Move over, sacred cod

THE MUCH-REVERED Sacred Cod hanging in the Massachusetts State House needs to share the limelight with two other species that are equally worthy of being honored -- the right whale and the sperm whale. These two mighty leviathans of the deep were just as important to the state's growth and development as the puny cod.

The whales distinguished themselves early on. Captain John Smith didn't voyage to America in 1614 looking for cod; he came to hunt whales, and also find gold and silver. Only if "neither of these schemes succeeded," was he to go fishing.

As soon as the weary Pilgrims dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor, whales surrounded the ship. The abundance of whales caused great frustration. "Every day," wrote one of the passengers, "we saw Whales playing hard by us, of which in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a very rich return . . . we might have made three or four thousand pounds worth of Oyle." Indeed, there were so many whales that Cape Cod could have just as easily been called Cape Whale.

Soon, the Pilgrims and other Massachusetts colonists began processing whales that drifted ashore, rendering their blubber into oil used for lighting and cutting the baleen out of their mouths to be used to put the hoop in hooped skirts and make the stays that gave form to stomach tightening and chest-crushing corsets.

By the late 1600s, the whalemen of Massachusetts had taken to their whaleboats to pursue whale near shore, and then in the early 1700s, they launched the offshore whaling industry, voyaging on larger ships for up to a year at a time, hunting right and sperm whales throughout the Atlantic Ocean.

Just prior to the American Revolution, the sale of whale oil and baleen provided New England with its single largest source of British sterling, accounting for just over 50 percent of all the remittances coming directly from the mother country. And even in cod-crazy Massachusetts, where many thought this bland white fish was king, whaling had a much greater impact on the local economy. According to Thomas Jefferson, in the early 1770s, cod fishing earned 250,000 pounds sterling per year, while whaling's take was 350,000 pounds sterling.

Leading the way in the burgeoning whaling industry was Nantucket, which the perceptive mid-18th-century French traveler, Crèvecoeur, dubbed "a barren sandbank, fertilized with whale oil only." Indeed, Nantucket and whaling were synonymous, and of the 360 whaleships sailing from Colonial ports, 150 called this faraway island home.

This good showing during the Colonial era wasn't a flash in the pan. In the early 1850s,more than 10,000 Massachusetts whalemen pursued their quarry throughout the seven seas and made whaling the third largest industry in the Commonwealth, after shoes and cotton; this, at a time when whaling was, according to one economic analysis, the fifth largest industry in the country.

During the Golden Age, Nantucket yielded its whaling crown to New Bedford. In 1846, when there were 900 whaleships worldwide, 735 of those were American, and nearly half of those launched from New Bedford's wharves. For a time, the profits from whaling made New Bedford the richest city in the United States per capita. "Nowhere in all America," wrote Herman Melville, "will you find more patrician-like houses, parks, and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford . . . all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea."

Why should the right and the sperm whales be honored at the State House, when there were other species of whale that Massachusetts whalemen pursued, including bowheads, grays, and humpbacks? The answer is simple. The right and sperm whale figure most prominently in the Commonwealth's whaling history.

While the Massachusetts Legislature christened the right whale as the state's marine mammal in 1980, it needs to take the next step and hang wooden icons of a right whale and a sperm whale from the rafters.

So, move over Sacred Cod, and give the big guys a little room. Perhaps, then, when the state representatives look up, they will be reminded that they were elected to resolve weighty issues, not waste their time on the small fry.

Eric Jay Dolin is author of "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America."