Brilliant (6 page)

Although the sperm whale isn't a filler feeder, and thus has no baleen, and one whale might yield only twenty-five to forty-five barrels of oil (far less than a right whale), the quality of the harvest made it worth the chase. At its best, the oil from a sperm whale burned clear and clean and was almost odorless. But even more valuable was the spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the head which could be made into candles of the highest quality. These candles had a high melting point and gave off twice the light of candles molded from tallow. And the flame did not smell foul—a quality dearly valued in an age of sputtering, stinking tallow candles and dim, finicky grease lamps, which also stank. Spermaceti candles were probably first molded around the mid-eighteenth century; it's likely that Benjamin Franklin was referring to them when he wrote of "a new kind of Candles very convenient to read by.... They afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softening.... They last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing."

The sperm whale can grow to more than sixty feet, weigh more than sixty tons, and possess a blanket of blubber almost a foot thick. But its greatest feature is its massive, scarred, and battered head, flecked with the sucker marks of squid. According to Herman Melville,

In the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.

That head houses a brain of about eighteen pounds—the largest on earth—and contains two large cavities, known to whalers as the "case" and the "junk." The case, at the top of the head, is full of a mixture of oil and spermaceti—also called "head matter"—an almost-clear amber or rose-tinted waxy liquid that whalers hauled out of the carcass with buckets. Once out of the whale and exposed to cold air, the head matter crystallized and hardened to a pure white mass, which was stored in barrels for the rest of the voyage. There could be up to five hundred gallons of it in an average sperm whale, nine hundred in a large bull.

The junk, located in the lower half of the forehead, contains a spongy material impregnated with sperm oil. The oil squeezed from the junk made the finest lamp oil. Additionally, whalers harvested oil from the blubber of the sperm whale. The price of oil always depended on supply and demand, as well as on the quality of the oil, which varied from whale to whale even within a given species. But sperm oil always fetched a price three to five times that of common whale oil. In 1837, when the annual sperm oil yield of the American fleet was more than 5 million gallons, it sold for $1.25 per gallon. The price peaked in the 1860s at $2.55 per gallon.

Unlike tallow, spermaceti couldn't be dipped or molded into candles by a housewife in her kitchen, for the complex process of making spermaceti candles took almost an entire year to complete. After the spermaceti arrived in port, it was brought to the candle works, where the candlemakers boiled it to filter out impurities and then stored it until the cold weather, when it would fully congeal. On a mild winter day, when the spermaceti softened a bit, they shoveled it into woolen bags and pressed it between the wooden leaves of a large screw press. The oil they squeezed from the spermaceti then was called "winter strained sperm oil"—clear and clean—and they sold it as lamp oil, which commanded the highest price. They stored the remains until spring, when they heated it again to filter out more impurities, then cooled it, molded it into cakes, and shaved it into small pieces before they pressed it again—this time in cotton bags and under greater pressure—to produce "spring strained sperm oil," which was a lower-quality oil. What remained in the bags they pressed a third time to make "tight pressed oil" or "summer oil." The remaining solid after these three pressings was almost pure spermaceti—waxy, brownish or yellowish in color, and streaked with gray. They stored it for the summer, then heated it again, this time with potash to bleach and clarify it—clear as spring water, it was said—before molding it into candles that would fetch twice the price of those made of tallow. Spermaceti candles had no comparison, except perhaps those made from beeswax, and like beeswax candles, they would always remain the province of the well-to-do. So steady and clear was their light that the brightness of the flame of a pure spermaceti candle that was seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and weighed one-sixth of a pound would eventually become a standard of measure for luminous intensity—one candlepower—against which the light of other candles, all lamps, and even the first electric lights would be measured.

The desire and demand for spermaceti and sperm oil would drive the whaling trade well into the nineteenth century. The size of the fleet reached its peak around 1846, when more than seven hundred vessels sailed out of twenty major American ports and a host of smaller ones, and several hundred vessels from other countries also roamed the whaling grounds. The oil and spermaceti brought to port that year were valued at $8 million. Melville himself posed the question as to "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff." There had been an estimated 1.1 million sperm whales in the world's oceans before the hunt for them began in earnest. How many remained in the mid-nineteenth century isn't known, but it's thought that today the somewhat recovered population stands at about 360,000.

Although sperm whales may have been the prized catch, whaling ships continued to take whatever whales they could find. In 1851 more than 10 million gallons of common whale oil—bringing about 45 cents per gallon—also arrived in American ports. The millions of gallons of whale oil and sperm oil circulating the globe meant that light was more readily available to many people—especially those in cities—than it had been in the past. People began to light more household lamps in the evening and leave them lit for a longer time. More light, yes, and unlike the old local oils and tallows, light at a far remove from its grimy source, so people for the first time could distance themselves from the whole endeavor of light's production. Melville's Ishmael said of himself and his companions, "They think that at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers, we are, that is true.... But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage, yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!"

Eighteenth-century whalers suffered their own particular perils, but the seas were dangerous for all sailors. Most navigation tools were rudimentary and the charts imprecise. Once night fell or weather closed in the coast, mariners had few lights to help them steer clear of sandbars, stone reefs, or the debris of old wrecks. What lights there were—often no more than open coal or wood fires on the headlands and burning baskets of pitch or oakum atop long poles—were of limited help, for they barely penetrated the fog and the dark and didn't always stand up to the prevailing winds and storms that battered them. The work of keeping the light alive could be unceasing: on a windy night, an open fire could consume a ton of coal or countless logs. The endless demand for fuel for coastal fires was one of the primary reasons for the deforestation of the island of Anholt off the coast of Denmark.

