“So what drew them to whaling? Some might have been lured by what Baudelaire called the ‘profound and mysterious charm that arises from looking at a ship’; others, as Elizabeth Hardwick noted in her biography of Melville, ‘have come sulking away, address unknown, from howling creditors, accusing wives, alert policemen, beggary on shore’. Many greenhands were from farming families, some awaiting their inheritance, others, as younger sons, unlikely to come into anything. Runaway slaves were not uncommon aboard Yankee whalers: Nantucket’s Quaker population helped to secure berths for those in danger of being recaptured by bounty hunters.”
Book:Whale