to Nantucket. Seth brought his family to the new home almost immediately, arriving in early autumn with his wife, four children, and his mother-in-law. The next spring Tom and all the good New England salt-water folk he and his brother could convert sailed up the Hudson in a fleet unlike any the farmers along the shore had ever seen. The Yankees came in a parade of sturdy whalers that were ready, as soon as they had landed the score of families, to come about and set sail for the South Seas. And to make sure that the time would not be long before they did just that, their owners had brought with them, ready built, the frames of tall, new houses, Nantucket style, soon to stand so close to the placid river that high tide sometimes sent the bowsprit of a moored whale ship crashing through a window.

Immediately after these Nantucket, New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard people had landed, they flaxed around and did things. Boats were sent downriver to fill their water casks, for it was already known that Esopus waters not only made the best ale but would not "rope" in the distasteful manner of most fresh water carried on long sea voyages. Then the voyagers left for Hyorky--their name for any far distant shore--and the men who were left muckled right into building houses, a Quaker meetinghouse, a school, and more whalers. They changed the name of Claverack Landing to Hudson and in less than two years it was an incorporated city with a proud fleet of twenty-five sail on the high, seas--more than the big city of New York could boast. The Hudson River whaling business was running before the wind.

The Port at the City of Hudson, NY
Now the Jenkinses, the Paddocks and the Macys, the Bunkers and the Folgers and the Coffins, the same families that made Nantucket an island to be loved and respected, were prospering as they had hoped. Captain Robert Folger returned in the Hudson with a stinking cargo of sperm oil for the Jenkins candleworks. Captain Judah Paddock came back with another. Captain Pinham scudded off to the Falklands after seals and returned with hundreds of hides and a tale of turtle eggs the size of a man’s head and turtles so large no man could turn them over.

Down off the ways just south of the town slid whaler after whaler--Liberty, Volunteer and American Hero, Juno, Diana and Helvetia, Harriet, Huron and Namina, Martha Beaver and Uncle Toby--while the band played and cannon roared and everybody--school children, farmers, shopkeepers--cheered themselves hoarse between bites of old Mrs. Newberry’s gingerbread. "Greasy luck!" they shouted to the proud captains waving from the decks as they started downriver on their search for whales. Captain Solomon Bunker came back in the American Hero with the largest sperm cargo ever brought into the United States. Let Nantucket match that!

The Dutch were doing their part too. At first the newcomers had thought them as odd as huckleberry chowder and made fun of their dialect. But as the store houses filled with ready cargoes of beef and pork and staves and leather and country harvest, the Yankees decided that they had better not try any cornstarch airs. These Dutch fellows understood everything that was said in English and then cooked up their shrewd deals among themselves, jabbering crazy language.

So Hudson grew. In 1790 it became an official seaport with customs officers and government seals, and in 1797 it lost to the upriver town of Albany by only one vote the honor of being the capital of New York State. Within five years it had recovered, however, for on the first day of March, 1802, twenty-eight hundred loaded sleighs entered the city and, as soon as the ice broke in the river, vessels began setting out southward at the rate of around fifteen a day. More boats had been added to the fleet--Alex Mansfield, Eliza Barker, James Monroe, and Edward. Tom Jenkins bought a gold headed cane so that he could direct launchings better, and redheaded Squire Worth, who had come to the river country with Tom in 1784, had his portrait painted and scolded the artist for making him look "like a one-story house with the chimney afire."

Trouble in Europe
Then when the young city was bowling along with a fair wind and an even keel a smear blew up. The British declared contraband any ships trading with France and her allies, and Napoleon replied that France would seize any ships entering or leaving a British port. Thomas Jefferson mixed up the whole business further with his embargo act forbidding all commerce with foreign countries.

So tar barrels hung over the mastheads of the Hudson whalers and traders to keep the wood from rotting. Business was struck with the dry wilt and the whole city of Hudson was sunk in the mollygrumps. The sea dogs of the Catskill shore might as well stay home and tend the kitchen halyards.

The War of 1812 did not help matters any--except that Hudsonians were glad they lived a hundred and twenty miles inland and not, like their Nantucket cousins, thirty miles out in an ocean infested by the British. Hudson was shrinking. Its once proudly boasted limits began to fit like a shirt on a handspike. The Bank of Hudson failed and there was no longer any stir along the wharves. Those farmers who had invested in shipping--and there were many--got no returns. For twenty-five years the upstate whaling trade lay becalmed.

Hudson River Whaling Companies
But a man with Nantucket blood in him usually lands on his feet. Around 1830 Captain Laban Paddock, his brother Judah, and some of the other salt-water men decided they had been fooling around long enough and they would go back to whaling. They sent out some boats which returned with hundreds of barrels of oil in the holds. They sailed again, and more ships followed them. One came back with a cargo worth $80,000. That was having your gingerbread cut the right way, said the Paddocks. Hastily they and their associates organized the Hudson Whaling Company. There followed a decade of “greasy luck” and Hudson was a rich and busy city once more.

This time the town did not have the river’s whaling trade to itself. Both Poughkeepsie and Newburgh had smelled rich cargo passing their wharves. Newburgh had a whaler on the way to the Pacific in 1832 before the Poughkeepsie Whaling Company was organized “for the purpose of engaging in the whale fisheries in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and elsewhere and the manufacture of oil and spermaceti candles.” Among the directors of the enterprise were the wealthy brewer, Matthew Vassar--who founded a college; euphoniously named Paraclete Potter, and Alexander J. Coffin (no whaling company could be complete without a Nantucketer). A crowd at the dock cheered lustily and a cannon, booming from a high rock overhead, made the echoes fly back and forth between the October-tinged banks of the Hudson, as the 300-ton Vermont, first Poughkeepsie whaler, set sail. Less than a month later the company had bought a second boat, the Siroc, and enthusiasm for the trade grew so rapidly that in the following spring Poughkeepsie and Troy businessmen incorporated a rival, organization--the Dutchess Whaling Company.