The smoke-clouded lanterns of the few lighthouses were no better. Their flames—sometimes open to the elements, at best enclosed in glass or horn and magnified with reflectors or convex lenses—were small and unsteady. The lamps, often possessing multiple wicks, had to be constantly snuffed, guarded, fanned, and fed. They were hard to light in the cold, and the keepers—ill supplied, isolated, and miserably paid, themselves barely protected from the wind and rain—might need to place hot coals near the lanterns to prevent the oil from congealing. Despite the best efforts of the keepers, along the British coast alone—the best-lit coast in the world in the early eighteenth century—more than five hundred ships foundered every year.

At times it was lights themselves that sunk ships, for well-intentioned beacons could be deceiving. Almost all of them in the eighteenth century were fixed—there was no system of flashing lights to help distinguish one lighthouse from another as there would be in later times—and although a fixed light could help orient those who knew the waters, it was of little help to someone unsure of his bearings. A ship approaching land after a long, wind-tossed voyage could be far enough off course that the navigator might mistake the light he encountered for a different one farther along the coast. Or a light, being precarious, would go out, and the navigator might find no light where he expected one to be. It was also true that a terrestrial light might appear to be celestial. Pliny the Elder, speaking of seamarks in Roman times, wrote, "The only danger is, that when these fires are thus kept burning without intermission, they may be mistaken for stars, the flames having very much that appearance at a distance."

Lights could also be intentionally deceiving: wreckers intent on stealing washed-up cargo sometimes set a lantern on a dark headland hoping it would be taken for a true seamark, though their usual method, wrote lighthouse historian D. Alan Stevenson, "was to drive an ass bearing 2 lanterns along the shore, to represent a vessel in motion and so lure a ship to destruction among the near rocks and shoals." Wreckers weren't the occasional wayward souls. Historian Bella Bathurst notes, "Many coastal villages staked their livelihoods on the exotic plunder to be found in dead and dying ships; the wreckers saw their lootings as a perk of nautical life, and bitterly resented any attempt to interfere.... The wreckers were furious at the prospect of a safer sea."

It was said that the open flame of the first known lighthouse, the Pharos, could be seen a hundred miles away. Although that is certainly an exaggeration, the Pharos was an impressive structure. Built for the port of Alexandria in the third century
B.C.
, its light—which was intensified and projected by a curved mirror or polished metal disk—was housed in the cupola of a rectangular marble structure that rose about four hundred feet above the low-lying Egyptian shore. At the time, only the pyramids stood taller. By comparison, eighteenth-century shore lights were far more modest, and on a clear night a well-maintained beacon might be seen five, six, maybe seven miles away, which was far short of some of the worst ocean perils. For instance, the rocks of the Eddystone reef, which lie nine miles off the south coast of England, extend for half a mile, and nearly all of them are submerged, the most prominent rising only three feet above water during the highest tides. According to Bathurst,

The rust-colored gneiss is as resilient as diamonds, and the currents that surround it send up abrupt spouts of water even on the calmest days. It is thought of as a bad-tempered place, full of sulks and strange moods, and by the sixteenth century its reputation for destruction had already spread well beyond Cornwall.... Merchant captains were so alarmed by the prospect of being wrecked on the Eddystone that they often ran themselves aground on the Channel Islands or the northern French coast trying to avoid it.

It was at Eddystone, on rock fully exposed to the sea, that the first offshore light, engineered and built by Henry Winstanley, was completed in 1698. Winstanley secured the structure by driving twelve iron rods into the highest rock on the reef. He then surrounded the rods with stone. Glaziers, smiths, masons, and carpenters made trips from Plymouth almost daily when the weather held. They moved tons of material from their boats to the rock even in rough seas and accomplished their work as the tides rose and fell around them. D. Alan Stevenson wrote:

At midsummer the party decided to lodge in the tower, hoping to save the time and labour spent in passage between Plymouth and the reef. But during the first night a storm of exceptional severity for the season arose unexpectedly and no boat could approach to take them off. With little shelter ... they were marooned in the roofless tower for 11 days [and finally] got ashore in a half-drowned condition. When the weather improved, undeterred by the unhappy experience, they returned to complete the lighthouse and lighted it on the 14th November.... In the following months the waves over-topped the lantern and Winstanley saw that he must raise it.

The next year, Winstanley built an almost entirely new structure, forty feet taller than the first. His second light lasted three years before severe winter weather damaged it. When Winstanley returned to the rock again to oversee repairs, he, his workmen, and the keeper were caught on the reef during one of the fiercest storms ever recorded along that coast. After the weather cleared, there was no sign of any man, and all that was left of the light were a few twisted pieces of metal—remnants of the rods that had tied the tower to the rock.

The third tower at Eddystone—a timber sheath packed with stone, built by John Rudyard—stood for fifty years until the wooden lantern that housed the flame caught fire. The light from the conflagration, seen from the English shore, reached farther than the beacon ever had. According to Stevenson,

Quickly the fire got a grip of the tower, the flames extended downwards over their heads and drove the men from room to room until they found shelter in a cleft in the Rock ... while burning embers and red-hot bolts rained down.... One of the lightkeepers ... declared that when looking upward during their descent of the burning tower, a quantity of molten lead had fallen into his mouth and down his throat. He experienced no pain and a physician who examined him did not believe his tale, but he died twelve days later.... The dreadful experience at the Eddystone so terrified another of the lightkeepers that on reaching land he ran off and was not heard of again.