SPEAKER_05: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions, even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.
SPEAKER_05: This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. But please call me Ishmael. In the basement archives of the new Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, there's a lot that catches the eye.
SPEAKER_08: This is a nice collection of mounted harpoons and lances. Michael Dyer is the museum's curator of maritime history.
SPEAKER_05: This particular harpoon is an early toggle type.
SPEAKER_08: But once you plant this thing into the blubber of sperm whale, it'll pop open like that and lock into place under that blubber. The shelves are lined with rusting harpoons and whale exploding bombs.
SPEAKER_08: These weapons were used for killing whales quickly and efficiently.
SPEAKER_04: The victims of those weapons are lying around too, parts of them at least. That's reporter Daniel Ackerman.
SPEAKER_08: What is this? That's a narwhal tusk. There's all kinds of strange stuff back here and I don't even know what it is.
SPEAKER_04: In the 1800s whaling was a vast and brutal industry, sometimes as deadly for the sailors involved as it was for the whales. And the global epicenter of whaling was just two blocks down from the museum on the piers jutting out into New Bedford harbor.
SPEAKER_08: I mean you're talking 350 vessels in the mid 1850s were registered and sailed out of New Bedford. That's a huge fleet. So they're sailing all around the world. They're taking more than half a million animals throughout the 19th century were extracted from the seas by the American whaling fleet.
SPEAKER_05: All this slaughter wasn't because people had some insatiable appetite for whale meat. It was all about things people could make out of whale blubber.
SPEAKER_04: In the archives Dyer picks up a jar full of what looks like melted chocolate bars. This is this whale oil soap I was talking about.
SPEAKER_08: Soap that 150 years ago someone made by hacking the blubber off a whale and boiling it.
SPEAKER_04: And it works great too. Have you used it? Yes I have. I actually asked permission from, we talked about it in the department unless I'd like to wash my hands with some of this stuff and did.
SPEAKER_08: And it lathered up and it was great.
SPEAKER_04: Another major driver of the whaling industry besides dirty hands was darkness. This is pretty awesome what the whaling industry was all about.
SPEAKER_08: Dyer picks up a clear glass lamp cast like an ornate goblet and it's filled with amber colored whale oil.
SPEAKER_04: This is high quality 19th century lighting.
SPEAKER_08: When you think today you know you throw on your light switch whatever you get all the light that you want. That wasn't the way life was.
SPEAKER_04: Before the electric light bulb or petroleum burning lamps whale oil provided the best lighting money could buy. It burned bright and smoke free.
SPEAKER_05: Whale oil rendered in New Bedford was sold to light street lamps, homes, and businesses all over the world. The city even adopted the latin motto, Lucum Divundo, which means I spread light. The phrase can still be seen stamped on the sidewalks outside of city hall.
SPEAKER_04: But fancy lamps and throwback soaps aren't what brought me to the whaling museum today. I came to see some much smaller artifacts. Tucked away in the back corner of the archives is an unmarked gray cabinet holding perhaps the most consequential items in the entire collection. Inside sit row after row of tiny glass bottles plugged with tiny wooden corks. There's a lot of bottles of oil down here.
SPEAKER_08: Gun oil, sewing machine oil. This is from the US Navy. This is torpedo gyroscope oil. Not every bottle is so specific. Dyer reads the list of intended uses off one of them.
SPEAKER_08: Using the bathroom, bicycles, bolts, cameras, carriages, cash registers, tapped hands, chisels, clippers, cutlery doors, dentists.
SPEAKER_05: These unassuming bottles of oil hold the history of a hidden technology, lubrication, that keeps the rest of our technology humming smoothly along. Locks and motors, musical instruments, and household articles.
SPEAKER_04: So everything. And the story of how lubrication became a technology unto itself starts with dead whales and piles of cold hard cash.
SPEAKER_05: In the 1800s whaling transformed New Bedford from a sleepy fishing town into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Fruitful whaling voyages built vast fortunes for the merchants and financiers who ran the industry.
SPEAKER_04: Society men and women strutted through towns sporting the latest trends in European fashion. And colorful Victorian mansions sprang up by the dozens. All built with that sweet, sweet whale money. As Herman Melville put it in Moby Dick,
SPEAKER_05: these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.
