You hear about these whaling expeditions where the sailing ships would be gone from home for two or three years as a matter of course.
Would the men on board really make that much more than if they stayed and worked at home?
How much could the officers expect to come home with? How would the ordinary crew members actually make out with at the end of so long a cruise? How about the actual owners/investors?
Whaling, in the age of sail, could be very profitable. Although a lot depended on luck and skill in finding and catching whales.
The Charles W. Morgan, is a New England sailing whaling ship, launched in 1841 for a cost of $27,000. (All up cost, once fully rigged, outfitted and equipped, was $ 52,786.) (Still afloat today as a museum ship (recently refurbished and seagoing again) in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut.)
By the time she finished her last commercial whaling voyage, in 1921, the “Morgan” had earned $1.4 million from the 54,483 barrels of whale oil she sold as a result of 37 whaling trips.
In 1851, the New Bedford whaler, “Benjamin Tucker”, made an after expenses net profit of $45,320. The crew split between $13,500 and $18,200. The owners got the rest.
When the whale ship “Milton” returned to port in 1836, she made a profit of $99,994. The captain got $5,882, the first mate got $4,545, the boat steerers $1,333, the blacksmith $714, the best paid seamen $800, the worst paid seamen $571. The owners would have more than paid for the whole cost of the ship in one cruise.
(It is very difficult to compare the money made by the "Milton" crew in 1836 to money today. A straight inflation index adjustment would indicate that the captain earned about $60,000, in today's money - which does not seem that much for a three year voyage. If we compare the captain's earnings to the average income then, however, and then calculate what that would be compared to the average earnings today, we get something like $600,000, which seems more worthwhile. (Especially as there were no income taxes to come out of it back then.))
That was a good voyage. The “Milton” made another whaling cruise which was a real dud where the worst paid ordinary seaman made only $10.10.
The history of the “Charles W. Morgan”, illustrates that even though she never made any block-buster cruises, an average whaling ship was a pretty good investment for its owners. (Though the “Morgan” had an unusually long life.)
The history of the “Tucker” and the “Milton” illustrate that the returns from whaling could be highly volatile, with the prospects of possibly really striking rich, or of having a poor cruise with disappointing returns.
http://www.whalingmuseum.org/learn/research-topics/overview-of-north-american-whaling/whales-hunting
I will absolutely answer this one for you. My responses tend to be kind of long, and I like to double-check my sources, so it might be a few hours. Just posting to let you know I'm on the case!
I can speak most illustratively about British Arctic whaling during the period of 1770-1775, as that is where the vast majority of my independent research was focused.
For the purposes of my study it was necessary to fix a price per gallon of oil for the period in question. According to The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review, Vol. 3, published in 1840, the average price in the market for whale oil was ~$70/tun. In order to convert $70(1775) to ￡(1775), a value equivalency based on economic aggregates was used, yielding a result of ￡18 11s(1775)/tun. According to The Grocer’s Encyclopedia, published in 1911, one ton of blubber yields ~200 gallons of oil, and a tun is a standard of measure for casks roughly equivalent to 236 gallons, it can be concluded that one ton of blubber was valued at approximately ￡15 14s 5d(1775).
As baleen was not a significant output for whalers operating in the eighteenth century, the only available correlation projects an average return of 15 pounds of bone/tun of oil at ~$0.50(1775)/pound (~3d(1775)/pound), accounting for a trivial average revenue of ~￡2 15s 4d(1775) per voyage. As the available data regarding whalebone returns outside of mathematical projection is extremely limited, I've omitted revenue from whalebone from my calculations regarding voyage productivity. The data can easily be adjusted to accommodate whalebone returns based on the above calculations should the need arise.
The most productive voyages during the period appear to have been those of the Renthall and the Liverpool in 1772, but as these datapoints are based entirely on projected data for burthen and tons of blubber/whale, more research into the ships and the voyages in question is necessary to substantiate this claim in any meaningful manner. Discarding these voyages for the time being, the most productive voyage based on a complete data set was that of the Golden Lyon of Liverpool under Captain Thompson in 1772. The voyage brought in ￡2523 2s 2d, approximately $4,090,000(2013)! The average wage of a crew member on this voyage would have been in the neighborhood of ￡6 1s 7d, the rough equivalent of $9830(2013).
The method of determining a particular crewman's pay was based on something called a "lay," which was a fractional share of a portion of the profits of a voyage (26-37%, average 34%). Captains received lays ranging from 1/8-1/16, whereas ordinary seamen received lays below 1/30 (ship's boys started with a lay of 1/250). On average, whalemen made less than their counterparts in the merchant marine, with the upside that if they got lucky, they could make a whole lot of money. This chance, along with the dashing adventure that came with a whaler's life, drew people to the profession, despite the fact that they could have probably done as well or better in a much safer job on or off shore. There are even recorded accounts of whalemen only making mere cents in exchange for months of work on a broken voyage (a voyage that didn't return with enough oil to offset the cost of the voyage).
The owners and investors during the period actually made out like bandits, as the British government sponsored a bounty of ￡2/ship-ton for whaling ships to combat the growing Nantucket whaling industry. This bounty was often enough to underwrite the costs of the entire voyage, so regardless of whether or not the voyage was successful, the owners and investors were at little to no risk of actually losing money. Also keep in mind that the payouts for the owners and investors were taken out of the 66% of the profits not earmarked for the crew, and that individual shares in these profits were much larger, often in the 1/6-1/2 range.
Source: My unpublished undergraduate thesis.