Call me Ishmael, Moby Dick opens in arguably the world’s most famous line, and goes on to explain that Ishmael is having a bit of a time of it:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent ne from deliberately stepping into the street – and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Translation: For God’s sake, would someone please invent Paxil!
With no Paxil available for 138 years, he goes to look at the water for a while. When that doesn’t necessarily soothe him, he does what we all do – he goes to a bar. At the Spouter-Inn, he initially gets annoyed by some members of a whaling crew who are there. But eventually he sits back and listens to their tales. From this, he somehow decides that the best way to cope with his ‘melancholy’ is to set to sea for 4 sexless, joyless, landless, boozeless years and try to kill massive animals from a little boat with a metal stick so that others could have candles.
And in this, we have the gist of whaling.
Whaling had been happening in Europe since at least the 11th century. In North America (aka the New World), it seemed to happen shortly after someone first threw up on Plymouth Rock. The locals used beached whales for several useful purposes and the colonists followed suit. In the beginning, they whaled near the coast (sometimes from the coast with, I’m guessing, a rod of steel and a net the size of an ice cream truck). Through the 1700s–1800s this extended further out to Greenland, South Atlantic, the West African coast, and the Canaries. The trips got longer. They decimated local grounds and found farther richer ones. By the golden age of American whaling between 1820-1860, these whaling expeditions brought them to the Japan grounds, Australia and New Zealand, the far Pacific, and the Galápagos. These were years-long expeditions.
Young men were recruited for whaling at pubs. What better place to inspire young men with bravado and promises of adventure and what better time than when they feel nostalgic, manly, and fearless. Pubs were prime hunting grounds for such recruitments throughout history, and we could replace whaling here with the Crusades, bear baiting, and joining a rugby club. With no Xbox to fuel one’s adrenalin, men at the time had to go west on horseback, join the navy, or join a whaler. Of the men who joined a whaler, it was said there were three varieties: ones running from something on land, ones who wanted to make it a career as an owner, and ones looking for adventure. The only one, it was followed-up, that went on a second trip was the guy who wanted to be an owner.
The realities were, of course, radically different from the dream. The soldier indeed saw the Tetons, but he did so while suffering hugely from dysentery and just before his scalp was cut away from his skull and his bones got bleached by the sun. The naval seaman marvelled in the majesty of the Pacific, but while scratching his skin away from scurvy. The whaler learned a hard reality, but perhaps in a more mundane way. The work was hard and gross. They washed clothes with urine and the cockroach was so ubiquitous that men wrote about them variously as hated guerilla, tasty food flavoring, and, once Stockholm syndrome had locked in, as beloved roommates. The food was hardtack and necessarily salted and treated as long journeys didn’t make for lots of fresh food. If they were lucky, they had whale brains or porpoise meatballs. Life on board was mostly boring and there were long hours spent at mundane activities like washing clothes (after peeing, evidently), swabbing the deck, and playing music or carving scrimshaw. All of this is harder to swallow if you were not getting wages, but lay-pay. This meant they got paid a share of the voyage’s profits. Sometimes that might be 1/350th of the profits. And, it might stun you to learn, big whaling companies and captains often treated these men very unfairly. They took out room and board, and so a man might come back from four years of whaling to get $20 or, worse, told that he owed money.
As has often been noted about war, whaling was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Terror in their case meant getting from a large vessel into a small boat and then intentionally stabbing a 40-ton behemoth. As you might guess, the behemoth didn’t exactly roll over and give up. And so men were sometimes in small boats that were getting smashed and rammed by an otherwise peaceful, currently pissed off monster. Other boats were dragged across the ocean like unwitting, horrified water-skiers. Others were left stranded or, worse, tangled in harpoon lines in the ocean, and left like Stoeffer’s microwavable meals for sharks. It’s a hard way to live for 1/350th of a lay.
Making matters worse, there was little reprieve. Captains didn’t want to stop in ports because they didn’t want to pay the port fees. But more to the point, they didn’t want to lose men – which happened rampantly in port. Men off a boat drank, and drunk men ran off in droves. Some jumped ships in the Pacific islands and spent time among the native peoples there. The women in particular were capable of drawing strange foreigners off their boats and (somehow) convincing them to stick around on a beautiful beach with nude people and food and not on a whaler, where they shared a bunk with a tattooed harpooner named Gropey.
