"Quite often the whaling ships were manned by men who were too bolshie to get work elsewhere - shipboard lawyers, those not afraid to stand up for their rights.
Some of them, referred to as 'scabbers' found themselves regarded as unemployable and were only taken on when full crews could not be found.
Jim Carroll "

Hmmm...probably why my ancestors were whalers - thankfully, those traits haven't come down to me :).

Here's a verse from a song collected by Gavin Grieg

There's Wady in the Enterprise is next to describe,
With their Windybags and Heather Jock and all their other tribe, Low, mean in their ways and respected by none
By all decent people their company is shun.

The owners were often pretty unscrupulous, too, especially with under-provisioning their ships, resulting in starvation and scurvy when ships got stuck in the ice. Here's a verse from another song:

There's some of their owners rather windy in their way
They were originally intended for Botany Bay,
But by some of the clever tricks of the hand
They escaped that though they ought to have been hanged.