George Clinton: 1834-1838

She Left Hudson Never to Return

The George Clinton was a large whaleship of 427 tons, rigged as a ship with all three masts carrying square rigged sails. The whaling captain was Samuel Barrett who had mastered five other whaling voyages (Pindus, Fairhaven, 1819; Sally, Nantucket, 1820; Barclay, New Bedford, 1827; Washington, Hudson, 1831; Huron, Hudson, 1838). 

There is no known crew list for the George Clinton, but it had a crew of 30. The ship left Hudson on August 16, 1834 for the Pacific whaling grounds. The voyage lasted three years and five months but the ship never returned to Hudson.  While on her way home on January 18, 1838, she ran aground in heavy fog along the New Jersey shore at Little Egg Harbor. The entire crew and the cargo of 1,459 barrels of sperm oil were recovered but the ship still sits at the bottom of the harbor.

Charles C. Coffin began the George Clinton logbook two days after the ship left the Port of Hudson and ceased writing seven weeks before she was due to return. There are a total of three logbooks for this ship and we have the digital facsimiles of two of them. The George Clinton struck her first two whales on December 22, 1834. The log entry on page 25 reads: “Saw a shoal of Sperm whales, lowered boat and got two. One large and one small. At 6:00pm took alongside employed in cutting.” Cutting in was the process of flensing large blanket sleeves of blubber from the whale and cutting them into smaller pieces for boiling. Tri-works, giant iron pots set in a brick structure on the ship’s deck, were used to boil the whale oil at sea.

Whaling voyages traveled thousands of miles in the open seas following routes to the whaling grounds and often gammed, or met up with each other, either at sea or onshore when they stopped at ports or islands for supplies. The captain and crew shared information, deliver mail to or from home, and sometimes even moved whale products from one ship weighed down by their bounty to another ship with less cargo. 

During the voyage the George Clinton  gammed with 50 other whaleships and one US sloop of war. Of the 77 times the whaleboat was lowered from the George Clinton, only 27% resulted in a whale kill. This was marked in the logbook with a whale stamp. A whale sighting followed by an unsuccessful hunt was marked with a whale fluke. The lower percentage of kills is attributed to either bad luck, weather or the skill of the crew. Although founded by Nantucket whaling families, Hudson was far removed from the orbit of New England’s resources of seasoned mariners.

According to the logbook, on September 9 and 10, eleven whales were sighted and three were killed. The Eldridge Auction House in East Denis, Massachusetts auctioned in 2017 a large 9 ½ in scrimshawed whale tooth with the description: “Large and important scrimshaw whale tooth. Depicted on one side is a whaleship surrounded by four whaleboats in the water and eleven visible whales. Inscribed below the scene is ‘George Clinton dated Sept 9th 1835 lat 25S=50 Long 169W=40.’” (Images below.) The inscribed information on the scrimshaw is the same scene described in this logbook on page 73, and it sold to the Nantucket Historical Association for $42,500. Although we know the date, the weather and the circumstances depicted in the scene, we may never know the unidentified crew member who was the artist.

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Additional Resource (links to PDF):

Logbook of the Ship George Clinton, 1834 - 1838

Nicholson Whaling Collection at Providence Public Library