Five harbours that lived on oil and bone — the Yankee square-riggers that lit the world's lamps, the Norwegian factory fleets that carried the trade to the ice, and the last open boats still rowing out with hand harpoons in the 1980s.
At the 1857 peak those 329 ships were about half the entire American whaling fleet, and the American fleet was most of the world's — which is how it came to be called the city that lit the world. The last whaling voyage out, by the schooner John R. Manta, ended in 1925. On sea scallops it has landed the most valuable catch of any port in the United States every year since 2001.
Norway's whaling capital: 27 companies and 115 vessels in the 1911–12 season — over 30 per cent of the world's whaling firms — and fifteen factory ships at sea by the late 1920s. The 1967–68 season was the town's last and the final factory ship was sold to Japan in 1971. Lars Christensen endowed the whaling museum here on 23 May 1917, having come home fired up by a visit to the one in New Bedford.
Carl Anton Larsen opened the island's first shore station here on 16 November 1904, and it worked until December 1966. Shackleton is buried in the whalers' cemetery, the 1913 church is the one building still doing its original job, and the manager's villa is now the South Georgia Museum.
The Cheynes Beach station at Frenchman Bay worked from 1952 to 1978, processing 14,695 sperm whales and 1,136 humpbacks, and outlasted every other land station in the southern hemisphere. The last whale legally taken in Australian waters — a sperm whale — was harpooned off here on 20 November 1978 and the plant shut the next day. It opened as a museum in May 1985, the chaser Cheynes IV hauled out on the slip beside the boilers, and is now Albany's Historic Whaling Station.
Azorean whaling ran on open boats, hand harpoons and cliff-top vigias right to the end: the last sperm whale caught in Portuguese waters was taken in these islands in 1987, and the Museu dos Baleeiros opened on 28 August 1988 in three nineteenth-century boathouses on this quay. The same families, and the same cliff-top spotters, now take visitors out to watch the whales instead.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.