American Whalers in the 19th-Century North Pacific: How a New Regional Port Web Shaped the Integration of the Larger Pacific Ocean

Following Japan’s opening to American whalers in 1854, the ports of Yokohama and Hakodate quickly assumed critical importance as the northernmost harbors in the vessels’ maritime support network spanning the Pacific Ocean.  As whalers “discovered” bowhead whales in 1840s, the Ochotsk Sea and Bering Straits became preferred whaling destinations for ships en route to these Arctic stocks, luring hundreds of New England whalers annually to chase thriving herds thought to be the salvation of a dying industry. This paper considers how these US whalers’ reliance on Japanese treaty ports for recruits, provisions, and consular assistance between 1854 and 1870 completed the creation of an integrated south-to-north web of support harbors that now spanned both the longitudes (from New Zealand to Peru) and latitudes (from Chile to Japan) of the vast Pacific.

The entrenchment of Japanese ports (including not only Yokohama and Hakodate, but also Nagasaki and Niigata) on whaling vessels’ itineraries to the north not only created a critical support node to reprovision and contract new sailors. It also provided  important transshipment points for forwarding full oil barrels and baleen to San Francisco or the Sandwich Islands, on the way to East Coast markets.  Petropavlosk, on the eastern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula, although on the route of many whaling courses, had barely a permanent population and no U.S. consular presence.  Alaska, acquired by the US in 1867, would not provide important stopping grounds for ships plying the Bering Straits and Arctic until the 1880s. This paper argues that the broader significance of Japan’s new open port network was that it constituted a crowning maritime node, completing the web of whalers’ support harbors now dotting the rim of the Pacific Ocean from south to north.