The Floating Hell: A Brief History of the Tryworks

The Tryworks was a marvel of pre-industrial engineering, a diabolical and ingenious furnace that transformed the very nature of global commerce and human ambition. At its core, the tryworks was a shipboard furnace, a brick-and-mortar hearth set directly on the deck of a wooden Whaleship, designed for the express purpose of rendering whale blubber into valuable Whale Oil. This seemingly simple apparatus—typically consisting of two or three massive iron cauldrons, or “try-pots,” set over a firebox—was the technological key that unlocked the world’s oceans for industrial exploitation. Before its invention, whaling was a coastal affair, tethered to the land where blubber could be processed safely. The tryworks severed that tether. It turned the ship into a self-contained, mobile factory, capable of remaining at sea for years on end, chasing its quarry across every degree of latitude. It was the fiery, smoke-belching heart of the 19th-century whaling industry, a floating altar upon which the bodies of leviathans were sacrificed to light the lamps, lubricate the machines, and fuel the relentless engine of the Industrial Revolution. Its story is one of innovation born of necessity, of immense wealth built on brutal labor, and of a technology so successful it nearly consumed the very resource that gave it life.

Long before the oceans became a factory floor, the pursuit of whales was a perilous dance conducted within sight of land. From the Basque whalers of the Bay of Biscay in the Middle Ages to the early American colonists of New England, whaling was a coastal enterprise. The process was a logistical chain, each link forged to the shore. Whalemen would launch small, oar-powered Whaleboats from the beach to hunt whales that migrated or fed in nearby waters. If they were successful in harpooning and killing the colossal mammal, the most arduous task had just begun: towing the immense carcass back to a land-based whaling station. These stations were the primitive ancestors of the tryworks. Here, on solid ground, the whale would be flensed—its thick blanket of blubber stripped away in long strips. The blubber was then minced and boiled in large vats over open fires in a process called “trying out.” The goal was to render the solid fat into liquid oil, which could then be stored in barrels. The logic was simple and, above all, safe. A roaring fire, necessary for rendering, was a catastrophic risk on a wooden vessel packed with oil-soaked timber and tarred rigging. The land offered a stable, non-combustible platform for this fiery work. However, this shore-based model contained the seeds of its own obsolescence. Its success was its limitation. As coastal communities perfected their techniques, the local whale populations began to dwindle under the intense pressure. The North Atlantic right whale, once abundant off the coasts of Europe and North America, was hunted to near extinction in these regions. To find their quarry, whalers had to venture further and further from home, pushing into the vast, uncharted expanses of the Atlantic and, eventually, the Pacific. This created an inescapable dilemma. A ship could kill a whale hundreds of miles from port, but the carcass was a ticking clock. The blubber would begin to decay, reducing the quality and quantity of the oil. Towing a 50-ton whale carcass across open ocean was a Herculean, if not impossible, task that slowed the ship to a crawl. The whalers were left with two inefficient options: return to port after each successful hunt, wasting weeks or months in transit, or hack off what blubber they could and hope to process it before it spoiled. The voyages grew longer, the profits thinner, and the risks greater. The industry had hit a wall. To grow, to become the global titan it was destined to be, whaling needed to break its chains to the shore. It needed a new technology, one that could take the fire of the land and safely harness it upon the water.

The solution, when it arrived in the mid-18th century, was a stroke of pragmatic genius born from the shipyards of Nantucket and New Bedford. The precise moment of invention is lost to the churn of maritime history, but by the 1760s, American whalers were experimenting with and perfecting a radical new device: the onboard tryworks. The challenge was immense, a direct confrontation with one of the mariner's oldest fears: fire at sea. To place a furnace on a wooden deck was to invite catastrophe. The ship itself was a tinderbox of dry wood, canvas sails, and tar, and its intended cargo—barrels of flammable oil—only amplified the danger. The design of the tryworks was a masterclass in risk mitigation and thermal engineering, a structure built to contain and control a miniature volcano.

The foundation of the tryworks was a shallow, rectangular pen built directly onto the main deck of the Whaleship, typically located between the foremast and the mainmast. This pen was filled with seawater, creating a cooling layer that served as a crucial heat buffer between the furnace and the wooden deck beams below. It was, in effect, a simple but highly effective water-cooling system, preventing the ship’s timbers from charring and igniting. Atop this aquatic foundation sat the furnace itself, a robust structure of brick and mortar. The bricks were specially made to withstand the intense heat and the constant, violent motion of the ship. They formed a firebox with openings at the front for stoking the fire and removing ash. Set into the top of this brick fortress were the two or sometimes three massive cast-iron try-pots. These were enormous cauldrons, each capable of holding hundreds of gallons of blubber and oil. A whaleman could stand comfortably inside one. Above the pots, a system of flues and a chimney—often called a “charlie noble”—channeled the thick, greasy smoke away from the deck and the sails. This was not merely for comfort; the smoke contained soot and embers that could easily set the rigging ablaze. The entire apparatus was a self-contained, fire-breathing entity, meticulously designed to coexist with its flammable wooden host.

Perhaps the most brilliant and unsettling aspect of the tryworks' design was its fuel source. While wood or coal might be used to start the initial fire, the true engine of the rendering process was the whale itself. Once the first batch of blubber was rendered, the leftover fibrous tissue, known as “scraps” or “cracklings,” was skimmed from the boiling oil. These scraps, wrung dry of their precious liquid, were incredibly flammable. They were fed directly back into the firebox. This created a perfect, and perfectly grim, feedback loop. The whale’s own body was used as the fuel to melt its own body. A ship could leave port with a minimal supply of firewood and, after the first successful hunt, operate its floating factory for years, powered entirely by its victims. This self-sufficiency was the final, crucial element that allowed for the epic, multi-year voyages of Pelagic Whaling. The tryworks didn't just allow a ship to process blubber at sea; it allowed the ship to do so almost indefinitely, turning the vessel into a truly autonomous industrial island. The monster had been born, and the world’s oceans would never be the same.

The tryworks was more than an invention; it was a revolution. It fundamentally reconfigured the geography, economics, and culture of the 19th century. By placing a factory on the waves, it transformed the Whaleship from a mere hunting vessel into a globe-spanning industrial complex. This new capability unleashed an era of unprecedented maritime expansion and exploitation, with the tryworks as its fiery, beating heart.

With the tryworks, the duration of a whaling voyage was no longer limited by the need to return to port. It was now determined only by the capacity of the ship's hold. Voyages of three, four, or even five years became commonplace. A vessel could leave New Bedford, round Cape Horn, and spend years systematically hunting the vast whale populations of the Pacific Ocean—from the coasts of South America to the Sea of Japan, and from the equatorial grounds to the frigid waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. The economic implications were staggering. Whale Oil became a cornerstone commodity of the 19th century. It was the world's primary illuminant before the advent of kerosene, filling the lamps of homes and cities from London to Boston. It was a superior industrial lubricant, greasing the gears and spindles of the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution. A special, high-quality oil called Spermaceti, found in the head of the sperm whale, produced the brightest, cleanest-burning candles ever known and was a prized material for ointments and cosmetics. The tryworks was the machine that processed the raw material—the whale—into these essential products, making whaling one of the most profitable industries of its time and turning small New England ports into centers of immense wealth and global power. This pursuit of oil drove exploration. Whaling captains, in their relentless search for new hunting grounds, charted vast, unknown regions of the ocean, encountering new islands and cultures. The logbooks from these voyages became invaluable sources of geographic, oceanographic, and ethnographic information. The Whaleship, powered by its tryworks, was an unwitting agent of globalization, connecting distant economies and ecosystems in a web of commerce spun from fire and fat.

While the tryworks generated fabulous wealth for ship owners and investors, for the men who operated it, it created a workplace of unimaginable hardship. The process of “trying out” was a descent into a sensory inferno, a scene so dramatic and terrifying that it became a central fixture in the literature of the sea, most famously immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. When a whale was brought alongside the ship, the crew began the long, bloody task of flensing. Using razor-sharp cutting spades on long poles, they peeled the blubber from the carcass in a continuous spiral, like peeling an orange. These massive “blanket pieces” were hoisted aboard and cut into smaller “bible leaves” before being fed into the try-pots. Then, the tryworks was fired up. Melville described the scene as a vision of hell itself. At night, the fires would cast a lurid, demonic glow across the ship, illuminating the figures of the whalemen as they worked, their faces slick with sweat and blackened by soot. The boiling oil hissed and popped, releasing a thick, acrid smoke that permeated everything—the men's clothes, their food, the very timbers of the ship. The stench was overpowering, a nauseating blend of burning fat and boiled meat that could be smelled for miles downwind. The work was relentless and perilous. Men stood on platforms next to the roaring fires, using long-handled bailers to scoop the rendered oil into cooling tanks and skimmers to remove the cracklings. A slip on the greasy deck, a sudden lurch of the ship in a heavy sea—any misstep could mean a fatal plunge into a cauldron of boiling oil or into the shark-infested waters below. The tryworks operated around the clock until the last piece of blubber was rendered, forcing the crew into a state of sleep-deprived, grueling labor. It was the dark, demonic core of their existence, the site where their prey was violently transformed into the profit they so desperately sought, a profit in which they only received a minuscule share, or “lay.” The tryworks, therefore, existed in a profound duality. It was a symbol of human ingenuity and economic power, the engine that fueled a global industry. But it was also a symbol of brutal exploitation—both of the natural world and of the men who labored in its fiery shadow. It was the heart of the ship, but a heart that pumped smoke and ash, a floating hell that lit up the world.

