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Here, then, was New Bedford during the 1830s and ‘40s, when Hetty was a child. The first great oil fortunes in the United States were established not by Texans poking into the hard-baked earth, but by New England mariners roaming the seas in search of whales. The original whaling capital, the island of Nantucket, faded in the early 1800s when newer, larger ships outgrew the limitations of Nantucket’s shallow harbor. The industry moved west to the mainland and New Bedford. By 1839, 212 of 498 American whaling ships called New Bedford or neighboring Fairhaven home.

The prime quarry was the sperm whale, which had the biological misfortune to possess the best oil. Not only was the oil derived from its blubber superior to other whales’, but the sperm whale had another feature that hunters found irresistible. Located at the top of its enormous head was a case containing up to 500 gallons of pure, fine oil just waiting to be scooped up. In a business where almost nothing came easy—from stalking and killing an animal the size of one’s ship to “trying out” book-sized chunks of blubber over a deck fire belching black, greasy smoke—baling the case provided a sort of orgiastic release for crewmen. They clambered up the enormous head, carefully split it open so as not to spill any of the precious fluid, and dipped round-bottomed buckets, affixed to the ends of poles, into the cavern. Whalers called the oil spermaceti because, exposed to air, it thickened to the consistency of human seminal fluid (hence the sperm whale’s name). As the case emptied, a crewman or two would slide in to obtain the last precious drops.

At the end of a long voyage, a fortunate ship might groan back toward home port bulging with 4,000 barrels of oil—worth more than $100,000—destined to grease the nation’s machines and illuminate its nights. America ran on the by-products of slaughtered whales. Their oil lubricated watches, clocks, and guns. Wealthy young women wore corsets of whalebone and perfume containing ambergris, a waxy substance found in the whale’s intestines.

Located on the western banks of the Acushnet River, about forty miles south of Boston, New Bedford was a curious amalgam of refinement and roughness. Oil revenue didn’t just enrich individual whaling families; it also loaded municipal coffers—through personal estate taxes, real estate taxes, and poll taxes levied at $1.50 per voter—with enough money to turn New Bedford into a model of civic pride. In an age when one could expect to sink to one’s ankles in mud, muck, and filth just to cross a busy New York City street, several of New Bedford’s prominent thoroughfares were paved and their sidewalks flagged.

The central part of New Bedford was laid out in a neat grid of wide, tree-lined streets set on ground that rose rapidly away from the riverfront. In 1840, New Bedford spent more than $66,000 for highways, street lighting, and other civic improvements. The town’s population increased fourfold from 1830 to 1840, from a little over three thousand to more than twelve thousand. The city boasted a membership library with more than five thousand volumes, a lyceum that offered winter lectures by out-of-town dignitaries who received honoraria to speak, two medical societies, and an athenaeum. New Bedford had an active abolitionist movement, supported by both black and white residents, and was the terminus for hundreds of slaves, including Frederick Douglass, escaping the South via the underground railroad. Although Quaker families—Hetty’s included—often shipped their children off to private Quaker schools—many of the city’s three thousand school-age children attended good public schools. Benjamin Evans, boys’ principal at the Charles Street School, earned $600 per year. His counterpart, girls’ principal Julia H. Haskell, received $300.

“There were two New Bedfords in this early day,” local historian Zephaniah Pease wrote, “one a fair and dignified village on the hilltop, where were patrician mansions, with opulent gardens, the homes of the whaling merchants and captains. The other was made up of