Enderby had acquired at least one ship,
Almsbury, c. 1768, renamed
Rockingham, that he used as a trader. In 1773 Enderby began the
Southern Fishery, a whaling firm with ships registered in London and Boston. All of the captains and harpooners were
American Loyalists. The vessels transported finished goods to the American colonies, and brought
whale oil from
New England to England. Some of Enderby's ships were reportedly chartered for the tea cargoes that were ultimately dumped into
Boston Harbor during the
Boston Tea Party incident. An embargo was placed on
whale oil exports from New England in 1775, as a result of the
American Revolutionary War. Enderby therefore elected to pursue the whaling trade in the South Atlantic.
Rockingham embarked on her first whaling voyage on 11 November 1775 when Captain Elihu L. Clark sailed her from Britain for the Brazil Banks. Samuel Enderby founded the Samuel Enderby & Sons company the following year. He and his business associates
Alexander Champion and
John St Barbe assembled a fleet of twelve whaling vessels on the
Greenwich Peninsula, on the River Thames just downstream from the
City of London. By 1785, Samuel Enderby & Sons controlled seventeen ships engaged in this business. All were commanded by American Loyalists. That year, whales in the South Atlantic had become nearly extinct due to pressure from the whaling industry. The Enderby family therefore shifted its focus to the seas around New Zealand, with the
Bay of Islands as its main base of operations. In early 1786, the Enderby family lobbied the government for the right to go into the South Pacific (an area in which the
East India Company had historically enjoyed a monopoly). The lobbying efforts were eventually successful, and on 1 September 1788, the 270 ton whaling vessel
Amelia, owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons and commanded by Captain James Shields, departed London. The ship went west around
Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean to become the first ship of any nation to conduct whaling operations in the
Southern Ocean. A crewman, Archelus Hammond of
Nantucket, killed the first
sperm whale there off the coast of
Chile on 3 March 1789.
Amelia returned to London on 12 March 1790 with a cargo of 139 tons of sperm oil. The
Amelia voyage marked the beginning of a new era for the company—one in which many great voyages of oceanographic and geographic exploration were accomplished, but which would ultimately prove to be a drain on company profits. By 1791, the company owned or leased 68 whaling ships operating in the subantarctic region and the Southern Ocean. Whaling vessels owned by Samuel Enderby & Sons were part of the
Third Fleet taking convicts to
New South Wales in 1791. These vessels included ,
William and Ann, , , and . Captain
Eber Bunker, the enterprising American captain of
William and Ann, not wanting to return to England with an empty vessel, became the first to hunt whales in New Zealand waters in December 1791. From this time forward, Enderby's ships ,
Britannia, and made frequent whaling voyages from
Port Jackson. Over the next decade the area became more attractive as the East India Company's monopoly on fishing in South Pacific waters was progressively lifted, and Governor
Phillip Parker King of New South Wales (Phillip Parker King's father Philip Gidley King was governor of NSW) worked to attract the whaling industry. From January 1793 to November 1794, Enderby sent to survey whaling grounds in the southeastern Pacific, under the command of Lieutenant
James Colnett,
Royal Navy. Colnett surveyed the Galapagos Islands on this expedition. Samuel Enderby died in 1797, leaving the company to his three sons, Charles,
Samuel, and George. ==History of the company: 1800–1854==