Whaling | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

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This is the well near Titusville, Pennsylvania which pumped the petroleum industry into existence 100 years ago. The picture was taken four years after Col. Edwin L. Drake struck oil on August 27, 1859 near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Seated in the foreground is “Uncle” Billy Smith, Drake’s drilling foreman, who was first to notice a dark green liquid bubbling at the top of the hole. His cry of “Oil, struck oil.” Signaled success of the world’s first oil well and set off the world’s first oil book. The Drake well with a depth of 9½ feet, pumped 3 barrels a day. (AP Photo)

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Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania 1871

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July 1, 2017 by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Joe Bal & Jack Ena

As early as 1811, the fur trading Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) had already hired twelve Hawaiians on three year contracts to work for them in the Pacific Northwest. By 1824, HBC employed thirty-five Hawaiians west of the Rocky Mountains.

The number of Hawaiians working as contract laborers for the Hudson’s Bay Company steadily grew. The large number of Hawaiian workers in the village at Fort Vancouver led to the name “Kanaka Town” in the early 1850s.

The first Native Hawaiian seamen who shipped aboard a foreign whaler in the Pacific fleet left Maui on October 10, 1819. And rather than the Northwest, many ended up in the Atlantic Northeast.

Let’s look back …

The over-fishing of “on shore” New England whales in the 1700s forced local whalers to venture “offshore”, journeying further west in search of their lucrative prey.

The first New England whalers rounded Cape Horn in 1791, and fished off both the Chilean and Peruvian coasts. Many sailed around South America and onward to Japan and the Arctic.

“I gave orders in the morning to put the ship on a WSW course putting on all sail. … We made the best of our way to the Sandwich Islands where we arrived in six-teen days, had a pleasant passage to the Islands and arrived at Hawaii 19th 9 Mo 1819.“ (Gardner Journal)

Gardner then “Left Oahu 10th of 10 Mo 1819 for Coast of California. I shipped two Kanakas from Maui and had them the remainder of the Voyage and took them to New Bedford.”

“Their names were Joe Bal and Jack Ena, the two names comprising that of my ship Balaena. Much notice was taken of them, singing their national songs and airs. They were the first brought to this place.”

“On a subsequent Voyage I took them back to Maui and left them there, they preferring to stay at their own Island. They were well fitted with clothing for the Voyage. I gave them all the clothing that had been furnished them by the ship, which was sufficient for three years. We had been but six months from home.”

“On a subsequent Voyage I visited Kealakekua and was visited by Comocow (Keʻeaumoku) the principal chief in the province or district. He came often and dined with me.” Gardner then went to Maui.

“On leaving Maui I discharged my Kanakas and these with the desertion of one man left me three ‘short of my complement of the ship’s company. I took two natives from Maui, one from Oahu and one from Onehow (Ni‘ihau.)”

“The names I gave them were Henry Harmony, George Germaine, John Jovel and Sam How. I finished recruiting at Niihau, where we took as many potatoes and yams as we needed. I bought twenty barrels of yams and the same quantity of potatoes of George Tamoree (Kaumuali’i) at Attowai (Kauai.) (Gardner Journal, first whaler in Hawai‘i)

Thousands of Hawaiians shipped out as seamen aboard the whaling ships, so many that the crews were often half Hawaiian. Whaling had been “an economic force of awesome proportions in these Islands for more than forty years,” enabling King Kamehameha III to finally pay off the national debts accumulated in earlier years. (NPS)

Many of the Native Hawaiian seamen who arrived were named George, Jack, Joe, or Tom Canacker, Kanaka, Mowee, or Woahoo. Their given names remain lost to us because of the common practice among whaling captains of giving them English nicknames and surnames denoting their origins in the Sandwich Islands, an early name for the Hawaiian Islands.

An 1834 editorial in the New Bedford Mercury defined “Canackers” for New England readers. “The term Canacker bears the same meaning as our English word man and is used by the natives to signify man, in general …”

“… and a man as distinguished from a woman or female. The present established mode of writing it is Kanaka, pronounced Kah nah kah, with the accent on the second syllable.” (Lebo)

Other Native Hawaiians landed in Nantucket, New Bedford, and nearby ports almost immediately after Joe Bal and Jack Ena. By the 1830s, Nantucket whalers employed about fourteen hundred seamen, including Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Four or five hundred men arrived or departed annually.

At least six sailor boarding houses operated during the 1820 to 1860 period when Native Hawaiian seamen frequented Nantucket.

At least one house, near Pleasant Street in Nantucket’s New Guinea section, primarily or exclusively boarded Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and a sign identified William Whippy’s establishment as the “William Whippy Canacka Boarding-House.”

These whalers, on countless other New England voyages with Hawaiian crews, contributed to the economic and social history there. They shared their cultural traditions, languages, skills and knowledge with New England’s citizens and with each other aboard the whaleships. (Lebo)

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June 23, 2017 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

New Guinea

In 1602 the English colonist Bartholomew Gosnold arrived in the ship Concord, landed at Cuttyhunk Island, off Cape Cod, and laid claim to the entire region.