The combined fleets of the four Hudson River companies soon numbered about thirty ships and great quantities of oil were returning to enrich the investors of the valley towns. Captain Norton of the Vermont was stabbed by a member of his crew and put ashore at Charles Island in the Galapagos Group where he died; the Siroc was wrecked at Valparaiso, Chile; Captain Glasby of the whale ship Meteor of Hudson got entangled in the line after harpooning a whale and was dragged overboard and drowned. But oil was still a golden flood along the river front.

More men were needed for crews, and many an upriver farm boy signed on for a voyage to the waters off Hyorky. A smart Harvard College boy named Richard Henry Dana, Jr., working his way on the brig Pilgrim, wrote in his journal of a two-year voyage that the Pilgrim’s crew had sighted the Poughkeepsie whale ship New England off Patagonia and had been honored by a visit from her captain—six-foot, garrulous, Job Terry, “known in every port and by every vessel in the Pacific Ocean.” While Terry spun a yarn that lasted through his entire visit, supercilious young Dana looked over the crew that had rowed their captain to the Pilgrim and reported them “a pretty raw set just out of the bush” who “hadn’t got the hayseed out of their hair.” One of them “seemed to care very little about the vessel, rigging or anything else, but went around looking at our livestock and leaned over the pig sty and said he wished he was back tending his father’s pigs.”

Generally the long-sparred Dutch farm boys made good sailors, though. They learned to eat potato scouse, salt horse, fu-fu, and dandy funk, and to sleep on a “donkey’s breakfast” mattress. The Yankees could not fool them more than once by admonishing “Cast hot water and ashes to windward!” The new crew got a little nervous the first time a whale was raised, but it was not long before they could take a Nantucket sleigh ride behind a harpooned whale with the nonchalance of the best of them. On the lee days they carved out scrimshaw for their upriver sweethearts, and shouted “Thar she blows! Thar she white-waters! Thar goes flukes!” on the busy ones. When they returned they sneered at the frosted-cake, gilt-trimmed passenger steamers that passed them on the Hudson and laughed loudly when the villa dwellers on the banks lifted perfumed fingers to aristocratic noses as the whale stench came ashore.

The sailors and the captains and their landlubber employers had the time of their lives for ten years. Sails caught the wind on many seas, because now New York was offering the upriver whalers competition with her sturdy boats--Autumn, Dawn, Hes per, White Oak, Desdemona, Shibboleth--but there seemed to be enough business for all.

End of the Hudson River Whaling Industry
Then suddenly the bottom dropped out of the whale trade. The great panic of 1837 was much to blame, for all prices dropped to a low level and stayed there. Some of the captains said the upriver businessmen would not put enough money into the trade and that they were too stingy with their pay to officers and hands. The businessmen replied that the river towns were too distant from the whale produce markets and complained because their fleets were crippled for three months every winter when the river was frozen over. Modern inventions began to presage the end of the use of whale oil for illumination.

Whaling died out as a Hudson River industry--but the fascination of far shores remained. The dreamland of Hyorky and the vision of big profits marching in quick-time still enchanted the valley sea dogs. The whaling captains turned traders and their boats knew distant rivers--the Amazon, Congo and Manhissa, the Orinoco, the Plate, and the little streams of the Mosquito Shore. To Catskill, Athens, and New Baltimore, to Peekskill, Hudson, and Poughkeepsie, to Newburgh, Kingston, and Marlboro the sloops and schooners of the Hudson brought rich cargo—ostrich feathers and elephant bone, tortoise shell and ebony, gold dust, rum, and Spanish dollars.

And with almost every voyage came a new tale of adventure in Hyorky. Sometimes the captain wrote down the story for his neighbors to marvel at. The York State seamen apparently were a little more articulate than the New Englanders, for there are a number of printed "narratives," probably more per capita than the Yankees can boast. Newspaper accounts, taken from the lips of survivors, provided other evidences of the tough fiber and unflinching courage of the boys from the river farms and towns. These melodramas of the sea are still told beside the river, in the slatches of bright spring weather before the sun gets too hot, by old men who had them from their fathers and their grandfathers.

Not so long ago Hudson folks buried an old-timer who remembered the fine solemn funeral of a young Hudson naval lieutenant, whose body was brought to his home town five years after he was killed fighting pirates of the Windward Passage. And there are many men in the valley today whose grandfathers recalled a taciturn old man, Captain Benjamin Lawrence, who once commanded the whale ship Huron out of Hudson. When he was only a boy he had been a boat steerer on the tragic 1819 voyage of the Essex out of Nantucket. Captain Lawrence was so silent, they say, because most of the time he couldn’t forget the open boat, the starving and the thirsting, the day that Isaac Cole went mad and died, or the next day when they cooked and ate him.

Sea Stories
These and many other Hudson River stories speak of strength and endurance. They tell of foreign places but they also have something to say about the kind of people who once lived in the valley. Here is a group of them—one from each of four seaports along the Hudson.

The Flowered Tabinet
The Tale of the Wreck of the Oswego of Hudson and What Happened Afterward

The Bloody Flag
The Capture of the Combine of Catskill by the Pirates of the Yucatan Channel

The Roasted Captain
The Story of the Wreck of the Newburgh Trading Schooner Colonel Crockett

The Trampled Crucifix
The Tale of the Survivors of the Wreck of the Poughkeepsie Whale Ship Lawrence

Return to Hudson Whalers