Whaling Museum & Education Center recalls Long Island's seafaring past

This might seem hard to fathom. 

Did you know whale oil was not only once used to fuel Colonial lanterns and lamps but was later used as a lubricant for sewing machines, watches and transmissions?

Was a key ingredient in perfume, lipstick and soap?

Was used in currency, World War I-era explosives and by NASA to help send astronauts to the moon?

Though difficult today to envision seas teeming with whalers and whaling ships on the prowl, Long Island whaling history is on display Thursday through Sunday at The Whaling Museum & Education Center on Main Street in Cold Spring Harbor.

Established in 1942, the museum is a quaint but jam-packed ode to a scene straight out of "Moby Dick," the Herman Melville epic.

It chronicles what was the first influential American industry driving the economic growth of the nation, beginning just two decades after the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

“The first commercial whaling that happened in the New World happened right here on Long Island,” museum executive director Nomi Dayan said. “After farming, whaling was the first commercial industry on Long Island — and it wasn’t just what drove Long Island, but it drove America.”

Stony Brook University associate history professor Jennifer L. Anderson, who also is on the museum board, said colonists first established a whaling base in Southampton around 1640, having watched Indigenous peoples, notably local Shinnecock Indians, processing whales that had washed ashore — breaking them down; boiling their blubber in try-pots along the ocean sands.

“The whale was considered sacred, and it was viewed as a gift of providence,” Anderson said. “Some was used to produce oil, some for food. Other pieces, like bone, was used to craft tools and other implements. . . . But it was English and Dutch colonials who came in and decided to commodify that. They didn’t see the whale as sacred, but rather as a commodity.”

Long Island ports emerge

Eventually, whaling ports emerged across Long Island, most prominent among them in Greenport, Sag Harbor and Cold Spring Harbor. Whale oil was even taxed by the Crown — though Long Islanders fought it, staging what was a forerunner to the rebellion staged as the Boston Tea Party.

Whaling crews included Black and Indigenous men and, sometimes, even women who hid their gender, dressing as men. Women also sometimes sailed to keep their whaling husbands company. Ships could be at sea years at a time, Anderson said, with Long Island-based crews at times ending up in places like Hawaii, the Philippines and even New Zealand.

George Washington authorized construction of the first New York lighthouse, at Montauk Point, to help guide whaling ships.

One of two key whaling museums on the Island — the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum is the other — the Cold Spring Harbor museum features a 28-foot whaleboat, a sail and oar-powered wooden craft dropped overboard from a mother ship so crew could pursue whales in open ocean.

It also features an array of historical items, from models of whaling ships to engraved whalebone known as scrimshaw. Displays provide historical facts and data on whaling.

Want to know what life on a whaling ship was like? There are exhibits to help you experience that, including footage from the 1922 silent film “Down to the Sea in Ships.” Want to know what a whale being processed on board a ship smelled like? You can experience that, too. P.S.: It stinks.

A monthly get-together called “Beyond the Book,” held in conjunction with local libraries, discusses ocean-related book themes. The museum offers interactive exhibits for children.

A new exhibit titled "Monsters & Mermaids" opened Thursday and will run for the next two years.

It features a kraken-giant squid sculpture by Greenport artist Cindy Pease Roe crafted out of collected ocean debris. The exhibit explores nautical myths and legends, examining how those have influenced our lives — from Starbucks cups to beer brands, to “Little Mermaid”-emblazoned cornflakes boxes.

'A grueling job'

On Thursday, a home-schooling mom from Sea Cliff cradled her infant while two daughters, ages 4 and 5, wandered the museum. 

Another visitor, Brian Matthews, of Centereach, said he first came to the museum with his parents as a 16-year-old high schooler from Levittown. He’s now 64.

“I still look at that whaleboat and think of it filled with crew out in the middle of an ocean somewhere, and think, ‘Isn’t that amazing,’ ” Matthews said. “This is a hidden gem. And I think for kids, especially, this is important because this is how it all started, the history of Long Island. Men out whaling in good weather, bad weather. In horrible weather.”

One exhibit notes Huntington native Nathaniel Scudder was lost at sea while a hand on the Monmouth out of Cold Spring Harbor in the 1840s.

Current Huntington resident Robert Archer, 86, said Wednesday his great-great-grandfather Benjamin Archer was a 17-year-old greenhorn on the Monmouth then, noting: “It had to be quite an adventure, a grueling job, to be at sea like that. . . . The museum is keeping that history alive.”

Whaling helped drive the Long Island economy into the 1850s, when the gold rush drove potential whalers to find fortune elsewhere. By then, most whaling ships had moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts; New York Harbor and even to the West Coast.

While native whaling still exists on a limited basis in places like Alaska, Congress banned all other American whaling with the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 — though whales are still hunted by Japan, Iceland and several Nordic countries, their meat considered a delicacy.

The museum has laid the groundwork to acquire a full sperm whale skeleton and is formulating a fundraising campaign to raise the capital for an expansion needed to exhibit it.

“I don’t think Long Islanders realize there was a time when whale oil was a main commodity, sort of like how today we rely on gasoline,” Anderson said. “You think of Cold Spring Harbor as this quaint, sleepy town. But it was quite a different place when it was a working port.

“You had people from all over the world coming in,” she said. “Whaling was something that connected Long Island to the world . . . This museum connects that to Long Islanders.”

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”