SPEAKER_04: It was like a gold rush. The whaling industry pulled in anyone looking to make a quick buck. And one of those people was a local New Bedford businessman named William F. Nye.
SPEAKER_05: Nye was something of a serial entrepreneur. He had dabbled in everything from selling fruit to building church organs. And like just about everyone in town, he looked to whales for his next big score.
SPEAKER_04: Nye realized there were already plenty of people hawking New Bedford whale oil for lamps and soap. Those markets were saturated. But in 1865, he found a new way to sell whales to the world. Here to explain is one of William Nye's living relatives.
SPEAKER_07: My brother has a bottle of Nye whale oil that's well over a century old. By way of introduction, for those of us who grew up watching educational television in the 90s,
SPEAKER_04: how might we know you?
SPEAKER_07: Oh, I'm Bill Nye, the science guy. I did a show. We did 100 episodes about science. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy.
SPEAKER_04: Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill Nye. And before Bill Nye was the science guy, he was an aerospace engineer. All right, so you have like first-hand experience. Oh man, I first as a mechanical engineer, I'm all about lubricants, man.
SPEAKER_05: And here's how Bill Nye the mechanical engineer guy thinks about motion.
SPEAKER_07: When you have any sliding mechanical parts, in general, you need a lubricant. And why is that?
SPEAKER_07: Wow, because things are rough. Things are rough out there, man. And by that, I mean even surfaces that look smooth actually have roughness. Two rough surfaces rubbing against each other causes friction.
SPEAKER_04: See, friction is the force we feel whenever things are rubbing on each other.
SPEAKER_04: And these problems aren't anything new. Julius Caesar and those guys were lubricating their axles with grease.
SPEAKER_07: And you would get grease by rendering animal fat.
SPEAKER_04: When archaeologists opened the more than 3,000-year-old tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, they found half a dozen horse-drawn chariots. And on the bottom of those chariots, they found animal fat, slathered into the spot where the wheels rotate around the axle. This helped control the friction problem.
SPEAKER_05: Instead of the wooden wheels grinding against the wooden axle with thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure, the wheels would glide gently around a film of animal grease, providing a smooth, efficient ride fit for a pharaoh. So by introducing a layer of oil that can tolerate these very high pressures,
SPEAKER_07: things get slippery. And it's a wonderful feature of our mechanical world. You just can't get much done without lubricants, and you guys can make all the puns you want and all the innuendo you want.
SPEAKER_05: And for a long time, that's just how things got done. Machines were lubricated with whatever local material was lying around. Animal fat, vegetable oil, sometimes just water or mud. But then... The Industrial Revolution was the great discontinuity of modern history.
SPEAKER_01: By 1800, there were already a thousand steam engines in operation in England. The Industrial Revolution brought an explosion of new kinds of machinery.
SPEAKER_04: Factories sprung up, brimming with steam engines and spinning machines and looms, everything newer, bigger and faster, and all of it in need of lubrication. And suddenly, whatever peanut oil was lying around was no longer good enough
SPEAKER_05: to keep the modern mechanical world moving at top speed. The 1800s saw a wave of patents for new kinds of lubricant.
SPEAKER_04: These were not materials just plucked out of nature, but refined and mixed together. There were blends of graphite and lard, of olive oil with rock dust.
SPEAKER_05: It was a world full of friction. Scientists and engineers were racing to design quality lubrication for it. And William F. Nye realized that there was something special about the oil from those giant marine mammals landing in the port of New Bedford. Whale oil is a very high performance lubricant.
SPEAKER_07: And by that I mean it maintains its lubricity at different temperatures. Basically, it stays slippery and doesn't congeal in the cold like other oils.
SPEAKER_04: Oil from sperm whales was a particularly good all-temperature lubricant. Sperm whales live everywhere from the equator all the way to the edge of the sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Whale oil is also non-corrosive.
SPEAKER_05: It doesn't wear down metals, a vital quality given the proliferation of metal machinery at the time.
SPEAKER_04: By all accounts, the opulent city of New Bedford stunk of rotting whale. But to Nye, it was the putrid stench of opportunity. In 1865, he began refining whale oil in his kitchen and bottling it as a lubricant.
SPEAKER_05: Many of his first customers were whalers themselves. He sold the refined oil from sperm whales and some other species as a lubricant for timepieces, including chronometers. Those machines helped ships navigate at sea, often for years on end. As Michael Dyer of the Whaling Museum puts it, if that chronometer went haywire. You could lose your ship and everybody on it and the entire cargo and everything.
SPEAKER_08: So it has to work.
SPEAKER_05: And it did, thanks in part to William Nye's all-weather lubricant. He successfully expanded the market for whale-based products beyond lamp lighting and the occasional bar of soap. He moved his refining operation from his kitchen into a storefront and, eventually, into an entire factory where he could make lubrication for all the newfangled machines coming to the American home.
SPEAKER_04: Nye wasn't the only one refining whale oil into lubricant. He even had a crosstown rival in New Bedford, Ezra Kelly, who was known for his watch oil. But it was Nye who had the idea to specialize, to engineer a unique refining process for each application of lubricant. He made a super fine lubricant just for music boxes and a thicker one just for firearms. For every machine, a lubricant.
SPEAKER_05: Nye led the charge of oil refiners who applied the principles of chemistry, physics, and engineering to the problem of friction. And the oil refiners were very deliberate craftspeople who were applying specialized and proprietary knowledge
SPEAKER_08: to the processing of these animals to make a product that was unique to their business so that they could actually put it on the label, you know, this is the greatest lubricant in the world.
SPEAKER_04: And that's exactly what Nye did. He wasn't just an engineer, but also something of a showboat on the marketing front. One of his company's salesmen was known to end his pitches by drinking from a bottle of lubricant to prove how pure it was.
SPEAKER_05: Nye hawked his whale oil as a cure-all for anything with moving parts. He displayed it at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Four years later, he showed up in New York to pitch his specialty oil for a new form of two-wheeled transport at the first national bike show at Madison Square Garden. By 1900, Nye had started experimenting with lubricant from different sources,
SPEAKER_04: like olive oil and Neitz foot oil made from cattle bones. His specialty, though, remained his high-end whale oil, which he shipped to eager customers all over the world. Nye had accomplished what he set out to do, open up a whole new market for whale-based products, and make a ton of money doing it. But the early decades of the 20th century brought what we know today as supply chain issues. Through decades of overfishing, New Bedford's whalers had harpooned themselves in the foot.
SPEAKER_05: Whales grew scarce, and ships had to chase their remaining prey farther and farther out to sea. The last whaling ship from New Bedford Harbor sailed in 1927. The city's once colorful mansions fell into drab disrepair, and Nye's supply of raw materials largely dried up. The market for lubricants was taken over by cheaper, petroleum-based products.
SPEAKER_02: As with all petroleum products, lubricating oil comes from crude oil. Crude oil, a veritable black magic that is taken from the depths of the earth.
SPEAKER_04: For its part, Nye lubricants kept scrounging whale oil however it could, often relying on pilot whales that sometimes beached themselves along the Massachusetts coast. But those occasional strandings just weren't enough. By the mid-1900s, the company's factory, once bustling with dozens of workers, dwindled to just four employees. It seemed the end was Nye for Nye lubricant.
SPEAKER_05: Mass-produced, petroleum-based lubricants had won the day.
SPEAKER_02: Today, the whole world moves on a thin film of lubricating oil. Oil is our magic carpet. Without it, no wheel could turn. No moving part operates. Petroleum products were terrible for the climate and toxic for people living near refineries.
SPEAKER_05: But as lubricants, they had a lot going for them. They were cheap and they could be mass-produced by oil companies. And they didn't require death-defying, years-long voyages in pursuit of an elusive white whale. But just because oil companies could make lubricants on this massive scale,
SPEAKER_04: doesn't mean those lubricants worked perfectly. In 1966, a British engineer named Peter Jost published a paper that would become the constitution for the small but growing field of research he dubbed Tribology, the study of friction, wear, and lubrication.
SPEAKER_07: Tribology rules! That's right, Bill Nye.
SPEAKER_05: To this day, if you walk into a Tribology conference, you can bet people are talking about the so-called Jost Report. The paper measured the literal cost of friction to the British economy. It found that unnecessary wear and tear to machinery caused by bad lubrication was dragging down the nation's productivity by more than 1% of GDP, the equivalent of billions of dollars. Seeing these results, countries like China, Germany, and the US all raced to study wear and tear in their own economies.
