Boardinghouses for Whalemen
In a smaller, specialized port like New Bedford, mariners used boardinghouses to facilitate crucial networking. Sailors used boardinghouses as the central clearinghouse for finding their next voyage. Keeps helped prospective crew members find suitable vessels on which to ship out, while vessel agents would visit lodgings to recruit crew members.
As a result, New Bedford had plenty of boardinghouses. In 1831, the New Bedford Port Society reported twenty-one boardinghouses; by 1845 there thirty-seven boardinghouses served between twenty and two hundred sailors each.1 The cost to stay in a boardinghouse varied greatly, depending on proximity to the waterfront, alehouses, conditions, demand, and innkeeper. Turnover in a boardinghouse, again unpredictable since sailors depended on employment, rarely expected to stay longer than a few weeks. At that point, sailors moved onto a new job or to the street.
1 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 17.
