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# Left Out In The Cold: From Fish to Finish
- URL: https://www.itsabouttime.email/left-out-in-the-cold-from-fish-to-finish/
- Published: 2026-10-17T12:31:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-17T12:31:41.000Z
- Description: For most of a century, the best watches in America ran on oil cut from the heads of pilot whales and porpoises. Watchmakers paid for it because it would not freeze. It came out of the cold North Atlantic, and on the beaches of Cape Cod. Be warned, this is a graphic one.
- Author: Vuk Radic
- Tags: The Caseback

The word reached Provincetown at about three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, November 15, 1884\. Blackfish in the bay. 

Men left what they were doing. They ran for dories and catboats and anything with oars, because a school of blackfish was money lying on top of the water, and the law of the beach was that a share went to every man who helped bring it in. Out in the bay the school was rolling at the surface, hundreds of black backs and hooked fins sliding up and under in the gray water, the animals blowing in short hard breaths you could hear from the beach. The men rowed out to get around behind it. That was how it was done, and every boy on the Cape knew it. You got between the whales and open water, and then you made all the noise you could. You slapped the sea with the oar blades and hammered on the gunwales and yelled, and the whales moved away from the racket, toward the land.

The first afternoon went wrong. The school drifted in too close to the fish weirs, the big traps of net and stakes set off the beach, and nobody wanted a weir torn out by a few hundred whales. The November light went out quickly and the boats came home in the dark with only a few animals.

They were out again early Sunday. They found the school and pushed it south across the bay toward Dennis and Brewster, but the whales would not come into the shallows there, and all the men could do was get alongside a few and go at them with case knives. They took about sixty. The rest sounded and ran for deep water with the boats strung out behind, and mackerel fishermen working the bay saw what was going on and came about to join in. Nobody wrote down where they all spent Sunday night.

On Monday the school was turned into Wellfleet Harbor, which was the end of it. The harbor is a wide sheet of shallow water over sand that empties on the ebb into mud and creek channels, and a pilot whale that feels the bottom rising under it will panic and drive forward, harder and harder, until it is on the beach. The men put a hundred and fifty of them on the flats at Indian Neck before the rest of the school understood it was boxed in. Then they worked the others down the harbor to the mouth of Blackfish Creek, which had been called that since at least the 1790s, and for this exact reason. By dark there were thirteen hundred whales aground there.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-2.jpg)

The papers painted the scene by the next morning. Carts and carriages stood along the top of the bank, women and children watched from the dunes, and every store in Wellfleet was shut. The railroad brought spectators down the Cape. Men who had killed whales before waded in with lances and harpoons, and men who hadn't brought whatever was in the barn, scythes and axes and picks. A paper in Maine said that anybody big enough to lift a weapon was killing a blackfish. The animals ran up to twenty feet, some of them close to two tons, and they did not scatter, because pilot whales won't leave a hurt animal. They close in around it. The men waded among them thigh-deep in November water and kept at it until it was too dark to see what they were cutting.

"Thus ended at dark last night," the Boston Globe reported on Tuesday, "the most exciting chase ever witnessed in these waters."

The Barnstable Patriot counted 1,498 blackfish and 96 porpoises, and the lot went to auction that week. The American Oil Company of Wellfleet bought 447 whales and ran its kettles night and day into the new year. Isaiah Barker, an old cooper who lived near the beach, bought 72 porpoises. A Henry Cook of Provincetown bought 512 blackfish, which the Globe said would be tried out at the oil works on Long Point. At Union Hall the men divided $15,353.75, a full share to every man over fifteen and every keelboat and dory, a quarter share to boys under twelve, and the dividend of $24 a share was paid out at the blacksmith's.

Most of what came out of those whales was blubber oil, about thirty gallons a whale, bound for tanneries and lamp dealers like any whale oil. The heads were a separate business. A pilot whale's forehead is a bulb of pale fat the Cape men called the melon, and a melon taken off whole looked like half a watermelon and weighed around twenty-five pounds. "When the knife is put into the center of this melon," Caleb Cook wrote, "the oil runs out more freely than the water does from a very nice watermelon." A melon gave about six quarts, and the fat packed into the hollow of the lower jaw gave a little more. 

For years afterward a photographer's view of that beach sold as a postcard, with a caption explaining that the dead whales were "very valuable for the fine oil they make for use on watches and other delicate machinery."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-3.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-4.jpg)

Caleb Cook was seventy-six that November, and two years later the Provincetown directory still listed him as a watch oil manufacturer. Nobody recorded whether he went over to Wellfleet to look. He had been buying blackfish heads for more than forty years by then, and before him his father had sent the first of the oil to a watchmaker in New Bedford.

