When steam power was being applied to whaling vessels in the mid-19th Century, it was a development of economic necessity after hundreds of years of traditional whaling methods. The right whale have been hunted since our earliest records of a whaling industry. Their coastal presence, relative slow swimming, and their bodies floating after death were very advantageous to sail whaling vessels. When whaling as an industry began taking larger and larger catches, the populations began to shrink and move to other bodies of water. Baleen whales have traditionally been the basis of whaling industry, the profitability of right whales in the whaling industry was declining as the whale stocks fell in traditional hunting grounds, especially in a post American "Golden Age" of whaling in the early/mid 19th Century. The industry began to look to new grounds - in Southern and Northern waters - and new whales- namely the rorquals of the Baleen family - to make up for an increasing loss. The largest issue pertaining to hunting rorquals was their speed, far greater than other baleen whales, which tended to frustrate large scale efforts by sailing vessels to turn them into a fishery. The introduction and evolution of steam power in whaler vessels was necessary to both catch up to whales and to keep up in the process of a hunt.

The first steam powered whaler in the American fleet was the Pioneer (aptly named), having left port in April of 1866 on a successful maiden voyage. It was crushed by ice a little over a year later in June of 1867. The celebrated 'first' steam whaler of the American fleet was the Mary and Helen left New Bedford in 1879 and became the first American steam whaler to successfully hunt in the Arctic. The 1880's, then, became the decade that the United States whaling industry as a whole began converting their ships to steam power.

A quick note, we traditionally hold New England as the whaling hotbed of the United States industry. While this popular perception holds truth in the early decades, by the developing 19th Century, we see West Coast ports opening to whalers as they chased catches into the Pacific and Arctic. San Francisco became a huge whaling capital that rivaled cities like New Bedford in the modern whaling age.

Relative to other whaling powers like Great Britain and late bloomer Norway, the United States entered steam power in their national industry relatively late. Britain was experimenting with steam in the 1850s, and the Norwegian Sven Foyd was developing and perfecting steam power in whaler vessels in the 1860s (among his other contributions that have immortalized him in whaling history). The lateness of American whalers to "modernize" fully in steam power can be contributed to early availability of these vessels - Norway was an initial supplier of steam whalers to other nations while maritime powers like Britain were very much able to construct their ships indigenously - and the declining profitability of whaling in the United States. Consider the total amount of whale oils taken by American vessels in 1851, 428,000 barrels, compared to their haul in 1898, 18,000. For comparison, a figure of 340,000 barrels is given for worldwide production in 1909! There are a number of reasons for the decline of the American whaling industry, a decline that modernization and steam power could only temporarily halt, but that's a far different topic.

Because steam power was providing American whalers a new and exciting opportunity to continue profit in a standing industry, their was very little in-house resistance to its adoption. The specialization and need for a more technical crew also gave realized or underwhelming promise of a greater stake in the traditional lay system of payment (as controversial as the system was for whalers) as the more "important" roles, like engineers and harpoon gunners, generally received a greater payout than deckhands and other "non-important" positions. Internationally, great gunners were worth their weight in gold and were often poached from various national whaling fleets in fierce competition.

What is noted is a cultural romantic resistance to the new industrial slaughter of whales as opposed to the older, "better", days of whaling. As the industry declines and evolved in the mid/late 19th Century, we see an established "whaling literature" in American culture, almost universally calling back to the days of men in boats with hand thrown harpoons. While the struggle of man vs leviathan is a useful bedrock for story (again, another discussion for another topic), it was becoming increasingly outdated and nostalgic in it's depiction - perhaps purposely - of what whaling had largely evolved into in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In that we find our only real widespread resistance to the modernization of whaling, within that being steam power.

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Some further reading:

Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin

The History of Modern Whaling by Johan Nicolay Tonnessen and Arne Odd Johnsen

Publications provided by the New Bedford Whaling Museum