SPEAKER_04: And they all came to similar conclusions. We need better lubricants. Whales didn't quite do it. Neither did petroleum.
SPEAKER_05: Even the science guy himself admits that science had not, in fact, solved the problem of friction. Getting these molecules of oil, of lubricant, to not break down when they're smushed is a dark art, man. It's the tricky business.
SPEAKER_06: All right, so this is a DeWalt drill.
SPEAKER_04: Nicole D'Ambrogio is a modern-day purveyor of the dark art of lubrication. So we make a lubricant that goes into the gearbox as it spins.
SPEAKER_06: She's standing in the sales room of the lubrication company she works for, pulling items from a display case.
SPEAKER_06: We have an inhaler in here. There's a lubricant that goes in here for the mechanism as you push the top of the inhaler in order to get a dose of medicine. There's also other drug delivery device in here for an insulin application. This one was important because there's a needle involved. D'Ambrogio is director of manufacturing at a company that to this day is still called Nye Lubricants.
SPEAKER_05: The end of whaling was not, in fact, the end of Nye Lubricants. With their supply of raw material gone, the company decided, we'll just make our own. Around the time of the Jost Report, Nye's few remaining employees began tinkering with a new type of lubricant. Not whale oil, not petroleum, but synthetic lubricant made with new kinds of chemicals cooked up in the lab.
SPEAKER_04: Synthetics meant that the company could turbocharge their designing of specialty lubricants for particular applications.
SPEAKER_05: Because now there were so many different chemicals to try out. You know, household names like... Poly-alpha-olefin, perfluoropoly ethers, also known as PFPEs, esters, esters could be diesters, polyol esters.
SPEAKER_06: Then you have your silicone oils, where you're looking at, multiply alkylated cyclopentane, pentane, or known as MACs, sometimes penzane products as well, polyphenol ethers.
SPEAKER_06: So there's a lot of different chemistries that you get to use versus just a mineral oil that's coming out of the ground.
SPEAKER_05: And this massive new chemical library proved useful as the world entered yet another machine revolution.
SPEAKER_02: More and more businesses are using the IBM System 36.
SPEAKER_04: As the computer era dawned, Nye lubricants spent the late 20th century crafting custom greases that were just right for keeping keyboards clacking, printers printing, and hard drives spinning at thousands of rotations per minute. With a focus on synthetics, the company built itself back up. Today, they make more than a thousand different lubricants, each designed to enable the most important technologies of our time, including the Perseverance rover currently exploring the surface of Mars. And equally important?
SPEAKER_06: This one is an Xbox controller. So all of your buttons here for gaming, they require a lubricant in here in order to get the device to work. And it's critical because if the buttons start sticking, and people can't get their games to play correctly, they're not going to be very happy. And keeping gamers happy is a process as rigorous as game design itself.
SPEAKER_06: There's a lot of cycle testing where the buttons literally go through needing to survive 20 million, you know, pushes in certain temperature environments to mimic, you know, someone sitting there playing games for six solid hours.
SPEAKER_04: When you said 20 million, was that literal?
SPEAKER_06: Literal, yes.
SPEAKER_04: Do you feel like when you kind of like move through the world, you have this x-ray vision where you're looking at objects and you're like, there's a grease in there, like on the hinge of that little box, there's a grease on like my laptop, like are you kind of like seeing these things?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, particularly when things don't work properly. The first thing that comes to my mind is they didn't put the right lubricant in it, you know.
SPEAKER_05: Today, the world is growing more and more digital. And it may even feel like the mechanical age that William F. Nye helped grease is coming to an end, along with our need for more and better lubricants.
SPEAKER_04: But even the internet, which feels so separate from the physical world, is actually just a giant machine with billions of moving parts.
SPEAKER_05: The data centers that house our cat photos and banking info rely on cooling systems, compressors, and fans that all use specially designed grease. And the fiber optic cables that beam those cat photos and banking info beneath the oceans and across continents, they use Grease 2 to guard against the tiny vibrations constantly rippling across our world.