## A Few Gallons for Mr. Kelley

Ezra Kelley was thirty-one in 1829 and keeping a clock and watch business in New Bedford, a Cape Cod boy who had come up from Dennis at twenty to learn the trade. He had been raised a Quaker. The Friends had read him out of the meeting in 1823 for marrying Nancy Simmons of Hingham, who was a Methodist, and in the years since he had built tall clocks in inlaid mahogany cases good enough that one of them ended up at Yale. Like every watchmaker in the country, he oiled the watches that came across his bench with whatever he could get. Most of it was bad.

Olive oil, believe it or not, was the standard, and the old manuals spent pages on how to make it fit for a watch. You shook it with lye to cut the acid, washed it, shook it again with strong alcohol and stood the bottle in a sunny window for two or three weeks until the oil came up as clear as water. It went sour in the watch anyway. There was always a trace of acid left, and the oil kept making more as it aged, and it went green on brass and stained the plates under it a dull greenish brown. Neat's-foot oil, rendered from the feet of cattle, gummed. The old-timers had a way around that. They kept a big bottle of it outdoors to bake through the summer and freeze through the winter, left it two or three years, and then on the coldest day of the year poured off whatever was still liquid and kept that for watches.

The cold was what beat all of them. A watch runs on almost no force, a mainspring easing a train of wheels around on pivots thinner than a pin, and at the far end a balance that swings several times a second, all day and all night, on just a few drops of oil. If the oil thickens, the balance loses its swing and the watch starts losing time, and if it thickens enough the watch stops. A pocket watch went wherever its owner went, which in New England meant unheated bedrooms and railroad cars and a coat pocket on a January morning. When a Philadelphia watchmaker named W. T. Lewis sealed the common oils into glass tubes in 1896 and left them for six hours at five degrees Fahrenheit, the olive oil came out as hard as candle wax.

The answer was already known, but it was not a common oil that people used around the world. Especially not watchmakers. Around 1816, by Caleb Cook's account, sailors and fishermen who caught a porpoise would sometimes cut the fat out of its jaw, try out the oil and give it to carpenters for their oilstones. The carpenters noticed it never gummed. Somebody noticed that a day at zero degrees did not thicken it and that it would not eat brass, so the watchmakers started buying. That is everything anyone knows about how it began, and Cook wrote it down in 1878, when he had oil of his own to sell.

In 1829 a school of about forty blackfish came into Provincetown, the first anyone there had seen in years, and the town took them. Solomon Cook, Caleb's father, was sixty-five, a Provincetown mariner who knew about the porpoise oil and wondered whether a bigger animal might give a better one. He cut the jaws out of the dead whales on the beach, rendered a few gallons and sent them up the coast to Kelley to try.

Kelley tried them. The blackfish oil, he found, had "more substance and less chill" than the porpoise oil he had been using, which in plain terms meant it stayed liquid colder and still had body enough to stay on a pivot. He took Solomon Cook on as his supplier and bought from him every year until the old man died in 1840, and after that from Solomon's oldest son. Around 1842 the youngest, Caleb, began rendering the melon instead of the jaw and decided the oil was better still. Kelley refused to buy it until Caleb told him where it came from.

Some time in the 1840s Kelley started putting the oil up for sale under his own name, in small clear bottles stopped with cork and sealed in red wax. The white label said Ezra Kelley's Superfine Watch Oil, New Bedford, Mass., U.S.A., and underneath, because there were already other people bottling whale oil and calling it his, it said that none was genuine without his signature.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/H0011-L146357580_original.jpg)

## Strained at Zero

When the Smithsonian asked Caleb Cook in 1878 how the blackfish were taken, he told it straight, the way a man describes a day's work.

The schools came along the Cape and into Barnstable Bay from early summer to early winter, he wrote. When one was sighted the boats went out and got behind it, and since the whales kept to the surface it was no trouble to hold them between the boats and the shore. The men beat the water with their oars until the whales moved off toward land. In shoal water, when the fish saw the sand under them, they lost their heads and swam with everything they had until they were hard aground. Then the boats went in among them and the men jumped over the side with lances "and butcher them as a butcher would a hog." The water flew every way and the blood ran, Cook wrote, until death ended "the great tragedy." When the tide went out and left the carcasses dry, the men flensed the blubber and tried it out on the beach. The heads came to Cook.

