At a very early day in the fishery, whaling vessels, which were at first long rowboats and later small sloops, began to increase in size, and about 1820 ships of three hundred tons were found profitable. The increase in profit producing capacity, strange as it may appear, actually sounded the death-knell of the Nantucket whaling, for across the mouth of the harbour ran a bar, over which it soon became impossible for whaling vessels of large size to pass. The difficulty was for a time overcome by the true Yankee ingenuity of some inventive Nantucketer, who devised the “camel,” a veritable dry-dock barge in which the larger whaleships, lightened often of oil and bone, were floated over the bar into the forest of masts which in those days characterized a harbour now frequented only by a few schooners and sloops, the small pleasure crafts of the summer residents, and an occasional steamer.
As whaleships still continued to increase in size, the “camel” expedient was only a temporary success; for the time came when vessels were of too great tonnage to be thus floated over the bar, and the daring and skilful Nantucketer, who had taught the civilized world not only how, but where, to whale, had to admit defeat and gradually give up the industry to more fortunately situated ports. At this time, about 1830, Nantucket was commercially the third largest city in Massachusetts, Boston being first and Salem second.
In 1843 Nantucket owned its record number of ships, eighty-eight. In 1846, which is referred to as the “boom” year in American whaling, sixteen vessels cleared from Nantucket and sixty-nine from her near-by rival—New Bedford. In 1869 Nantucket sent her last ship and disappeared from the list of whaling ports. The great fire of 1846 also contributed to the downfall of the industry.
A new era in whaling was to be born, with New Bedford as the centre, and Nantucket was to become only a health resort and mecca for sight-seers, more than ten thousand persons visiting the island in 1914.
New Bedford undoubtedly owed its whaling success to its proximity to Nantucket, to its wonderful harbour, and to the honesty, thrift, and good business ability of its citizens, most of whom were Quakers.