The legendary yacht designer and builder Nathanael Greene Herreshoff once quipped: “There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black.”
Keep in mind Captain Nat was talking about yachts, not whaling ships, which were almost always painted black except for one special occasion.
Whaling ships in the 19th century were remarkable for their durability and uniform design, turned out by the hundreds at shipyards on the shores of Mattapoisett, Fairhaven, and New Bedford. They were factory ships constructed to last for two or three decades of continuous sailing, their rigging, decks, and copper sheathed bottoms revived in between voyages by gangs riggers and shipwrights. The last surviving wooden whaler, Mystic Seaport’s Charles W Morgan, was built in 1841 and retired from whaling in 1921 after 37 voyages over 80 years.
In my research for my book, The Marginal Sea, I assumed all whaling ships were painted black. Why not? Almost every painting of whaling ships depicts a black hull, or, on occasion, a white checkerboard scheme along the sheer of the hull to give the false impression of a warship’s gun ports to fool pirates and other marauders. Because many ships were owned by pacifist Quaker merchants, their fleet were usually piously painted all black.
Last winter, while touring the library at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, I happened upon a copy of a gorgeous book, O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea by Michael P. Dyer. I requested a copy through the CLAMS Library service and a few days picked it up from the Cotuit Library.
Published in 2017, the book presents the history of art produced during two centuries of American whaling, from scrimshaw and illustrated sailors’ journals to formal marine paintings. Dyer, the former Curator of History at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, invested two decades of exhaustive research into the work, and the text accompanying the lavish illustrations is, by itself, an important addition to American maritime history scholarship.
As I read the book I came upon a painting by the maritime artist Charles Sidney Raleigh (1830-1925) of the whaling bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. What caught my eye was the color of her hull, a spectral, ghostly white.
Charles Sidney Raleigh’s painting of the bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. Note the whaler in the background painted with the white stripe and fake gunport pattern.
Dyer’s caption explained that whaling ships were sometimes painted white on their maiden voyages — evoking the image of a bride in a white gown — a detail I had never known before. Evidently the ship would be painted the more practical black when she returned to New Bedford, as one would imagine a white hull would get very grimy after three years of hard whaling in the North Pacific.
My book describes the wreck of the New Bedford whaling bark Ocean Wave in a blizzard that swept over Siberia’s Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk. Captained by Hiram Baker of Pocasset, the Ocean Wave was lost with all hands — three dozen men — when she was caught by surprise on the lee shore of Elbow Island on the night of October 12, 1858. Baker “slipped his chains” and abandoned his anchors to make a desperate run for cover in the shelter of the Shantars. The ship struck the fangs of the Pinnacle Rocks where her wreckage was discovered the following spring when the whaling fleet returned to Southwest Bay to hunt bowhead whales.
Captain Hiram Baker’s cenotaph in the Cataumet Cemetery
The Ocean Wave was on her maiden voyage. But was she painted white? The only witnesses to see her before the wreck were the captain and crew of the Nantucket whaler Phoenix. None of the accounts of the wreck that night 167 years ago mention the color of the Ocean Wave, but it is the type of detail that I wanted to include in my book.
I wrote Michael Dyer to get his advice. Was the Ocean Wave painted white for her maiden voyage?
He kindly replied: “Without direct evidence, I would hesitate to state definitively that the vessel was painted white. There are as many examples of vessels launched that were not painted white as there are references to white-painted ones. On the other hand there are examples of vessels painted white on their maiden voyages, like the Hunter and a Charles S. Raleigh painting of the Wanderer and another of the Catalpa.”
The Catalpa
I don’t want to take poetic license with the historical record, and lard up my description of the Ocean Wave’s final hours with some purple prose like “…the ghostly white ship fought for her life in the foaming sea and gusts of Siberian snow” so I’ll follow Michael Dyer’s advice and speculate that the ship might have been painted white, but the only men who knew for sure are long lost to the sea and the past.
Here’s Michael Dyer’s 2018 lecture at the Nantucket Whaling Museum about his book: