When the Sea Fed Long Island

IF YOU WERE a working man on Long Island in the mid-19th Century, you were most likely a farmer. If you weren't, the odds were that you owed your livelihood to the sea.

In the 1840s, the state's and the Island's second-biggest employer was the whaling industry -- second only to agriculture. Shipbuilding and ancillary businesses were the biggest economic generator in communities such as Port Jefferson and Northport. And hundreds of families put food on the table by manning trading vessels or fishing.

So Huntington historian Richard Welch estimates that 50 percent of Long Island's economic activity was tied to its maritime industries at that time.

The whaling industry poured millions of dollars in revenue into its Long Island bases -- Sag Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor, Greenport and other Suffolk ports -- in the three decades before it collapsed at the beginning of the Civil War.

In 1846, the peak year for whaling in the Northeast, 730 ships carrying 10,000 seamen were hunting whales. Thousands more worked in supporting trades such as coopers making barrels to hold whale oil and other supplies, carpenters, rope and sail makers, and boat builders. Long Island was the second-biggest whaling center outside of Massachusetts.

No Long Island town profited as much as Sag Harbor, which had its own U.S. customs house and a fleet of more than 60 whaling ships. And while whaling ultimately turned out to be an unprofitable venture for Cold Spring Harbor, it did generate a large payroll and spur development of the community. At its peak in 1851, the industry in Cold Spring Harbor supported six ships with 30 to 35 crewmembers each plus workers ashore doing support work.

The life of a whaler was no romantic adventure. "It was brutal," said George Finckenor, curator of the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. "Few men wanted to do it." Whaling was dangerous, the pay was bad, the work malodorous and dirty, and voyages often lasted several years. That meant whaling crews were generally composed of men who couldn't find better jobs, such as Indians, former slaves and poor whites with few skills.

Early Indians, and then whites during the Colonial period, carried out whaling from shore using small boats. The dead whales would be towed to the beach and butchered for their flesh -- used for oil -- and bones used in manufacturing shoe horns, men's collars, umbrella stays and hoops in women's dresses.

By the beginning of the 19th Century, there were no longer whales to be found near the coast, and large ships began to be outfitted for long ocean voyages. The labor pool on Long Island was too small to provide crews for all of these ships. So often the vessels would leave Sag Harbor or other ports short-handed and round out their complements with multi-national crews at traditional stopping-off points such as the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

The pay for seamen was pitiful. Usually the profit from a voyage was divided into thirds. The owners and agents kept a third, another third paid for maintenance of the ship, and the remainder was split by the captain and crew. The captain's share might be a tenth, or a sixteenth, while a crewman could get one-two hundredth or one-two hundred and twenty-fifth.

At the end of the voyage, a seaman might receive $5 in today's dollars on top of the clothing and food given to him while at sea. This was at a time when a can of beans would cost about 2 cents in today's money, so that $5 would feed a sailor and his family for at least several weeks. The captain's share would average between $300 and $400 in today's money, a sizable amount in those days. The whaling industry reached its zenith in the 1840s. The first blow came with the discovery of gold in California in 1848, siphoning whaleships and potential crewmen to the West Coast. In 1859, oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, providing a more convenient and dependable supply of fuel. Two years later, the outbreak of the Civil War harpooned most of the remaining industry. A few whalers continued to sail after the war. The last Sag Harbor whaler was the Myra, which sailed in 1871 and was wrecked three years later off Barbados.

Despite the prominence of the whaling industry on Long Island, very few of the whaling ships were constructed here. Most were turned out of larger yards than existed on Long Island, primarily in New England.

But the Long Island shipbuilding industry, which focused on supplying primarily coastal trading vessels, was still substantial.

Suffolk County had become the state's largest shipbuilding center outside of Manhattan and Brooklyn by the middle of the 19th Century. By 1855, there were 25 yards in Suffolk, employing 419 workers. Twelve of the shipyards were located in Port Jefferson, Long Island's shipbuilding capital. The first shipbuilder in what was originally called Drowned Meadow was John Willse, a farmhand from New Jersey, who began building vessels in 1796 in what is now Poquott.

The industry developed slowly at first in the community. But between the late 1700s and 1884, 327 wooden vessels were built there. This represented about 40 percent of the more than 800 ships launched on Long Island.

Shipyards were also major employers in Northport and Greenport, and almost every deep protected harbor along the North Shore and around Peconic Bay also had at least one shipyard.

Building ships required skilled craftsmen to carve models, cut trees into the proper shapes, assemble frames and planks and caulk them, and then install rigging. "Working hours were long, weeks ran six days, job security was nil, and the possibility of wage increases was virtually non-existent, especially after 1865," Welch writes in "An Island's Trade -- Nineteenth-Century Shipbuilding On Long Island."

Other craftsmen -- sailmakers, blacksmiths -- supported the shipbuilders. So while in 1870 about 10 percent of the workers in Port Jefferson and Northport toiled directly in the shipyards, several times that number supplied labor or materials for ship construction.

By the 1870s, the whaling industry was gone and steamships and iron-hulled vessels, which required larger yards and more machinery than was available on Long Island, had taken over the market. In 1900, only three major shipyards were left in Port Jefferson, and they only survived by building recreational vessels or doing repair work.

The next year the hamlet held its last big christening for a wooden ship: the more than 200-foot-long schooner Martha Wallace, the largest sailing ship ever built on Long Island.