In 1652 English settlers from the Plymouth Colony acquired from Chief Massasoit control of 115,000 acres along the south coast of Massachusetts.

The colonial town government, organized in 1664, encompassed the present towns of Acushnet, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, New Bedford, and Westport. The economy was agrarian – a few scattered villages that supported themselves by farming and fishing.

The merchant families who came to New Bedford from Nantucket in the 1760s brought not only their whaling expertise, but also the Quaker traditions that had sustained them on the island. These traditions profoundly influenced business dealings and social relations during the whaling era and afterwards.

In the mid-18th century Nantucket emerged as the world’s most vigorous whaling port in the colonies, with a substantial fleet dedicated exclusively to pelagic sperm and right whaling on distant grounds, and a highly developed network of merchants and mariners to prosecute the hunt.

By the 1840s, with its harbor no longer deep enough to handle newer, larger whaling ships, most of the vessels relocated to New Bedford, while most of the financiers and much of the money and good life stayed in Nantucket.

There were more than three hundred Nantucket whaling voyages to Hawaii and the Native Hawaiian crewmen aboard. Thousands of Hawaiians shipped out as seamen aboard the whaling ships, so many that the crews were often half Hawaiian.

Whaling had been “an economic force of awesome proportions in these Islands for more than forty years,” enabling King Kamehameha III to finally pay off the national debts accumulated in earlier years. (NPS)

Many of the Native Hawaiian seamen who joined the whalers were named George, Jack, Joe, or Tom Canacker, Kanaka, Mowee, or Woahoo. Their given names remain lost because of the common practice among whaling captains of giving them English nicknames and surnames.

As early as 1825, The Nantucket Inquirer estimated that there were more than fifty Pacific Islands on Nantucket, all employed on whale ships.

“… and a man as distinguished from a woman or female. The present established mode of writing it is Kanaka, pronounced Kah nah kah, with the accent on the second syllable.” (Lebo)

By the 1830s, Nantucket whalers employed about fourteen hundred seamen, including Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Four or five hundred men arrived or departed annually.

As far as residents of Nantucket were concerned, Kanaka meant ‘male Pacific Islander,’ for whaling ships brought only young men, ‘single mariners,’ halfway around the world.

As ‘black men,’ Pacific Islanders ashore on Nantucket lived in ‘New Guinea.’

New Guinea was the segregated section of Nantucket where blacks lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century, a number of free blacks bought lots on the West Monomy shores, near the Old Mill.

Once known as Newtown, the area became known by 1820 as New Guinea, indicating the African roots of the property owners. (The label “New Guinea” was used in numerous cities and towns to designate the section in which people of color resided.) (MuseumOfAfroAmericanHistory)

The settlement, known as Guinea, or New Guinea, after the territory of the same name in West Africa, was a cluster of residences, gardens, and pastures physically separated from the white community by Newtown Gate, a sheep barrier at the end of Pleasant Street. There were stores, shops, churches, a school, and later on an abolition society. (Nantucket HA)

Among the residents of New Guinea in the 19th century, were at least three who had been born in Africa. One of them was James Ross. He had found his wife Mary Pompey on-island. Their children were, in order of birth: James Jr, Maria, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Eunice.

“In 1837 Maria Ross married William Whippey (identified as a ‘coloured’ man,) who was had been born in New Zealand in 1801, apparently the son of a Maori mother and one of the Nantucket whaling Whippeys.”

At least six sailor boarding houses operated during the 1820 to 1860 period when Native Hawaiian seamen frequented Nantucket. Together William and Maria ran a boarding house for Pacific Islanders on-shore from Nantucket whaling vessels.

That house, near Pleasant Street in Nantucket’s New Guinea section, primarily or exclusively boarded Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and a sign identified William Whippy’s establishment as the “William Whippy Canacka Boarding-House.”

After William’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Maria kept the boarding house going for a while and then remarried. Widowed again, she went to work as a stewardess on the Island Home, a steamboat running between Nantucket and Hyannis. (lots of information here is from Lebo, Karttunen, Carr and Okihiro.)

William Whippy Canacka Boarding-House-sign-NantucketHA

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January 10, 2017 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Timeline Tuesday … 1840s

Today’s ‘Timeline Tuesday’ takes us through the 1840s – first Hawaiian Constitution, the ‘Paulet Affair,’ Whaling and Great Mānele. We look at what was happening in Hawai‘i during this time period and what else was happening around the rest of the world.

A Comparative Timeline illustrates the events with images and short phrases. This helps us to get a better context on what was happening in Hawai‘i versus the rest of the world. I prepared these a few years ago for a planning project. (Ultimately, they never got used for the project, but I thought they might be on interest to others.)

November 22, 2016 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Timeline Tuesday … 1810s

Today’s ‘Timeline Tuesday’ takes us through the 1810s – Kamehameha and Kaumualiʻi negotiations, death of Kamehameha and the fall of the Kapu. We look at what was happening in Hawai‘i during this time period and what else was happening around the rest of the world.