Tag: Sea of Okhotsk

Were whaling ships ever painted white?

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:

The long life of the bowhead whale

Carl Zimmer reports in today’s New York Times (October 29, 2025) that a study published in the journal Nature offers clues to the extraordinarily long lifespan of the bowhead whale. How old and why? Despite centuries of hunting the “Arctic whale” by Dutch, English, Americans, French, Russians, Japanese, and indigenous people for their thick, oil-rich blubber and “bone” or baleen, specimens have been caught as recently as 2007 bearing harpoon fragments buried in their fat that were used in the late 19th century.

The Chase of the Bowhead Whale, Clifford Ashley – 1909

Scientists have estimated some bowheads live well over two hundred years, with some claiming the maximum natural lifespan of the leviathans to be 268 years, making bowheads the oldest living species of mammals by far. To put that into perspective, a whale born 268 years ago was born in 1787 when the U.S. Constitution was drafted.

So why do bowheads live as long as they do? Given how massive they are, one would assume their cells, multiplying in size from an egg to a massive animal the size of three garbage trucks, would sooner or later mutate and lead to cancer. One theory is their preferred habitat in the frozen waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea, and the Arctic Ocean has something to do with their resiliency. This week, the scientists reporting in Nature say their research on live bowhead cells harvested from a whale taken by Alaskan Inuits revealed bowhead cells can repair DNA strands better than most animals, in large part due to the ‘”cold-inducible RNA-binding protein CIRBP” which is “highly expressed in bowhead fibroblasts and tissues.”

So yes, the cold has something to do with their long life-spans, but essentially bowheads are better are growing, and repairing their DNA than most species.

Why do I care? Writing my book, The Marginal Sea about the hunting of bowheads in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk in the late 1850s left me with many questions about the state of the bowhead population given the intense pressure the American fleet placed on the Okhotsk stock between 1848 and 1865. According an estimate made in 1984 by R.C. Kugler that was published in a “Historical survey of foreign whaling: North America” in Arctic Whaling, as many as 15,000 bowheads were taken (with other killed but lost) in the Okhotsk alone. Today an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 bowheads are left, being classified as a species of “least concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But those estimate are worldwide. The population remaining in the Okhotsk is estimated to be less than 400 and that stock is considered endangered, despite the Russian’s declaration of their feeding grounds around the Shantar archipelago as a national park.

For all the carnage the commercial whaling fleet inflicted on the world’s whale population, I can wistfully imagine bowhead whales swimming today who escaped the harpoons of the men in my book, who along with 120 other ships and 4,000 other whalers massacred so many of these extraordinary giants in 1858. That puts history and time into perspective and reminds me of an anecdote I once read in American Heritage Magazine about a man who told of watching a parade as a child and meeting an old veteran of the Civil War, who stepped out of the ranks of marching veterans to shake his young hand and tell him, “Now you can tell your grandchildren you once shook the hand of a man who as a boy shook the hand of man who fought in the American Revolution.”