Henry David Thoreau was boarding at the Highland lighthouse in Truro in July 1855 when a man named Peterson came by on the morning of the 9th with word that there were blackfish ashore, and he walked over to see. He went back to that stretch of beach about a week later and found it strewn, as far as he could make out with a glass, with carcasses stripped of their blubber, the heads cut off and lying higher up the sand. Nobody had bothered to clear them. A little way out, men were taking lobsters as usual.

Porpoises came in fewer at a time, mostly tangled in the nets. By the 1890s the trap and gill-net men of Massachusetts Bay were landing them at Provincetown and selling them off the wharf, some still alive. Further out, whaling captains who took a porpoise at sea kept the head and jaw, rendered the fat aboard and sold the oil when they got home. The man buying in Provincetown by then was David Conwell Stull, who had come into the head-oil trade after Caleb Cook retired. Stull's father had sailed for St. Thomas in 1852 and never been heard from again, and the boy grew up in an uncle's house that lived off whaling and fishing money. In time he was a fixture at strandings, there before the tide was out, buying heads and carting them back to his shop. Mariners called him the Ambergris King, because when a whaler came in with a lump of the stuff, Stull was the man the French perfume houses trusted to price it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-5.jpg)

In Stull's factory the fat was cut from the heads, washed in fresh water and packed into tin cans, and the cans went into iron retorts that took live steam from the boiler at ten pounds of pressure, 230 degrees Fahrenheit, for five hours. What came out was crude oil, cloudy and full of water and blood and the heavy fats that would kill a watch. It was washed and stirred and left to stand for days while the water settled, drawn off, and the last of the water was cooked out of it. Cook warned that a single drop of water in a pint of finished oil would ruin it.

The rest of the work was done by the cold. Animal fat is a mixture. Some of it sets like lard as it cools, and some of it stays liquid far longer, and if you chill crude head oil far enough the heavy part comes out as a white mush of crystals and the rest runs clear between them. Press the whole thing through flannel at that temperature and what comes through has already shown it won't freeze at the temperature you strained it at. Cook did it out of doors. He set the oil out on a zero day and, with the air still at zero, poured it through a cotton flannel bag sewn into a cone. Taken too far, filtered through paper until it was perfectly clear, the oil went so thin it would run off the pivots and across the plates and dry up, and the pivots would cut and turn red. Knowing where to stop was what took years of experimentation, and Cook claimed his method was a secret known to nobody else.

The refiners went north for colder weather. William Nye, who would end up owning most of this business, put a second refinery in an old rolling mill at St. Albans, Vermont, a few miles from the Canadian line, to strain his oil through the winters there, and his company later claimed the St. Albans oil kept working from fifty below zero to two hundred above. The finished oil was aged, sometimes two years, and stood in a window to bleach until it was nearly white.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-6.jpg)

Stull made three grades from the same heads, for watches, for chronometers and for clocks. When Lewis put them in the cold in 1896, the watch and chronometer oils came through six hours at five degrees without a change, and the clock oil set as stiff as butter. A clock on a wall indoors could use the heavier oil as it would not be exposed to temperature extremes. A watch could not, and neither could a ship's chronometer on a deck in the North Atlantic. Refined head oil sold for five to fifteen dollars a gallon, depending on how many whales had come ashore that year, and a repairman bought it by the vial.

## Fish Island

William Foster Nye walked off his family's Cape Cod farm in 1840 at sixteen and spent the next twenty-five years trying on lives. He apprenticed to a carpenter in New Bedford. He built church organs in Boston, shipped out as a ship's carpenter, and worked in an ice house in Calcutta at the far end of the trade that sent New England pond ice around the world packed in sawdust. He went to California for the gold and did better building staircases in San Francisco after the fire. He came home and sold kerosene, and when the war came he followed the Union Army as a sutler, a licensed peddler to the troops, and later liked to say he was the first man to open a shop in Richmond after it fell. In 1865 he came back to New Bedford for good and started an oil business in the kitchen of his house across the harbor in Fairhaven.

New Bedford in 1865 was still the whaling capital of the world, though it was past its best. Eight years earlier the city's fleet had stood at 329 vessels, with more than ten thousand men in the trade, and the ships went out for three and four years at a time and came home low in the water with casks of sperm and whale oil. The money had built the big houses on County Street and the candle works and the refineries along the waterfront. Kelley's watch oil was a speck inside all that. The whaling merchants counted their oil by the barrel. Kelley counted his by the ounce, and his customers were jewelers.