Every technology that defines an era eventually confronts its own twilight. The reign of the tryworks, so absolute and transformative, was no exception. Its decline was brought about by a confluence of forces—the predictable consequence of its own brutal efficiency and the unpredictable arrival of a rival technology that would utterly supplant it.

The first harbinger of the end was the very success of the industry the tryworks had created. For over a century, the global whaling fleet, equipped with these floating factories, had prosecuted a relentless, industrial-scale slaughter. Whale populations that had once seemed limitless began to collapse. The North Atlantic was depleted. The great hunting grounds of the Pacific, once teeming with sperm whales, humpbacks, and right whales, grew barren. Voyages became longer and less profitable as ships spent more time searching for fewer whales. The tryworks had given humanity the power to empty the oceans, and it had done so with devastating effectiveness. The resource base of the entire industry was being consumed. The fatal blow, however, came not from the sea, but from beneath the earth. In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The discovery of petroleum unleashed a new, far cheaper, and more abundant source of fuel. Kerosene, distilled from crude oil, quickly proved to be a superior illuminant to Whale Oil. It was less smoky, less smelly, and dramatically less expensive. The lamps of the world, once fed by the leviathan, now burned with the distilled remains of ancient forests and plankton. Petroleum-based lubricants also began to replace whale oil in the world's factories. The American Civil War (1861-1865) accelerated the decline. Confederate commerce raiders targeted and destroyed a significant portion of the New England whaling fleet. Simultaneously, the war effort diverted capital and manpower away from the industry. By the time the war ended, the age of petroleum was firmly established, and the whaling industry, already weakened by resource depletion, could not recover its former glory. The economic rationale for the tryworks had evaporated.

The tryworks did not vanish overnight. Whaling continued into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was a shadow of its former self. The majestic square-rigged whaleships were gradually replaced by steam-powered chasers and factory ships equipped with a new, even more lethal technology: the explosive-tipped Harpoon gun. This new era of modern whaling required different methods of processing, and the old brick furnace, a relic of the age of sail, became obsolete. Today, the tryworks exists only as a ghost, a powerful echo in the annals of history. Its physical remains are exceedingly rare, found primarily in archaeological contexts like shipwrecks buried in Arctic ice or in meticulous reconstructions at maritime museums, such as the one aboard the last surviving wooden Whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan, at Mystic Seaport. These artifacts stand as silent testaments to a bygone era. Yet, the legacy of the tryworks endures.

• Culturally, it is immortalized as a potent symbol in literature and art. It represents the apex of humanity's pre-petroleum industrial might, a raw and visceral expression of the ambition to conquer and commodify the natural world. It is the dark stage upon which the epic drama of Moby-Dick unfolds, a permanent fixture in our cultural imagination of the sea.
• Technologically, it remains a landmark of engineering. It was a brilliant solution to a complex problem, a perfect fusion of materials science, thermal dynamics, and risk management that enabled a global industry. It stands as a prime example of how a single technological innovation can redefine economic possibilities and reshape humanity's relationship with the planet.
• Environmentally, its story is a profound cautionary tale. The tryworks was an instrument of ecological devastation, a machine so efficient it drove its own resource to the brink of extinction. Its history is a crucial lesson in the unsustainable nature of unchecked exploitation, an early and dramatic chapter in the much larger story of the industrial world's impact on the global ecosystem.

The fire in the try-pots has long been extinguished, but its smoke still lingers, a faint haze on the horizon of our collective memory. It reminds us of a time when the world was lit by the body of the whale, when ships were floating factories, and when a simple brick furnace, burning with a hellish light, changed the course of history.