SPEAKER_04: We could all decamp to the metaverse, completely abandoning the physical world and all its moving parts, though please don't do that, and we'd still need humble grease to keep it running. On the hottest, most humid days of summer, if you wander over to the back corner of the production floor at Nye Lubricants, you can still catch a whiff of whale oil. From the time that it, you know, when they were working with material, it just got into the cement and it's difficult to get out.
SPEAKER_06: It's not a good smell. It's very pungent. It's, I don't know really how to describe it. It's kind of, I don't know, maybe like sweaty feet? It's gross.
SPEAKER_05: But it's a potent reminder that good grease doesn't happen by accident. It's taken centuries of careful design and development to keep our machines running. Even though William Nye was chasing a fad when he got into the whale business, he stumbled upon selling a solution to a problem that would need solving until the end of time. Coming up, the daughter of New Bedford's last whale man describes what it was like to work in whaling, the industry that lit the world and helped give rise to good grease. After this. If thinking about salsa in a variety of delicious flavors and heat levels makes your mouth water, you need to check out Green Mountain Gringo and make sure you turn the jar around to see it's all natural ingredients. With the medium salsa, you get hearty chunks of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers and onions in every scoop. Some like it hot. And for those people like me, Green Mountain Gringo does not disappoint. My favorite is the hot salsa, which brings flavorful heat to every meal with each bite containing jalapenos, serrano peppers and other savory herbs. Green Mountain Gringo even has their own tortilla strips made with stone ground, all natural yellow corn flour. As far as I'm concerned, the secret to life is to have the ingredients to make nachos in your home at all times. Plus, they have a hot sauce with tangy spicy flavor and enhances the simplest of meals. It's perfect for eggs. I like hot sauce on eggs. Visit Green Mountain Gringo dot com and start shopping. Use the store locator to find Green Mountain Gringo products, get inspiration for recipes and purchase products using promo code podcast 23 for 23 percent off. That's promo code podcast 23. Football's back and Whole Foods Market has got everything you need for a delicious tailgate or watch party. Level up game day hosting with animal welfare certified meat. We're talking marinated chicken wings, organic chicken sausages, hot dogs and more. And if you really want to step it up, catering makes tailgates a breeze. Explore the Whole Foods Market catering menu at shop dot w f m dot com and don't sleep on the build your own taco bar. Everyone loves a taco bar. Plus, from September 20th through October 17th, you can save 20 percent on your next catering order with promo code fall catering. All one word terms apply if you're heading over to a friend's house, bring snacks from Whole Foods Market like late July tortilla chips, Primal Kitchen queso dip or buffalo sauce, beef jerky, cheese, pickles or salted nuts. Grab football ready sides that are already prepared. Mac and cheese, potato salad or sushi. I'm telling you, the prepared foods at Whole Foods cannot be beat. They have saved my bacon so many times. It comes to feeding anybody who's coming over. Elevate game day at Whole Foods Market. Chances are you're listening to 99 percent invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades? Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to Squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. So we're back with reporter Daniel Ackerman. Hey, Daniel. Hey, Roman. So I loved that 20 minutes on Greece. That's some classic 99 P.I. stuff right there. 20 minutes on Greece. It was so fantastic. But I hear you want to talk a little bit more about whales. Right. And I actually want to start with Moby Dick because I hear, Roman, that you're a fan.
SPEAKER_04: I am. I am a huge fan of Moby Dick. Whenever it's November in my soul, I read little passages of Moby Dick.
SPEAKER_05: I even like those boring chapters with really bad whale biology. I like it all. Nice. Well, you should come to New Bedford one year for the Moby Dick marathon, which is exactly what it sounds like.
SPEAKER_04: People just get together and sit around and read aloud cover to cover the entirety of Moby Dick. Usually takes about 25 hours. So bring some coffee. I would be so into that. You have no idea. I wouldn't need coffee.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So, I mean, this draws hundreds of people. There's still this like really strong connection between New Bedford and the sea, even though the whaling days are long gone. New Bedford is still a big fishing port, though. It's actually the highest grossing fishing port in the country. But today they catch scallops, not whales. Right. So no harpoons required for scallops.
SPEAKER_05: No harpoons. You'll have to go to the whaling museum to see those.