First, this makes you wonder how 100% of whaling ships didn’t turn into ghost ships. Second, this brings us to our literary hero, Herman Melville. Melville himself jumped the whaler the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in 1842. He spent some time with the indigenous people for several months until hopping another ship back. His first novel, Typee, is about a melancholic guy who seeks adventure on a whaling boat. If you’re sensing a theme, then bravo. Typee, however, is a lighter adventure tale. Despite his place in the folklore of American Literature and writing about obsessed one-legged characters, Melville started out his career as a writer of more fun adventures. But Melville wanted to explore the dark side of humanity and, for that fodder, he returned to whaling.
Melville’s later work – Dick included – confused and even turned off critics, and they were unpopular compared to his lighter, early work. (Think Steve Carell’s 40-Year-Old Virgin vs. Steve Carell’s Beautiful Boy). Both genius in their own ways perhaps, but only one of them will make you pee laughing in a wax shop.
Perhaps most surprising of whaling is the fact that it’s the only at-sea occupation not known for its alcohol consumption. The navies of the world had their grog and rum supplement. Pirates had their rum for parties, sorties, and syphilis medication. Though alcohol may have been on board a whaling ship (which it often wasn’t), it doesn’t seem to have been a big part of ship life. My disappointment exists on an expectation-based level. I, after all, was raised in the 1980s, where we learned exactly what one did with a drunken sailor. Nevertheless, alcohol’s absence in whaling makes sense from a pragmatic view. Expeditions were massive, storage space would have been for their intended grab – blubber and spermaceti; alcohol in the hands of a bored, depressed, underpaid crew would have been dangerous. Yet, it seems that in the world of whaling, alcohol’s main (and only) role was in recruitment. So it might be said that the history of whaling and alcohol don’t interlink so much.
That is, unless you’re from a tiny 8,000-population island off the North German Sea called Föhr. The people in Föhr lived in a green island sheltered from the weather from two other islands. Their young men did mostly seafaring work and much of that was whaling. When it dried up locally – at the end of the 18th century – they went off to America where it was booming. Hundreds of Föhrers emigrated to New York City. They made a community, whaled, and after 1939, we can assume, prayed incessantly that their name wasn’t slightly mispronounced. When whaling dried up there, they started coming back to the island. And what they brought, besides a bad attitude, a non-rhotic accent, and a penchant for deli, was the Manhattan.
The whiskey-based Manhattan had likely been around since the 1860s, when French and Italian vermouths became more widely available. This was, coincidentally, around the same time people realized that you could drink a lot more alcohol and not cry as much if you just made it taste better. By the 1880s, the Manhattan was an established cocktail mentioned in bartender bibles. It was a staple of late 19th century cocktail culture and by the early 1900s was considered one of the big 4 cocktails (sorry, no bracket pool for this one).
The Föhrers who headed back home brought with them the Manhattan. And to say that the islanders took to it would be an understatement. It became a cocktail for every occasion – weddings, funerals, home visitors, Tuesday, a good bowel movement. It became such a part of island culture that the Föhrers premixed it and, according to most sources, have their fridges stocked with it at all times. Each village on Föhr has its own recipe and variation.
We here at Hammered History admire the tradition, the continued adherence of the Föhrers, and the fact that the only recipe we could find was for a whole bottle of the Föhr Manhattan.
Ingredients
- 250 milliliters whiskey (any, but CC, Beam, or Jack will do fine)
- 250 milliliters sweet vermouth (Martini Rosso)
- 250 milliliters blanc vermouth, such as Martini Bianco
- A cocktail cherry
Instructions
Mix in a bowl, make sure to taste test occasionally after handing your car keys to a responsible human. Funnel the mixture into a bottle and chill in the fridge until someone stops by and then casually ask them if they’d like a Föhr Manhattan. Anyone who turns you down is clinically insane. To those who agree, pour them 2 ounces of the elixir into any willing vessel and garnish with a cherry. You will be drinking a long history born and battled on worn planks in cold seas. Drink to Herman Melville, to Ishmael’s melancholy, to the history of Frisian emigration, and to Moby Dick himself, an unwitting character in a book that proves that men will literally chase whales than go to therapy.
