Wreck of only sunken Gulf whaler discovered 190 years later

A Massachusetts whaler sank near the mouth of the Mississippi about 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick.

Nearly 190 years later, experts said, it was still the only whaler known to have crashed in the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of slavery in southern ports posed a risk to black and mixed men who were often part of the whaling crews .

Researchers, who observed strange shapes during undersea scanning of the sandy ocean floor, believed they had finally found the shipwreck about 113 kilometers off the coast of Pascagoula in Mississippi.

It was documented in February by remote-controlled robots in about 1,829 meters of water.

Not much remains of the two-masted wooden brig believed to be the Industry, a 20-foot whaler that sank after a storm in 1836. An old news clipping found in a library showed his 15 or so crew members were rescued by another whaling ship and returned home to Westport, Massachusetts, said researcher Jim Delgado of SEARCH Inc.

The industry’s discovery shows how whaling expanded into a region where relatively little was known about whaling, despite the Gulf’s extensive maritime history.

“The Gulf is an undersea museum with some incredibly well-preserved wrecks,” said Delgado of SEARCH Inc., who a few years ago helped identify the remains of the last known American slave ship, the Clotilda, in muddy river waters just offshore. north of Mobile in Alabama.

The find also sheds light on how race and slavery became entangled in the country’s maritime economy, said historian Lee Blake, a descendant of Paul Cuffe, a prominent black whale captain who made at least two voyages aboard the Industry.

Confederate slave owners felt threatened by mixed-race ship crews entering the harbor, she said, so they tried to prevent enslaved people from seeing whites, blacks, Native Americans and others, all free and working together for equal pay.

“There was a whole set of rules and laws so that if a crew entered a southern port and there were a large number of mixed race or African American crew members on board, the ship would be impounded and the crew members would be taken into custody until it left.” said Blake, president of the New Bedford Historical Society in Massachusetts. Black crew members can also be kidnapped and enslaved, she said.

Industry images captured by NOAA Ocean Exploration aboard the research vessel Okeanos Explorer show the outline of a ship along with anchors and metal and brick remains of a stove-like device used to make oil from whale blubber at sea, elements that Delgado describes as important evidence that the wreck was a whaler.

The Industry photos pale in comparison to the recently released Endurance photos, which sank in 3,048 meters of icy Antarctic water a century ago and are incredibly well preserved. Bottles believed to date from the early 1800s are visible around Industry, but no ship’s nameplate; what appears to be a modern fishing line is near the metal pilot plant used to produce oil from whale fat.

The Gulf was a rich hunting ground for sperm whales, which were especially valuable for the quantity and quality of their oil, before the country’s whaling industry collapsed in the late 1800s, said Judith Lund, a whaling historian and former curator at the New Bedford Whale Museum. in Massachusetts.

“In the 1790s, there were more whales than they could pluck from the Gulf of Mexico,” she said in an interview.

While at least 214 whaling voyages have ventured into the Gulf, Lund said, ships from the Northeast rarely made long port calls in southern cities such as New Orleans or Mobile, Alabama, due to the threat to crew members who were not white.

That may have been one reason why the whaling ship that rescued Industry’s crew returned the men to Massachusetts, where slavery was outlawed in the 1780s, rather than landing in the south.

“The people who have been fishing in the Gulf of Mexico knew it was risky going to those ports down there because they had mixed crews,” Lund said.

• A Massachusetts whaler sank near the mouth of the Mississippi about 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick.

• The industry’s discovery shows how whaling expanded into a region where relatively little was known about whaling, despite the Gulf’s extensive maritime history.

• The whalers in the Gulf of Mexico knew it was risky to enter those ports there because they had mixed crews.