Westport's whaling century, and the last whaler its shipyards built

In the journal Pardon Petty kept aboard the Westport brig Kate Cory, a pencil sketch of the vessel sits below a tally of blackfish oil, with her name written under the hull. She was built in 1856 behind the Cory store at Westport Point, the last whaler built in Westport, according to the Westport Historical Society, and in April 1863 the Confederate raider Alabama burned her off Brazil. Part 1 of this series traced whaling across the South Coast, and this part follows the people who built and sailed Westport's ships.

Counting the voyages

The American Offshore Whaling Voyages database, kept by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum and the Nantucket Historical Association, lists 309 voyages with Westport as home port, plus two more marked with a question mark or a second port. By our count of its current edition, Westport ranks ninth among American whaling ports, just behind Boston. The historical society, in a 2016 article, ranked it eighth of 72.

The database and a 2008 society page both start Westport's whaling with the sloop Union, which sailed in 1775 under Thomas Case. Early voyages typically lasted six months, the society says, and it names the Greyhound's, which sailed in 1857 and came home four and a half years later, as Westport's longest. The database dates that voyage May 8, 1857, to Oct. 6, 1861, but lists five Westport voyages that ran longer, the longest of them the Sacramento's, from May 22, 1858, to June 16, 1863. Sailings peaked in 1851 and 1853, with 11 in each year. The catch was mostly sperm oil: of the 275 voyages that brought home any oil or bone, 271 brought home sperm oil, at least 127,658 barrels in all, against 17,338 barrels of whale oil.

Built at the Head

Shipbuilding took place all along the river, the society says. At the Head of Westport, Thomas Winslow, a shipbuilder from Assonet, was master carpenter and namesake of the last large vessel built there, the 135-ton Thomas Winslow of 1828. The database credits her with 23 Westport voyages, more than any other vessel, before she was lost at sea Sept. 8, 1869.

Drawing on an 1893 account by Curtis Peirce, the society describes men fastening sealed, empty oil casks to a new hull so the tide would lift it through the narrow channel, then oxen hauling it around Hix Bridge before it drifted down to the Point. Launch days drew 300 or 400 people, Peirce wrote, "and as it was understood to be free drinks all day, almost everybody turned out."

The Kate Cory

The Kate Cory was built at the Point. On Jan. 5, 1856, Allen & Sisson signed specifications to build for Alexander H. Cory a schooner 75 feet on deck and 22 feet across the beam, with white oak planking and a copper-fastened hull, delivered by March 1, 1856, according to the society's transcription of the original at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The contract calls her a schooner. The database lists her as a schooner and a brig, and the society's vessel list counts two of her voyages as a schooner and three as a brig.

She made five voyages for Cory, two of them under Weston Smith Tripp, a captain born in Westport. Petty's journal of Tripp's second, which sailed Dec. 9, 1858, is at the Providence Public Library. A page at the front carries Petty's name twice, once with the middle initial L and once with what reads as Z, and both spellings survive: the database uses L and the library's catalog uses Z.

Her last voyage began June 26, 1862, under Capt. Stephen Flanders, born in Chilmark. In April 1863 the Alabama was coaling at Fernando de Noronha, an island off Brazil, when two whalers came in to trade sperm oil for supplies, John McIntosh Kell, the raider's executive officer, wrote in his 1900 memoir. When the whalers asked who the steamer was, "our prize master told them 'we were a Brazilian steamer bringing convicts,'" Kell wrote. The Alabama followed them out beyond the marine league and fired, and neither ship resisted. One was the bark Lafayette of New Bedford. Kell wrote that the raiders first meant to use the Kate Cory to carry their prisoners ashore, but a Brazilian schooner offered to take them to Pernambuco for a few barrels of flour and pork, "and so we burned the Cory." The database dates the burning April 15, 1863.

Owners, captains and a wife at sea

Andrew Hicks was born June 17, 1799, according to Westport's published vital records. He fitted out his first vessel, the President, in 1836 and died a wealthy bachelor at Westport Point in 1895, the society says. The database lists him as agent on 77 Westport voyages, more than anyone else, with Henry Wilcox next at 41. The last of Hicks's voyages was also Westport's last: the bark Andrew Hicks sailed June 23, 1879. The database names 172 masters of Westport voyages and gives a birthplace for 50 of them: 13 were born in Westport (one with a question mark), more than in any other town, and 11 on Nantucket.

