New
Hampshire had a small, short-lived
whale fishery of its own (recently
the subject of a very readable
book by former KWM director Kenneth
R. Martin, entitled "Heavy
Weather and Hard Luck": Portsmouth
Goes Whaling).
However, New Hampshire's principal
contribution to whaling was
to furnish three or four generations
of hardy, farm-bred lads and
millers' sons for the fleets
of New Bedford, New London,
and Sag Harbor.
Among the hundreds of shipboard
logbooks and journals in the
museum collection are literally
dozens written by New Hampshire
men aboard Yankee whaleships,
some of them brimming over with
songs, poems, prose essays,
and even an original full-length,
three-act play -- evidencing,
if nothing else, that the Granite
State provided good schooling
in the 19th century, and that
a lot of New Hampshire lads
went to sea for a while.
Of particular interest are
the literally hundreds of song
texts -- including a very rare
traditional narrative ballad
in the Hawaiian language and
a number of otherwise extinct
broadside ballads in English
-- collected and transcribed
on shipboard
by seaman George Wilbur Piper
of Concord in the ship Europe
of Edgartown, Massachusetts,
in the 1860s.
