The rocky tip of Point Loma, where the protected water of San Diego Bay meets the open Pacific, has been many things across the centuries. It was where Cabrillo made his 1542 landing. It was where the first Point Loma lighthouse was established in 1855. Today it is a naval installation. Before all of that — before the lighthouse, before the city had a real skyline — it was a whaling station.
In 1858, Portuguese-American brothers Henry and James Johnson — whalers who had made their way from Massachusetts to California — established the Ballast Point Whaling Station at the tip of the peninsula. They processed California gray whales that migrated through the bay entrance each winter, passing Point Loma as they moved between their Arctic summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and their winter breeding lagoons in Baja California.
The crews were multinational: Portuguese, African, Irish, Spanish, Mexican, and English men worked the same boats in the same cold water. The work was industrial in its demands. Gray whales caught in the bay entrance or the coastal approaches were towed to the station, hauled up the beach on hand-powered try-works, and rendered for oil and bone. Whale oil was the primary illuminant for buildings and streets across California in the 1850s and 1860s, before kerosene and petroleum products began replacing it.
The station operated from 1858 to 1886 — nearly thirty years. Whale oil prices declined as petroleum became available, and the California gray whale population, under pressure from commercial hunting throughout the Pacific, had been significantly reduced. The last commercial whalers left Ballast Point in 1886.
The California gray whale population, severely depleted by commercial whaling in the 19th and early 20th centuries, recovered after hunting was banned under federal protection. The population today is estimated at approximately 19,000 animals. Every winter and early spring, the gray whale migration passes through the waters off Point Loma — the same whales, the same route, the same passage through the bay entrance that the Johnson brothers watched for twenty-eight years.
From JADA's deck, at the bay entrance, whale spouts are visible during the migration season in January, February, and March. Gray whales travel within a few miles of shore. Some enter the bay. The rocky spit at Ballast Point — now behind a Navy security fence, occupied by submarine piers instead of try-works — is the same piece of land that California's southernmost whaling operation ran from for three decades.
The bones of those whales are somewhere below the current shoreline, under the concrete and the dredge spoil and the submarine infrastructure. The whales still pass.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Ballast Point Whaling Station"; National Park Service, Ballast Point historical records; NOAA Fisheries, California gray whale population estimates.
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