Whaling's Final Days

During the war, sperm oil brought a dollar and a half a gallon, but around 1922 demand for sperm oil disappeared as the cost of sending a ship to sea doubled and the price of oil collapsed. By 1924 the whaling industry had returned to the southern Atlantic, where it had begun, and only a few ships and barks remained in the trade. Schooners often sailed from New Bedford with skeleton crews and recruited men in the Cape Verde and Caribbean Islands. In late August 1924 the whale ship Wanderer, the last square-rigged, three-masted vessel to leave New Bedford on a whaling cruise, wrecked off Cuttyhunk Island in a fierce and unexpected gale, and its small crew could not keep it from running aground fourteen miles south of New Bedford. In August 1925 the schooner John R. Manta returned with only 300 barrels of sperm oil, the last cargo of whale oil or bone ever brought to the New Bedford customs district and the end of whaling from that port.

Fairhaven, Massachusetts · United States