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ONE of the many memorable paragraphs of Herman Melville’s classic allegorical work of American fiction, Moby-Dick, is when the narrator/character Ismael speculates on what remuneration he might receive for signing on to the voyage of the whaler Pequod:

❝ I was already aware that in the whaling business they pay no wages; but all hands, including the captain, receive certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company… I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage…what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing ❞.

As Elmo P Hofman elaborated in a 1926 essay, “the whaleman was not paid by day, week or month, nor was he allowed a certain sum of every barrel of oil or for every pound of bone captured” …his earnings came from a “specified fractional share” (a lay) of the net profits of the trip (cited in ‘How Profit Sharing Sent Captain Ahab in Search of Moby Dick, Joseph Thorndike, Forbes, 15-Dec-2015, www.forbes.com). Rather than being wage-earners the entire crew including the skipper were sort of joint shareholders in the commercial venture.

The 1956 film

The experiences of real-life whaling boats of the era of Melville’s novel offers insights into the synchronic system of divvying up the profits – if we look at the profits of the 1843 whaling voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford⚀, it reveals a 70/30 split of the dividends, 70% to the owners and partners and 30% sub-divided between the captain and crew (Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, Karen Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan (1997)). This was pretty typical for the period of what has been described as “an oddly denominated profit-sharing scheme” (‘The Whaleman’s Lay’, Ahab Beckons, 04-Feb-2018, www.ahab-beckons.blogspot.com). A captain might score a lay of ⅛th whereas a ‘green’ hand might only net a ¹⁄₃₅₀th lay or worse, so the novice sea-hand Ismael was perhaps over-optimistic about his likely share (in the novel Ismael is offered an exceptionally long lay which after haggling hard he manages to have reduced to a more acceptable lay of ¹⁄₃₀₀th). So, like the unknowables or “known unknowns” of the stock exchange, a crew member of a whaling vessel engaging in this pelagic industrial arena, even if he knows what lay he had scored, still won’t have any idea of how much he’ll earn for his months and months of hard ship work. Everything hinged on the voyage’s profitability.

Then on top of all this there were deductions from a crew member’s lay when he did finally get the money…anything an ordinary whaleman purchased from the ship’s store during the voyage—tobacco, boots, clothes, etc—was subtracted from his lay. The same if he was given an advance to send to his family. A crew member, especially one with a very long lay, could easily end up in debt to the ship’s owners at voyage’s end (‘Life Aboard’, New Bedford Whaling Museum, www.whalingmuseum.org).

New Bedford Whaling Museum

𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪
⚀ 50 miles south of Boston, from the early 1820s on it supplanted Nantucket as America’s foremost whaling port