From the whaleship logbooks, 1841–1842
On 3 January 1841 the whaleship Acushnet sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Its crew list names a greenhand on a 1/175 share: Herman Melville, then 21. Ten years later he published Moby-Dick. An abstract of the ship’s log survives, copied by hand for the US Navy’s charts. Here are the 434 days it records with him aboard, each beside its handwritten page, with every other logged whaleship at sea that day.
Follow the AcushnetEvery line is a whaleship’s voyage, drawn day by day: 443,145 logged daily positions from 754 American voyages, 1784–1920. The continents are the places no ship went.
The log starts at sea on 22 March 1841, off southern Brazil; the first eleven weeks out of Fairhaven are not in it. The part with Melville aboard ends on 23 June 1842, when the Acushnet anchored at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. In July Melville deserted there. The orange line is the ship; the small dots are the other logged whaleships on the same day; a ring marks a day when the log notes whales.
Kept by the ship’s officers and copied out for Matthew Fontaine Maury’s whale charts. The highlighted row is the day on the map. Open the full page
On 12 days between 30 April and 5 June 1842, the logs put the New Bedford bark Columbus within 50 km of the Acushnet, 6 km apart at noon on 5 June. Five other logged ships came within 50 km on some day: Joseph Maxwell, Mary, Roman, Rousseau, Timoleon. The Acushnet’s abstract does not say they met. Moby-Dick has a chapter, “The Gam”, on the visits whalers paid each other when they met.
On 26 of the 434 days the abstract notes sperm whales seen. It does not record which were chased or killed; some abstract-keepers did not separate whales seen from whales struck. The voyage’s haul is known only for all four years: it came home in 1845 with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1,350 barrels of whale oil and 13,500 pounds of baleen.
“Herman Melville · Greenhand · 1/175”. A greenhand had never been to sea on a whaler. The lay was his pay: one 175th of the voyage’s net earnings, paid when the ship came home.
The same archive holds 443,145 days at sea from 754 voyages. Pick a date or play the year; click the bars to change the year. The bars show how many ship-days survive each year: three in four come from the 1830s and 1840s, the years whose logs were copied for Maury.
One test was written down before it was run (a rough first look had pointed the same way): on the same grounds, did ships meet right whales (Eubalaena) less often in the 1840s than in the 1830s? It failed. The drop was there, but in those years more and more encounters were written down only as “Whale”, which in about a third of the abstracts means a right whale (from 38.9% to 48.5% of encounter days), so a change in wording could have made it.
The second test, written after the first failed, counts whales of any kind, so the wording cannot move it. On 114 squares of ocean that ships worked in both decades, with each square weighted by its 1830s traffic, ships met whales on 14.1% of their days in the 1830s and on 8.6% in the 1840s: about 39% fewer (95% range: 34–46% fewer). The drop holds with any one ocean left out.
These are the whales the keepers wrote down. The test cannot tell fewer whales from keepers writing down fewer of them.
In the 1840s the fleet hunted North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica) in the north-east Pacific, on the grounds whalers called the Northwest Coast and Kodiak (here 45–62° N, 130–175° W). Of 143 ship-seasons spent there between 1840 and 1848, 76 met right whales at least once, and in a quarter of all those seasons they did so on more than a third of the days. By 1850, a study of the catch records says, the Gulf of Alaska fishery was largely over and the whalers moved north to hunt bowheads; in 1848 one ship had sailed through the Bering Strait. Afterwards so few logged ships cruised there that the logs cannot say what happened to the whales.
The same study estimates that 21,000 to 30,000 North Pacific right whales may have been killed in the 1840s alone, about 80% of the 26,500 to 37,000 killed between 1839 and 1909. A 2011 study estimated the eastern population at about 31 animals (95% range 23–54), from photographs taken in 1998–2008, almost all on the south-eastern Bering Sea shelf; only two had been photographed in the Gulf of Alaska.
The database rows for the Acushnet were checked against the scanned pages on 26 days chosen across the log (latitude on all of them, longitude on 15), including every crossing of the equator; all matched. One day, 9 February 1842, is on page 80 but missing from the database; its position here (4°56′ S, 99°50′ W) was read off the page. Positions are noon positions; the ship’s real track between them was longer. Added up, the noon positions alone make about 41,600 km.
“Within 50 km” compares two ships’ noon positions on the same date, as written in two different logs; it is not a sighting. A position written in degrees and minutes in the log is shown the same way here.
The sailing date, masters and cargoes come from the voyages database; the legs and port dates from the abstract’s own index. The tests, their thresholds and both results are in the project notes as written before each was run.