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Rough Sea of Transition

By Patricia Kitchen | Staff Writer

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CAREER TRANSITION. It's not a phenomenon reserved for 20th-Century workers. Take Long Island's mariners, especially the whalers, who experienced their heyday in the mid-19th Century.

The retrenching of the whaling industry was gradual -- no single Big Bang event, says Sam Scott, curator of the Whaling Museum in Cold Spring Harbor, a whaling port that reached its peak in the 1840s. Some factors: Kerosene started to give whale oil a run for its money; the scarcity of the quarry; and eventually many whaling ships were destroyed during the Civil War and were not replaced.

Some whalers certainly would not have been sorry to hang up their harpoons. A whaling crew could be at sea for as long as five years. And pay came as an agreed-upon fraction of the voyage's profits -- minus a sailor's expenses, with interest. "It was a young guy's thing, especially for sailors," says Scott. "Most were 21 or younger."

One natural transition would have been to the crews of coastal trade, in which smaller vessels took daylong or weeklong trips to deliver goods in the metropolitan area -- comparable to today's 18-wheelers, said Ann M. Gill, the whaling museum's executive director.

Indeed, even a cursory look at the 1870 Census, kept at the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University, shows the new occupation of "captain, coastal trader," joining boatman and mariner listed often 10 years earlier.

Of course, some whalers came ashore as farmers or shopkeepers, and others -- lured by 1849's equivalent of the lottery -- set sail for the California gold rush. About 50 people from eastern Long Island set sail in 1849 from Greenport on a former whaling ship, says Scott. "Some came back disappointed."

At least one whaling captain-turned-shopkeeper could not transfer his skills ashore. Capt. Manuel Enos of Cold Spring Harbor tried not once, but twice, to run businesses. Both times he threw in the towel and returned to the sea, never to return from his final voyage.

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