Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket began whaling in the 17th century; Nantucket invented sperm whaling around 1712, became the world's greatest whaling port in the 18th century, and was surpassed by New Bedford in the 19th.

Other Massachusetts whaling ports of note were Boston, Dartmouth, Edgartown, Fairhaven, Falmouth, Holmes' Hole, Lynn, Mattapoisett, Newburyport, Rochester, Salem, and Westport.

Some of the Commonwealth's most prominent citizens were involved in whaling: John Hancock of Boston, a Founding Father and sometime President of the Continental Congress, was an oil merchant, shipper, and held large interests in spermaceti candle manufacture.

Crispus Attucks, African-American martyr of the Boston Massacre (1770), was a runaway slave from Framingham employed as a Nantucket whaleman at the time.

William Rotch of Nantucket effectively founded New Bedford in the 1760s and established whaling colonies in England and France in the 1780s.

Paul Cuffe, boatbuilder and whaleman of Westport, was the first African-American capitalist-entrepreneur and the first Native American capitalist-entrepreneur, circa 1800.

Orator and journalist Frederick Douglass, a Maryland native, embarked on his brilliant abolitionist career in the whaling communities of New Bedford and Nantucket (183841).