Nantucket-on-the-Hudson

Remembering the halcyon days of Hudson's whaling fleet

by Paul Smart
October 23, 2003
Ulster Publishing, Kingston, NY

Back two centuries, when the banks of the Hudson were largely bare of trees, with mud rolling down hills to turn the great River's length a shade of brown now associated more with the soft drink Yoo-Hoo than with our region's heralded namesake, the wealthiest ships coming up this mighty thoroughfare were inevitably those that stank the worst. According to tales from the time, you could smell the three-masters hours before they appeared, their stench carrying for dozens of miles, if the wind were just so.

Similarly, what was once the region's richest city - and almost its state capital instead of Albany, but for a single vote - was for years a fine market for snuff and strong perfumes, to be dabbed directly into the nostrils.

The City of Hudson had a presence, all agreed: from the New England-like skyline of its captains' homes with cupolas and widows' walks to its riverfront of ropewalks and 30 or 40 ships ready to sail; from its fine promenade on the cliffs above the River, overlooking the distant, storied Catskills; to its million-dollar odor of whale oil - the mighty moneymaker of the great Sperms hunted the entire world's oceans over.

A whaling port 120 miles from the sea, we now ask? A legend on the high seas, from Barbary to the Marquesas, from Hyorky to Typee?

It came about like this: During the Revolution, several wealthy families of Nantucketers - those seafaring legends of the spare island off Massachusetts made famous in Moby Dick and other tales of whaling - got tired of fearing for their ships from marauding British privateers. Maybe the harsh winters played into things, too, along with a growing sense of competition coming out of what would soon be the nation's top whaling port, New Bedford. So they up and sold all they had and headed west until they found a piece of property with both a bay and a piece of high ground overlooking water. It just happened to be along the Hudson, in a spot then known as Claverack Landing. The price, the families decided, was $100 cheaper than something offered along the East River in a place called the South Bronx. There was potable water and deep water for shipbuilding purposes. So they settled.

That was the summer of 1783. By the summer of 1785, enough whalers had sailed up the River, with their goods and families, to allow Claverack Landing to take on the name of the entire River, Hudson, and incorporate as a City. Churches had been built; several schools and an academy; a Quaker meeting house; boat-building facilities; candleworks where the sperm oil brought in by the 25 ships to port in Hudson could be manufactured into candles - candles that, quite oddly considering the stench of whale oil, burned odorless, giving them great value and prestige.

"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 - schoolchildren, farmers, shopkeepers - cheered themselves hoarse between bites of old Mrs. Newberry's gingerbread," wrote popular historian Carl Carmer of it all in his 1939 "Rivers of America" book, The Hudson, drawn from early newspapers and journals. "'Greasy luck!' they shouted to the proud captains waving from the decks as they started downriver on their search for whales."

Things went really well for a couple of decades, with Hudson actually setting records for the amount of sperm oil and the size of whales caught, until new troubles with the politics of the High Seas killed the Middle Atlantic whaling business for a decade. But by 1830, a whole new generation was out whaling - and doing even better and more than before. Thirty-five ships called Hudson home. And the City took on the attributes of a rough-and-tumble port, with saloons and whorehouses and bear pits and gambling halls and a wide array of religious outlets trying to save everyone before they got on their ships for two to three years before the mast.

What was the life of Hudson whalers like? Smelly and dirty, with beer and rum for drink because the water went bad too fast for safety. There were more rats and mice than on other ships, because of all the blood and oil and stench on board; endless maggots and flies, all of a cycle. There were lashings and barbed fights; death and decay and everything that still lends Herman Melville's great book of whaling, Moby Dick, its eternal hold on our imaginations - as well as our sense of what those days and that industry were.

It seems, in fact, that Melville's draw to the sea - the reasons he ended up shipping out as a common seaman in his 20s, leading to his great books of the sea and all else - came largely as a result of Hudson's character at the time. That character carries on today in the aged town's cute street signs with the cartoon whales on them - more Free Willys than giant leviathans of the evil deep.

Melville, you see, was born in New York, but raised in Albany. His mother's family were all Gansevoorts, with a street named after them in Manhattan and mansions still in their name within hailing distance of the State Capitol. His childhood, in a family of eight children, was punctuated by nasty bumps as his father lost business after business. When Herman was 13, father Allan, trying to return home from an unsuccessful business trip to New York, was stopped by January ice on the River at Poughkeepsie. For some reason, he walked across the River, caught pneumonia and started a downward spiral that saw him dead, following a month of "frantic hysteria", by mid-February. The family moved to River towns. Herman had to leave school at 15, after which he shuttled between jobs in Pittsfield, a school (which went broke after a year) in Greenbush, across from Albany, and a newspaper near Troy.

Letters and journal accounts from the time, when he was still in his late teens, suggest a fascination with the nearest real port along the Hudson: the whaling city formerly known as Claverack Landing. Some have him spending time there, watching the ships come in and unload their stinking loads of whale product, which in addition to the oil included ambergris and whalebone, skin and baleen.

At 20 he sailed on a packet ship from New York Harbor to where his elder brother took him, to Liverpool. He returned and started working on a novel, found more work near Albany, hunkered around Hudson.

By then, though, things in the River whaling port were dwindling. A heyday had started in 1830 that led to the introduction of whaling companies to Newburgh, in 1832, and Poughkeepsie, in 1834, which saw 30 new ships sailing from the River ports toward the hunting grounds of the North and South Poles. But a massive fire that destroyed much of Manhattan in the winter of 1835 started a decline that eventually resulted in a financial panic throughout 1837. The whaling industry took a big hit, dwindling back to Nantucket and New Bedford. And the great port of Hudson started a long decline that only recently started reversing itself via antiques - its heritage from those early years. Poughkeepsie shifted to an odd combination of brewing beer and educating women, while Newburgh - after a respite brought on by its early electrification and turn-of-the-century showmanship based on centennial historical pride - also began declining.

By the time Melville was ready to really up and sail away as a whaler, he did so from New Bedford. And his two-year journey ended up yielding a lifetime of writing such great works as Typee and Omoo, Reburn and Billy Budd, and of course, that massive tome originally known simply as The Whale.

Reports from the late 17th century tell of a white whale circling Manhattan. Just before the Revolution, one made it up almost to Kingston before turning around and heading back out to sea. Whaling accounts from over the years tell of ships meeting Hudson whalers in the South Seas, around Alaska and off the coast of Greenland.

Were Melville's reports based on Hudson's old role as a beacon of the now-forgotten industry? It doesn't matter. Both exist, still, as part of this River's long legacy - like those visions, once oft-repeated, of a water surface afloat with hundreds of craft at any given point: a great thoroughfare, a place of endless, life and culture-changing dreams.

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