Nye sold everything at first, burning oil and lubricating oil and castor oil and salad oil, but the end of the business he wanted was Kelley's, the small, costly oils for delicate machines. Kelley had owned it for twenty years. Watchmakers asked for his oil by name, and no repairman wanted to experiment on a customer's watch with somebody else's. So Nye made his own "fish jaw oil" and went over the repairmen's heads. With the help of a trade-journal publisher he got it in front of Cross & Beguelin, a big New York house in watch movements and parts, and once they took it up the rest of the trade paid attention. Then he cut his prices and gave dealers discounts that Kelley would not match.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-7.jpeg.webp)

He advertised in every trade paper there was, with endorsements from Waltham and Elgin, from a watchmaking school in Chicago, from the men who kept the great astronomical clock in Strasbourg Cathedral running. He hauled his oils to every exhibition that would have them, including the Paris Exposition of 1889\. Within ten years of starting in his kitchen he had moved out of a rented storefront and into a stone factory of his own on Fish Island, out in the middle of New Bedford harbor, with a bottling machine his son Joseph had patented that filled one-, two- and three-ounce bottles a gross at a time and pumped the spill from broken bottles back up to the tank on the third floor. By 1889, by his own reckoning, he was the biggest maker of watch, clock and sewing-machine oil in the world.

Nye's oil may not have been the better oil. In 1896 Lewis bought both brands off the shelf, the way any repairman would, and put them in the cold. After six hours at five degrees, Kelley's oil had not changed. Nye's had gone as thick as honey inside the hour. Lewis was careful to say that a single bottle proved little, and by then it hardly mattered.

Ezra Kelley died in New Bedford on December 14, 1895, at ninety-seven. He had outlived his wife by twenty-two years and nearly everyone who had been in the business when he started, and his son-in-law, John Wing, was running it. In January 1896, a few weeks after the funeral, Nye absorbed the firm. By the end of that year, according to the Nye company's own history, he had tripled the size of his factory and bought up nine-tenths of all the fish jaw oil in the world. He kept the Kelley name on the bottles, and from then on his company dated itself to 1844, the year it said Kelley's oil first went on sale.

That same January a watchmaker named A. L. H. Brown wrote to Nye from Calgary, which was then in the North-West Territories. He had been repairing watches there for four years, he said, had cleaned about three thousand of them with Nye's oil, and had never once had a customer come in to say his watch stopped in the freezing weather. He put the local weather report in the envelope so Nye could see for himself. It showed fifty below.

## Hatteras

Everyone in the business called it porpoise jaw oil, even though a good deal of it had never been near a porpoise. Caleb Cook admitted as much in print in 1878\. The oil sold under that name, he wrote, came from the blackfish, "belonging in the family of whales," which is to say the long-finned pilot whale, a big oceangoing dolphin whose head oil had pushed porpoise oil off the market on the Cape almost from the day Kelley first tried it. But why change the name the customers trusted already, right?

The sourcing got vaguer from there. When Lewis asked John Wing in 1896 where the Kelley oil came from, Wing said porpoise and blackfish taken in the summer months off the coast of Africa, north of the equator, and that he found it cleaner than the oil out of the St. Lawrence. Nye bought crude head oil wherever he could get it, and at least once a supplier cheated him, selling him crude dolphin oil cut with something cheaper. Nye's refining took two years, so nobody caught it until the oil had already gone out to the trade. Afterward he wrote that the only way to be sure was to control the whole thing "from fish to finish."

So in 1907 his son Joseph went south to Hatteras Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where men had been netting bottlenose dolphins on and off since at least 1851\. He hired a third-generation Hatteras oiler named William Rollinson to run it. Rollinson's father had been superintendent of an earlier dolphin fishery on the island for a company out of Wilmington, Delaware, and his grandfather had captained a dolphin crew there before the Civil War. Crews of about fifteen men worked the beach with boats and long seines. When a school came in close they ran the net around it and hauled it into the shallows, and the dolphins were butchered on the sand. The heads and jaws were rendered at a small works on Durant's Island, on the sound side, and the crude went north to New Bedford. The fishery lasted until 1928 or 1929\. Hatteras men who had worked it, talking to a historian decades later, described a grim business, a job you took only when there was no other.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-8.png)

Joseph Nye shipped some of the dolphins north alive. They went on show at the New York Aquarium, and the company later claimed they were the first live porpoises ever exhibited in the United States.