Captains' wives sailed on 11 Westport voyages, the database records. One of them, Abbie Maria Dexter Hicks, kept a diary in a book 5 by 3 inches that is now at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the society says. Two months after their wedding she sailed with her husband, Capt. Edward E. Hicks, on the bark Mermaid, which the database shows leaving Aug. 28, 1873, for the Indian Ocean. She was the only woman aboard. She sewed, studied navigation and gave lessons to a cabin boy picked up in the Azores, and when the Mermaid met the Greyhound, another Westport bark, she befriended its captain's wife, Mrs. Wicks. Her first child was born July 23, 1874, in a house the couple rented at Mahe in the Seychelles. Her diary entry for the day says only "baby born about 12" and "caught two rats."

The Cuffe and Wainer ships

Paul Cuffe appears in the database as master and agent of the 42-ton schooner Mary, built in Westport in 1792 and listed as sailing that year for the Strait of Belle Isle, with its home port marked Westport with a question mark. The bark Hero, which the database lists as built in Westport in 1801, was built by Cuffe and co-owned by Cuffe and Isaac Cory, the society says. Her captain, William Bearns, wrote to the owners from Chile in June 1812 that his men were getting "very Bad with the Scurvy" and that when he reached port "there was but Four men that could come on deck," and those four were sick as well. The database records the Hero condemned and broken up at Coquimbo, Chile, in 1813.

Paul Wainer, born in Westport Oct. 17, 1776, took the brig Protection out of New Bedford to the Brazil grounds in 1821 and came home with 500 barrels of whale oil, the database shows. The society writes that Michael and Mary Wainer's sons served as mates, captains and masters of the family's ships. Cuffe's son William commanded the brig Rising States out of New Bedford in 1837. The society says he and three of his crew died when the ship was badly damaged in a gale, and the database records the brig condemned at Cape Verde that December.

The records differ on one date in Cuffe's own life. Westport's vital records, the historical society's biography of Cuffe and the eulogy Peter Williams Jr. delivered in New York on Oct. 21, 1817, all put his death on Sept. 7, 1817, while the whaling database gives Sept. 9.

Lost at sea, and two stories of the Janet

Albert Gifford, keeping the log of the Westport ship President in 1849, wrote that a whale "took one Ansel Juel in his Jaw," adding, "never saw him after," according to the society's 2016 article. The database lists that year's voyage under the President II, a second Hicks bark built in Mattapoisett in 1849, after the first President was condemned and broken up at Westport in 1848. In 1860 the bark United States, owned by Andrew Hicks, sprang a leak bound from St. Helena toward New Bedford. Capt. Warren Woodward put his eight passengers, a family moving to New Bedford, aboard the passing ship Moses Wheeler, and the bark was abandoned May 1 with 550 barrels of sperm oil, the society says, a date the database also gives.

The bark Janet, owned by Henry Wilcox, left for the Pacific in November 1848. In 1849 Capt. Charles B. Hosmer's whaleboat was separated from the ship more than 1,000 miles from land, the society says, and it found two accounts of what followed, one from a surviving seaman and one from Hosmer. They disagree on whether a whale destroyed a boat, how many men died and how the survivors were rescued, though in both the men drew lots. "All we know is that there was cannibalism among the crew of the Janet," the society wrote. "But how that actually happened we'll never know."

Other dates differ between the society's 2008 pages and the database. The society's disaster list has the Barclay wrecked on Cape Antonio in 1855 and the United States abandoned in 1856, where the database has March 1856 and May 1, 1860. Its page on Hicks says the Mermaid, built for him in 1855, was lost in a gale at Unalaska in 1880, while the database has her lost at Dutch Harbor in October 1899.

See it today

• Pardon Petty's journals of the Kate Cory's 1858 to 1860 and 1861 to 1862 voyages, with the sketch of the brig, are free to read on the Internet Archive from the Providence Public Library's Nicholson Whaling Collection.
• The Westport Historical Society's online exhibit "A Perilous Life" covers the shipyards at the Head, the houses and wharves of the Point, and letters that families at home wrote to Westport whalemen.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.