The whalers of Ballast Point — San Diego's first boom industry.

On a still February morning in 1858, smoke rose from Ballast Point in thick, oily columns that hung over the harbor entrance and drifted south on the afternoon sea-breeze. Ashore, iron try-pots the size of bathtubs sat nested in brick furnaces, rendering slabs of whale blubber into the amber lamp-oil that would light parlors from Sacramento to New York. Out past the kelp beds, beyond the surf breaking against Point Loma's sandstone cliffs, small double-ended whaleboats rode at anchor beside a barnacled bark, her decks dark with blood and rendered fat. For the men working the station—Yankee veterans of the New England fishery, Portuguese seamen from the Azores, and a scattering of local Californios learning the trade—this stretch of San Diego's outer harbor was among the richest whale grounds on the Pacific coast, a killing ground made possible by the greatest annual migration on the gray whale's calendar.

San Diego in the early 1850s was a port in search of a purpose. The hide-and-tallow trade that Richard Henry Dana had immortalized in Two Years Before the Mast had peaked before the Mexican-American War and evaporated after American annexation reshaped commerce along the coast. The gold rush drew men and capital relentlessly northward, leaving San Diego as a drowsy anchorage of perhaps three hundred souls, too far south to profit from the Sierra Nevada diggings and still awaiting a railroad. What the town possessed, however, was geography: a deep natural harbor opening onto some of the most productive whale grounds on the continent, where the southbound gray whale migration funneled thousands of animals within rowing distance of the harbor entrance every winter. The men who recognized this built their try-works on the long sandy spit at the harbor's mouth, and for two decades the smoke never entirely left the sky above Ballast Point.

The shore whaling station differed fundamentally from the pelagic fishery of the North Atlantic. Where the great sperm-whaling barks of New Bedford departed for voyages of two or three years, a shore station kept its men close to land. The Ballast Point operation maintained a small fleet of twenty-eight-foot whaleboats, each crewed by six men: a boat-header commanding from the stern with a long steering oar, a harpooner at the bow, and four oarsmen pulling in silence—their oarlocks muffled with rags—against the Pacific swells. When lookouts posted on the bluffs above Point Loma spotted the heart-shaped blow of a surfacing gray, the alarm went up and the boats launched through the shore break. The harpooner's first strike fixed a line to the animal; the terrified whale sounded or ran, towing the boat in the classic Nantucket sleigh-ride, until it tired enough to be finished with a lance. The carcass was then towed back to the point, hauled up the beach by block-and-tackle, and stripped of its blubber within the same tide.

The target of all this effort was Eschrichtius robustus, the California gray whale, a species whose entire life history seemed calibrated to make it catchable. Each autumn the animals departed their summer feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas and traveled some six thousand miles south along the Pacific coast—the longest migration recorded for any mammal—to breed and calve in the warm, shallow lagoons of Baja California. The southbound animals passed Point Loma between November and February, moving in loose groups close to the kelp beds, and a mature cow yielded twenty to thirty-five barrels of oil: less per animal than the sperm whale that made New England fortunes, but arriving on schedule each winter like a reliable freight consignment, no voyage required. The gray's baleen plates—flexible sheets of keratin used to filter amphipods from the seafloor—added a secondary revenue stream as raw material for corset stays, umbrella ribs, and buggy whips.

The figure who would define and ultimately doom the California gray whale industry was Captain Charles Melville Scammon, a Maine-born mariner commanding vessels for the Pacific whaling trade out of San Francisco. In December 1857, Scammon threaded his brig through a narrow, surf-wracked entrance in the Baja California desert and discovered the vast breeding concentration that would bear his name: Scammon's Lagoon, unknown to outside commerce, holding more gray whales in a single anchorage than most whalemen had seen in a decade at sea. Within two seasons a fleet had followed him in, and the carnage was efficient enough to earn the grays their alternate name among the trade: "devil fish," for the violence with which nursing mothers defended their calves against iron. Scammon himself later expressed regret in print; his 1874 scientific treatise, The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America, documented with biological precision the animals his industry was erasing. The Ballast Point station, working the same migration a thousand miles north, had by the mid-1860s begun to record noticeably fewer strikes per season.

At its height in the late 1850s, the try-works at Ballast Point produced San Diego's single most valuable export. Shipments of rendered whale oil—valued at roughly one dollar per gallon in the San Francisco commodity market—moved north on coasting schooners to enter the global trade in illuminants, lubricants, and fine soaps. The station employed forty to sixty men at its peak, a significant fraction of the town's slender adult male population, and the wages circulated through Old Town's dry-goods stores and boarding houses. But two forces converged to end it. In August 1859, Edwin Drake completed the first successful commercial oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, inaugurating the petroleum age and driving whale oil prices downward through the following decade. Simultaneously, the gray whale population collapsed under the pressure of shore stations from Crescent City to San Diego and the concentrated slaughter inside the Baja lagoons. By 1876, the Ballast Point operation had gone quiet. The try-pots were abandoned on the beach, and the spit returned to the gulls.

The same point of land where whalemen once scanned the horizon for heart-shaped blows is now the southern terminus of Naval Base Point Loma, home to the submarine force that anchors the Pacific Fleet's western approach. The continuity is not incidental: both industries chose Ballast Point for exactly the same reason—a commanding position at the harbor mouth, deep water close to shore, and an unobstructed ocean beyond. The gray whale, meanwhile, recovered under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and was removed from the federal endangered species list in 1994, the first great success story of American marine conservation. Every winter, the same animals still round Point Loma on their southbound passage, their plumes rising fifty yards off the submarine piers—a reminder that what this harbor once consumed, it eventually learned to keep.

The whales still come. The same migration, the same gray November swells off Point Loma, the same heart-shaped blow lifting above the surface a quarter-mile from shore. You could watch them tonight from the rail of a boat leaving the harbor, the submarine base glowing behind you and the open Pacific ahead—the same bay, smelling now of salt instead of smoke.