A bottle of porpoise jaw oil, by then, might hold the jaw oil of a Hatteras bottlenose, the melon oil of a Cape Cod pilot whale, something from off West Africa, or a blend. Between the Civil War and 1900, by the reckoning of the historian who has studied the Hatteras fishery most closely, the bulk of Nye's supply came from pilot whales stranded or driven ashore on Cape Cod and Long Island.

## Christchurch

After the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 brought down much of central Christchurch, in New Zealand, archaeologists followed the demolition crews from site to site, sieving the ground before the new buildings went up. Over the next decade they logged close to a million objects: chamber pots, shop signs, soda bottles, the jars of a local shoe polish whose maker turned out to have invented his own patent. One find was a miniature glass vial with a name embossed in its base, Ezra Kelley. The archaeologists traced it to New Bedford and wrote it up in 2017\. Someone in a colonial town on the far side of the Pacific had been oiling watches with oil from the Cape.

New Zealand had a whaling coast of its own, and its settlers were cutting up stranded blackfish and boiling the blubber on the beach well into the twentieth century. Nobody there was refining head oil for watches, though. That came the long way, from Massachusetts by sea, with the watches. The Nye company later boasted that its oil was asked for by name in North and South America, Europe, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand, and the vial from Christchurch bears out at least the last of those.

The customers at home were bigger and better documented. In 1878 Caleb Cook listed them: Waltham, Elgin and the Howard Watch Company, the clock factories of Connecticut, Smith & Wesson in Springfield and the gunmakers in Worcester, the telegraph-instrument makers, the makers of scientific apparatus who used it on the leather seals of their air pumps, and the government lighthouses, where it went into the clockwork that turned the lights. Those were the decades when the American watch factories were turning out movements by the hundreds of thousands, adjusted for heat and cold, for a country that wanted its watches to keep time through a Minnesota winter and a Texas summer and on railroads that ran to the minute. At the end of the line in Waltham or Elgin, a finisher put the last drop of oil on the last pivot before a movement went into its case, and the oil on his oiler had more than likely started out in the head of a whale on a Cape Cod beach.

## Fairhaven

William Nye died on August 12, 1910, and every year after that the heads got harder to come by. His son Joseph ran the company until 1923 and then handed it to a friend and business associate named Anderson Kelley, whose family kept it until 1956, buying crude head oil from Canada and taking what they could from the blackfish that still came ashore on the Cape now and then. The Hatteras crews were laid off at the end of the 1920s. In 1929 the refinery moved off Fish Island to a new plant in Fairhaven, and the hurricane of 1938 wrecked the old stone factory in the harbor.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/out-in-the-cold-9.jpg)

The Mock family bought the company in 1956, mostly, they said later, for the real estate. Then they read the customer list, which had Bulova and Eastman Kodak and General Electric and IBM on it, and kept the business. They bought blackfish head oil from Newfoundland, and after that from a fishing cooperative in the British West Indies where people still hunted pilot whales for food. They could also see that it would not last. In the early 1960s, a decade before anyone made them, they began moving the company from whale oil to synthetics.

President Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act on October 21, 1972, and it took effect on December 21\. From then on it was illegal to take a whale, dolphin or porpoise in American waters or to bring anything made from one into the country, though stock already on hand from before December 21 could still be sold. Nye's porpoise jaw oil stayed on the market into the 1970s, until the last of it was gone.

The company is still in Fairhaven, a short drive from Fish Island, making synthetic lubricants for satellites and cars and medical devices and, still, for watches. Since 2019 it has belonged to the German lubricant group Fuchs, and it still dates itself to 1844, the year Kelley's oil went on sale. The New Bedford Whaling Museum has a box of five of Kelley's little bottles, corked and sealed in red wax, the labels still warning that none is genuine without the signature. The oil itself is almost all gone. Over a century of cleanings it came out of the pivots of old watches a few drops at a time and went into the trash on a watchmaker's rag.

The blackfish still come into Cape Cod Bay. They still strand at Wellfleet, often in the cold months, often in the same shallow harbor where the town killed thirteen hundred of them in a day, because the hook of the Cape and the long drain of the tide make it one of the worst places on earth for a whale to lose its way. When it happens now, people still come down to the beach in numbers, carrying wetsuits and stretchers and buckets. They spend the short afternoon in the cold water beside the whales, keeping them wet and upright, waiting for the tide to come back in so they can walk them out to sea.

Nobody comes for the heads.