SPEAKER_04: But I do have a story for you about the people who used those harpoons. And these aren't the whale business owners like William F. Nye. These are the folks that actually risked their lives out on the high seas to catch these animals that provided the world with light and lubricant. So here I want to introduce you to someone. My name is Dorothy Lopes. I live in New Bedford. I was born and raised in New Bedford.
SPEAKER_03: And I'm still here.
SPEAKER_04: Still in New Bedford at 88 years of age. And I went to talk to Dorothy to hear about her father, Antonio Lorenzo Lopes. So who is Antonio Lorenzo Lopes?
SPEAKER_04: Well, he was born in 1897 in a small town in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. And as a teenager, Antonio went to work with his father, who was a fisherman. The two of them bought some lumber. They built a small boat instead of oars. And Antonio learned how to row it. They caught turtles and scup, mainly. That was what they caught.
SPEAKER_03: What are scup?
SPEAKER_04: It's a small fish, six or seven inches, maybe. But I guess they were very tasty. I took their word for it.
SPEAKER_03: To me, I had too many bones. I didn't like fish with bones.
SPEAKER_04: So small bony fish. This was just like kind of a father-son fishing business in Cape Verde. And they kept at this for a few years until one day when Antonio was in his early 20s. And he was approached by a family friend, someone who was just a bit older than him. And he had been to America on whaling ships. And going back to Cape Verde, he used to talk to my dad about,
SPEAKER_03: you know, you should come to America. You should come to America. I'll get you on a boat.
SPEAKER_04: And this was common practice in the American whaling industry. They would go out and recruit workers in places like Cape Verde or the Azores Islands, because those places had this highly skilled labor. People like Antonio were oarsmen who had spent years navigating the open ocean in these small rowboats. Okay, so what exactly is the job of an oarsman on a whaling ship then?
SPEAKER_05: Right. So maybe like big picture, like how the whaling expedition worked.
SPEAKER_04: Most of the time, Antonio was just like hanging around with the crew on this big sailing ship with masts and sails and everything. And there would be a couple of guys up on top of the mast in the crow's nest, keeping a watch on the water, right? And when those spotters saw a whale out in the distance, they would yell, what do they yell, Roman? What do they yell, Roman? Tharsi blows. Tharsi blows. That was the signal that it was go time for Antonio as the oarsman. So what he would do is he would huddle up with a couple other oarsmen in the ship's harpooner, and then they would all jump into this much smaller, more nimble rowboat. And then the group of them would get lowered down into the surf to go after the whale.
SPEAKER_03: You know, when I think about it, I just get shivers because even though my father lived on an island, he did not know how to swim. So I think of my father out on this huge ocean with other men in the boat with him. I don't know if they know how to swim. They didn't have life jackets and things of that nature. So, oh my God. He was one of the lucky ones who survived all those times jumping off the whaling ship into these small boats to go chase the whales.
SPEAKER_05: That is amazing to me that he didn't know how to swim. I would invest some time in learning how to swim if that was my job. Yeah, but he just went for it.
SPEAKER_04: He rode this tiny nimble boat out to chase the whale and get it into position for the harpooner to take his shot. And Dorothy said, like, this was the moment that was the most dangerous for everyone involved.
SPEAKER_03: The whale would start turning over and over in the water. He said there was lots of blood, lots of blood, I can imagine. And then they would have to tow the whale up alongside of the large ship. And then they would start the process of cutting up the whale. And so they cut up the whale, like, when it's still in the water, like alongside the ship, correct?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they would, like, tow it along the ship, they would, like, over the side, lop off the blubber chunk by chunk. And then they would boil each of those chunks down into the whale oil. And this whole process could take days to complete for a single whale with the men working 24-7. And after they took off the blubber, what happened to the rest of the whale?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so once they got the blubber, they would often just let most of the carcass go to sink back down into the ocean. Sometimes they did keep some of the bones. The sailors would carve them into these art pieces called scrimshaw. And some of those are actually, like, really impressively elaborate. The whalers would bring them home as gifts for their girlfriends or families or whatever. And Dorothy also told me sometimes they'd salvage some of the meat from the whale, and they would grind that into hamburgers. Yeah, and this was, like, particularly important and probably kind of a treat for the crew. Because otherwise, there was not much on the ship for Dorothy's father and the crew to eat.
