38Talk:

As the Morgan is about to be towed back to Mystic Seaport this afternoon, I got it in my head to look up the last whale. I've never paid any attention to the Morgan's whaling voyages after 1906. The captains and mates recording in the logbooks in that period were relatively illiterate and, for my own interest, their navigation work was trivial. The Morgan was a miserable "fishing boat" in the North Atlantic. I'm attaching a page from the last day of whaling (the original at mysticseaport.org). It was May 21, 1921. As you can see, they were still using little whale stamps to mark off the whales taken and the boats lowered. The location of this last episode of whaling surprised me. The position listed, 36° 23' N, 74° 38' W (normally the noon position), places them just off the east coast of the US, near the border of North Carolina and Virginia. The Morgan's last day of whaling was only about 70 nautical miles from Virginia Beach or about 55 miles from the beaches at Kitty Hawk...

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

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