SPEAKER_03: We always talked about bread. The cook made bread. It was like a hard-crusted, but almost like a biscuit. So, every day. And you'd have bread and molasses.
SPEAKER_04: You're making a face when you're describing that biscuit.
SPEAKER_03: I can't imagine eating it. You know, for days. Yeah, I mean, you're out there months and you've got bread and this molasses, and maybe sometimes you have this ground up whale meat.
SPEAKER_05: So it's not a really balanced diet, eating only bread, molasses, and whale meat.
SPEAKER_04: No. But get this, Roman, and here's kind of the crux of the story of the whaling industry. Dorothy says that in the galley, in the kitchen of this whaling ship, there was this stash of plump, juicy, delicious oranges. But Antonio and the crew? They didn't get the oranges. They'd get the skin of the oranges, which was dried, and they could boil it with water to make a kind of tea.
SPEAKER_04: And then who got the oranges? Probably the captain. And the captain, you know, the first mate and those officers on the ship.
SPEAKER_05: This reminds me of a passage in Moby Dick. It's one of my favorite passages about who on the boat got to eat butter for dinner. And, you know, the captain gets butter and then as you go down the chain of command, eventually gets down to Flask, who does not get butter. And it has one of my favorite sentences in all of Moby Dick, which was, Flask, alas, was a butterless man. Yeah, butterless and orange-less, financially.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, he did. I'm sure he didn't get oranges either. Yeah, maybe for the next episode, Roman, you should just read the whole book aloud for us to enjoy. Don't tempt me.
SPEAKER_05: But like, that's how it went. And this was actually a successful expedition. They caught several whales, but at the end of it all, Antonio was left with not much more than those orange peels.
SPEAKER_03: When they left Cape Verde and didn't get to New Bedford until six months later, he had $10.
SPEAKER_04: He made $10 over the course of six months? $10. Whatever, any supplies that you got, like at first they say they gave you two shirts, two pairs of overalls, a pair of shoes, a hat, like a rain type, slicker type of coat.
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, but they took it out of whatever you were making, it was taken out. So at the end of six months, he had made $10.
SPEAKER_05: So $10. Can you remind me of what year this is again?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so this is around 1920. So in today's dollars, that would be like making 150 bucks. For half of a year's work. Yeah, for half a year's work. And Dorothy says her father wasn't even like that badly off compared to some of the other whalers. They're stories of whalemen among the Cape Verdean whalemen who came back from several months of whaling, owing the captain money, I believe is because they were people of color and taken advantage of, another form of slavery.
SPEAKER_05: So what did Antonio do when he arrived in New Bedford? Did he stay in the whaling business?
SPEAKER_04: Well, this was getting into the 1920s. And commercial whaling was really on his last legs. So instead, Antonio took a job at a factory that made nails. And in his first week at that factory, he made $17. Wow. So more than he made in the entire whaling expedition, like $7 more than he made whaling for an entire half of a year. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah. So that was definitely the end of whaling for Antonio. He never went back out to sea.
SPEAKER_04: But, you know, I think his story captures a lot about how whaling worked. And, you know, by the way, this whole history of whaling and the workers who built the industry is still really present today. And if you walk around New Bedford, you know, the industry drew people from all over the world. And to take Dorothy's family history as an example, the city is still a huge part of the Cape Verdean diaspora. You'll see Cape Verdean flags in front of houses. The Cape Verdean Prime Minister makes state visits to New Bedford from time to time. Oh, wow. And that connection, like so much of the culture in the city, goes back to the time when people came here to chase whales with a dream that did not always pan out. Well, I love hearing about this history. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad the whaling industry is dead and gone and we're not killing these animals anymore.
SPEAKER_05: But I love hearing about the past of it. So thank you so much, Dan. I appreciate it. Anytime, Ishmael. I mean, Roman.
SPEAKER_05: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Daniel Ackerman and Jacob Maldonado-Medina. Daniel first reported a version of this story for CAI radio mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Lay, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks to Anne-Marie Lopes and the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse and nothing in particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. 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 me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off, then I count it high time to get to Stitcher as soon as I can. Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_00: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home, or life insurance. It's empathy. Because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year. Amika, empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_02:
