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| Whalers off Twofold Bay, Oswald Brierly. |
The literary canon
of the sea is a romanticized one. From the
fictionalized world of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower to the
exploits of Woodes Rogers, the famous 17th century Pirate
hunter, the otherworld of the sea has been heavily sensationalized as
the stage upon which the masculine ideal of adventure and peril have
been played out time and time again. And an otherworld it is. The sea
of the 17th-19th century was a dangerous place; a frontier
of its time, a place of unpredictable weather which could crush a
ship and its crew, and home to the conflict of international trade
and warfare; in other words, the perfect outlet for industry and
machismo. As misleading as the literature may be, it is a worthy
pursuit to disentangle this web of confused romanticism and ideals,
to discover the truly surprising maritime world, and the world of the
people who plied their trades upon the open ocean.
Another aspect of
the sea, one which held at a times an insatiable allure and the
promise of fortune, was the great leviathan- massive oil reserves
which drifted across the ocean with deceptive docility. When angered
however, they became raging beasts of carnage and destruction, a
monster which could mangle a ship and its crew, and fight to the last
with a frenzy befitting the biblical term of the monster from
revelations. How perfect then was the whale, as a foil for both
economic progress and fanaticism; the ideal outlet for the coupling
of adventure and profit; immortalized in the works of Herman Melville
and historians alike; the object of a truly American industry at the
dawn of the industrial-capitalist era, and the end of a limitless
world.
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1817 Scrimshaw (carved images in whalebone) by a seaman,
memorializing the capture of a whale near the Galapagos Islands which
yielded 100 barrels of oil. |
One of the issues
regarding the depictions of this industry is the chance that the
harsh realities of the industry may be overshadowed by contemporary
preconceptions of an adventuresome liberty in the life upon the sea.
Whereas recreational sailors of today may be drawn to the waters by
some romantic idea of freedom and carefreeness, the realities of the
historical seafarer is something far removed. To say that the
operation of a tall ship was complicated and grueling would be a
gross understatement of reality. The ships of the British Navy
required crews numbering in the hundreds, all of whom knew every line
of the rigging, every sail and mast. Though the numbers may have been
fewer, without the need for military presence, the same skill and
discipline was required upon the decks of American whale-ships. These
ships went as far afield from their New England ports as the Pacific,
and later even the Arctic sea, all in pursuit of the whale from which
they extracted their fortune. The ship itself was a floating nation
of sorts, under one captain whose word was law. Liberty may have
seemed a distant concept in the confines of the vessels, which were
usually small, cramped, and vile from the smoke of the tryworks, and
the smells of decomposing whale flesh and oil. Though they were
certain to see many things which would amaze, the primary mission of
the ship was to harvest oil, a grossly unpleasant process of hard
work and stamina.
The literature on
whaling may seem at first sight to be simple and straightforward.
There are many histories, such as Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan, The
History of Whaling in America, which provide detailed and
exciting accounts of the sea, but upon further investigation a
scholar will find, and perhaps be surprised by the fact that the
literature of the industry is as varied and complex as the act of
whaling itself. There are books about the religious aspects of
Nantucket Island, such as Robert J. Leach and Peter Gow's Quaker
Nantucket; The Religious Community Behind the Whaling Empire. There
are books written about the women who went to sea with the ships,
such as Joan Druett's Petticoat Whalers, which
follows the lives of wives accompanying their whaling
husbands in a unique act of solidarity. Then there are the stories of
the hardships of whaling gone wrong, such as Nathaniel Philbricks In
the Heart of the Sea,The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the
story of a ship sunk by a whale which led to a
horrific journey of starvation and loss for its crew across the open
sea, and ultimately inspired Herman Melville to write his most famous
novel, Moby Dick. Each book explores a different aspect of
this immense transcontinental world, and each provides a specific
viewpoint which can help to understand the world of whaling as a
whole.
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| Whalers remove the jawbone of a sperm whale. |
Eric Jay Dolin's
immense book on American whaling deals primarily with whaling's link
to the growth of the American economy. Drawing greatly from legal
documentation, correspondences and logs, he gracefully places
American whaling within the context of a growing nation- not as a
minor aspect of, but a significant part of the birth of the nation
itself. He begins with early expeditions to North America by Henry
Hudson's Muscovy Company, who after a primary expedition in 1607
decided on an attempt to build a whaling company on Spitsbergen
Island.
Dolin's book proceeds to map out the culture of whaling which sprang
up along the American coast and maintained a lingering presence. By
drawing upon the colony's recorded legal policies on the matter,
Dolin quite successfully illustrates just how prevalent whaling was
within the growing American communities. Early colonists relied on
drift whaling, the act of processing dead whales which washed ashore,
and selling the oil. This was no marginalized industry, but an
actively pursued one. With the advent of drift whaling
in the colonies came a bevy of guidelines and restrictions as to who
had the right to whales. Dolin illustrates this very well when
discussing feuds between the towns over the carcasses which washed
ashore. Dolin details a feud between the townspeople of Long Island,
represented by a man named Mulford, and the State of New York, who
was taking advantage of the policies regarding trade with oil to lay
claim to a percentage of the oil harvested by Long Islanders. Drift
whales became a valuable commodity, and even the church began to lay
claim to some of the oil harvested by the coastal communities.
Dolin also details
the multicultural aspects of this industry, noting that drift whaling
“relied heavily on Indian labor”
to be successful. He also maps some of the cross cultural relations
between the indigenous peoples and the colonists regarding the
processing of whales.
“In
many instances the Indians sold their lands to the colonists with the
proviso that they would retain the rights to various parts of the
whales that were cast up. Sometimes this meant that the Indians were
given the fins and flukes of the whales, items they held in reverence
and used in religious ceremonies. Other times the Indians' demands
were more substantive, such as when a local chief on Martha's
vineyard sold a property “four spans
round in the middle of every whale that come upon the shore of this
quarter part and no more.”
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Watercolor by Alfred John Cooper depicting shore whalers
stripping blubber. |
This is merely one
example which Dolin gives in which drift-whaling factors greatly
within the transaction of land, or the laws concerning the sale or
settling of land in regards to the whales which the purchased coast
could provide. By relying less upon inter-personal documentation and
instead investigating the wealth of governmental policy regarding
early colonial whaling, Dolin makes a subtle yet effective argument
that whaling was, from the start, an important aspect of the
“American” experience and culture- not merely a marginalized
industry, relevant only as a side-pursuit. The effects of whaling
were enormous. For example, shore whaling interfered greatly with the
ability to raise troops during the French and Indian war. In 1694,
Captain John Thacher wrote to Governor Stoughton of Cape Cod that
“All our young and strong men are imployed in whaling and mostly
have their rendivous remote from the towns.”
He even notes that on a more communal level, in the town of East
Hampton school-children would be dismissed from December 1st
to April 1st for the purpose of locating and processing whales. By
demonstrating that whaling was significant enough to the 17th
century colonist's life to generate regulation and fierce competition
between settlements, Dolin contextualizes and illuminates an aspect
of history which is often neglected, even in books concerning the
whaling industry itself. It also sets a strong foundation to better
understand the later power of the island of Nantucket within the
global economy and the American whaling fanaticism.
While the island of
Nantucket may have been only one of the many whaling powers along the coast of
New England, it was by far the most successful. While Dolin does
highlight Nantucket's important contribution to the power of the
whaling community, he does not delve as deeply into the social
reasons for this as he may have. An historian who does effectively
demonstrate this aspect of whaling, and the culture which fueled it
is Lisa Norling, whose book Captain Ahab Had a Wife, New England
Women and the Whalefishery 1720-1870 contains
detailed insight not only into the role which women played as wives,
but the role they played as valuable members of a community whose
religion not only varied greatly from that of the mainland, but also
promulgated a different relationship to whaling.
While
Dolin's decidedly narrative-based history of whaling is more than
sufficient to grasp a strong sense of the inundation of whaling in
the American community at large, Norling's account serves to explain
the effects of Quakerism upon the Nantucket population and the way in
which the women of the island sustained the community in the absence
of a male population, but more importantly it reveals the resulting
presence of women as the leaders of the community.
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| Whaling captain's wives. |
Norling,
a professor at The University of Minnesota primarily focuses on
re-examining the history of women in relation to maritime labor
history. The title of her book, (derivative of Captain Ahab's absent
wife in the novel Moby Dick)
is quite evocative of her aim; to investigate and establish the
history of women within a history which has, for the most part
relegated the role of women to a brief mention. Dolin himself has
does devote a portion of his book to women whaling and the
relationships between men and their wives, but in all, the role of
women has been conspicuously silent. This is most likely due to the
fact that when it came to the act of whaling, that is when whaling
had become an off-shore venture during the early 18th
century,
women had less presence- the ships were after all primarily crewed by
men. Norling criticizes this, and importantly the angle from which
historians have traditionally viewed the history of whaling.
“In
both realms, attention has focused largely on the ship itself, a
highly specialized and almost wholly single-sex environment –
though certainly not a “genderless” one. In fact, seafaring has
traditionally been one of the most strikingly gendered pursuits, an
aggressively masculine world of “iron men on wooden ships” that
marginalized and objectified real women while feminizing the sea,
ships, and shoreside society. Women have served as the foil against
which sailors and maritime culture in general asserted their rugged
masculinity and demonstrated their estrangement from land – based
society, as they “wandered” often “in exile” over “the
trackless deep” on ships that were always called “she.” In
seafaring custom, song, and craft, women have featured more
prominently as metaphor than as flesh-and-blood persons.”
Norling's
book serves not to explore the history of whaling-women, of which
there have been several recorded, but to explore rather the more
prominent role women fulfilled on the Island of nantucket as the
backbone of the community.
Nantucket
was first settled by Europeans in 1659 by a group of various
religious beliefs including
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| Map of Nantucket Island. |
Quakers. One of their number, Thomas Macy
of Salisbury had offered shelter to Quakers, a crime at that point in
time. He brought his family out, along with Tristram Coffin to settle
the island which they had purchased from the original owners.
Thus was established a small population, part of which was part of
the Quaker “Society of Friends.” It was this society which would
ultimately become the predominant religious force which constituted
and supported the whalers of Nantucket.
Norling's
book explores the role which women played within this Quaker society,
and her conclusions seem at times to vary. Norling admits that she
went into the study of maritime communities as an undergraduate with
the preconception that she would find “strong, independent women
who had withstood the rising tide of Victorian domesticity along with
their seafaring husband's regular absences.”
However, she was disappointed to find quite the contrary- wives who
“subscribed just as whole-heartedly to pervasive ideas about female
character and social roles as any other white, middle-class American
women of the period.”
She continues to realize that that far from what she had expected to
see, she found women who accepted the role which they played, ad
wives of men who would be gone often four to five years at a time-
yet in the correspondences she explored she found not distant or
uncaring, but loving and hopeful words between husbands and wives.
Norling's ideas which she wholeheartedly share are part of a larger
way of seeing the past- it is easy to imagine women running away to
sea, casting off the shackles of their confines to join their male
“counterparts” in the toil which brought wealth to their
community. However, as Dolin and Norling both admit, this was not the
case. In fact, if there was agency and strength in the position of
women in 17th
and 18th
century Nantucket, Norling would argue that it came not from
defiance, but cooperation with, and taking advantage of the setting
in which they existed. As Norling states,
“We now recognize that domesticity was a particular set of closely
regulated assumptions and ideals about gender, family, and home that
saturated American culture in every conceivable form and medium from
about 1820 to at least the end of the nineteenth century. According
to the pervasive norms and values, men were supposed to be producers
and providers who went to work to support their families, which they
understood to mean primarily their wives and children. Women's
complementary responsibility was to create a home in which husbands
were loved, sustained, and renewed, and children loved and
nurtured.”
With
this understanding of the historical role of women in traditional
19th
century American culture it would seem that the women of Nantucket
fulfilled this role. However, Norling's purpose, and indeed, her
reason for establishing that Nantucket was itself a unique facet of
American life is to challenge, or rather re-shape this preconception.
Part of what made Nantucket women distinctly different was the nature
of the island's breed of Quakerism- admittedly different than that to
the mainland in that it was uniquely accepting of women. Norling uses
the story of the conversion of Mary Coffin Starbuck, a wealthy
Nantucketer descended from Tristram Coffin, who went into the reverie
for which the Quakers were named during an assembly and proclaimed
the actions of the Nantucket Quakers as the Truth, or the ultimate
understanding and interaction with God. Norling asserts that the
acceptance of women into the Quaker community was in part due to the
fact that they “insisted on a spiritual equality among all
believers, which derived from the equal possibility of experiencing
God directly.”
While
attempting to find the strong female heroines which are so lacking,
Norling was herself disappointed as, she came to inevitably realize,
the ship was a masculine realm, and great lengths were taken to
maintain that, reinforced through heavily masculinized rhetoric and
songs. Instead, Norling would have use look rather to a somewhat
neglected aspect of the nantucket empire: it's home base, the island
itself. Here, the role of women in the history of whaling is
surprisingly unique. For example, Norling goes into great depth to
analyze store receipts and lists to create a picture of a culture
which was very much devoted to a cooperative maintenance by and of
the families of absent whalers. Women ran not only the household, but
also handled the affairs of finance. Shopowners and other tradesman
kept records of the money they had forwarded to the wives of the
Island, as well as their exchanges. She quotes the writer John Hector
St. John de Crevecoeur, who wrote extensively about the whaling
communities of his time.
Unlike
Melville, Crevecoeur gave equal credit for Nantucket's success to the
Island's women. . . “As the sea excursions are often very long,”
Crevecoeur observed, “[the whaler's] wives are necessarily obliged
to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and
provide for their families. These circumstances, being often
repeated, give women the abilities as well as a taste for that kind
of superintendency, to which, by their prudence and good management,
they seem to be in general very equal.”
As
is apparent, whaling wives adapted out of necessity to become the
heads of their respective households while their husband were away at
sea laboring in the island's industry. The wealthy ship-owners,
responsible for the payment of the sailors would oftentimes provide
money to the families in need. Women also eventually served on the
Nantucket Quaker Assembly. Indeed, because so many men were absent or
left the Island, during a population recession, in 1781 the women of
Nantucket outnumbered the men three to one.
As a result, there were more women serving on the assembly than men.
In essence, the island was a self sustaining community, based upon
the tenets of Quakerism in which the whaler-wives were an
indispensable part. Without the wives, the sustainability of the
community would become precarious, and the industry would impossible.
It is also interesting that Norling notes that according to Margaret
Hope Bacon, a Quaker Historian, “Nantucket,
with its isolation and frequent absence of husbands and fathers on
whaling trips, became a training ground for the development of strong
Quaker women: Lucretia Coffin Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Phebe
Hanaford, Maria Mitchell, and many other pioneer feminists came from
Nantucket.”
Whether or not early Nantucket women themselves led feminist
movements, Norling does not say. However, what can be gleaned is that
this culture which Norling investigates, and which in many books on
the subject is ignored, clearly engendered a unique sense of worth
into its female inhabitants; enough so that they could effectively
lead the community themselves.
Norling
is exploring a fascinating new way of looking at the Maritime history
of women. If, as she asserts, the sea is the masculine realm where
women had little place, and therefore little presence, then perhaps
the history should be less exclusive in the realms which it explores. The Nantucket community
served as a unique opportunity to study this, as a symbiotic
relationship between those on shore supporting and being supported by
those at sea. Here the women's role is equally as vital, but because
maritime history has (historically) been biased toward the study of
seafaring, the history of the women at home has been a history
neglected, and unacknowledged. It is seductive to want to look for
the select few who participated in the “manly” acts of
seamanship, but perhaps in this respect it is more vital to
understand the rather unique breed of domesticity which existed on
Nantucket in its formative years, and of which Norling writes.
That
is not to say that women did not go to sea. Indeed, many women did;
in particular the whaler-wives of later years. In her book, Petticoat
Whalers, Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920,
Joan Druett offers a rich account of the lives of women who, in the
later 19th
century, accompanied their husbands on their voyages.
Druett,
a New Zealand maritime historian writes a fascinating account of life
upon the American whaleship. Gone is the romanticism of the sea- in
fact she begins with a description of the braggadocio of the
Whaleman, describing their behavior in sea ports, and their
“legendary” drinking bouts. Her book serves as a perfect segue
into an increasingly diverse history from that of Norling's work.
Like Norling, she is concerned with women and whaling. However, her
history, (admittedly later) offers the unique perspective of a
“civilian” experience upon the working-factory that was the
whale-ship. Whereas Norling's women were the women of a growing 18th
to 19th
century settlement, Druett's book is concerned with the final years
of the age of sail; when the whaling industry was declining, unique
communities like Nantucket had begun to resemble in appearance those
of the mainland, and Quakerism had declined.
The
world which Druett introduces the reader to may be somewhat familiar
to those who have even a scarce familiarity with the sea; a world in
which seamen labored on the decks and in the rigging under the
watchful eye of stern masters. And yet, amidst the organized chaos of
the seafaring world, Druett exposes a lesser known aspect; the wives
who went to sea with their husbands.
There
were many challenges to this- Druett speaks of the flesh-trafficking
which occurred frequently on islands such as Hawaii, acts which one
Captain Sawtell was more than happy to keep his “strong-minded
yankee housewife” from witnessing.
As sexual acts were limited aboard, once a ship came near land, much
of the whaleman's lay
was spent upon debauchery, and it was the toil of the captain to
attempt to preserve decency. As Druett succinctly pstates, “The
very idea of a modest young woman living on one of those 'floating
castles of prostitution' was unthinkable.”
But women did step onto these ships, and sail across the world in
pursuit of whales.
Joan Druett relies, as does Norling, upon diaries and personal
correspondences. Diaries were common among the sailing wives, and
even sailors, as very often there was little to do aboard besides
work. “Theoretically, the men had shipwork. Whaleships were so
over-manned . . . that the routine jobs that could easily be
accomplished by a dozen men had to be stretched to occupy thirty, and
despite all the 'make-work' that the officers could devise . . .
there were still man empty hours to be filled.”
Druett's work is a valuable compilation of the lives of a
multitude of devoted whaling couples who set to sea on what came to
be coined as “hen frigates,” or “petticoat ships.”
While she does little to provide a sense of the life these women left
to join her husbands, she does show that sometimes the friends and
families of the whaler-wives “stated many objections” to their
choice to follow their spouse's to sea, thereby indicating that this
act was in stark contrast to what was expected of a woman at that
time.
Druett begins with an account of the life of one of the first
whaling wives, a Nantucket woman incidentally, named Mary Hayden
Russell who followed her husband in 1823 on his ship The Emily.
There
are profound implications in the work of Norling as to the sacrifices
one made go to sea. Once even a man stepped onto the ship, they
entered into a different world where the land fell away and ceased to
be relevant. While Norling is dismissive while describing the male
attitude in reference to their “exile” upon the sea, it runs the
risk of dismissing a valuable aspect of the seafaring experience.
The term exile is indicative of an emotional experience in which a
ship, out of sight of land for weeks at a time could cause a deep
sense of isolation, of which the males were resentful. The sexual
proclivities of the sailors are quite indicative of the effects of
these voyages upon the scruples of men who were aware, even in the
act, of their violation of Christian-American sensibilities. Why then
would a wife subject herself to this lifestyle, going against the
social mores of her time? Druett makes a valid case for the
preservation of domesticity aboard these ships, in the presence of reform among the unruly sailors.
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Mary Brewster, who often accompanied
her whaling captain husband on his voyages. |
Although
life aboard the ships was distant, the effects certainly found their
way ashore, the most telling and difficult to hide being the venereal
diseases contracted in the seductive islands of Hawaii; most
ominously, syphilis.
For the wives of these sailors, monitoring their husbands was
certainly a motivator. Less exacting perhaps, but just as strong was
the drive to be near to one's spouse. “According to the letters she
wrote on board to her daughter, Mary Hayden Russel's reason for
sailing was a strong and righteous sense of wifely duty. . .”
As Norling herself states, the correspondences between husbands and
wives were not simply to inform one another, but demonstrate a very
real sense of longing and loneliness.
Druett
also provides accounts of the duties women served on the ships, such
as ironing clothes- one woman improvised by doing the ironing on the
cabin floor.
Women on these ships were not idle, and fulfilled a role themselves,
as well as providing company and closing the distance with their
husbands which had proved to be so painful for the couples of
Norling's book.
As
is clear, the study and literature concerning this subject is vast,
but also fractured. Norling's account offers a clear image of the
domestic life of whaler's wives, while Druett adds a more complicated
view of gender aboard the ship, a setting which is usually described
in a deeply gendered manner by historian such as Dolin. Each serves a
necessary function, one which cannot be easily done, as the topic
itself is magnanimous. The history of whaling as it pertains to North
America alone is full of complexities. Perhaps a broad history such
as Dolin's could be seen as limited in it's scope, but Dolin's text
addresses on aspect which neither Norling or Druett do; the role
which race played on these ships.
A
ship during these times was not always an exception to culture. Of
course there were marked differences in the culture and manners of
the sailors themselves, but to what degree was racism affected by
this change in location and context? Dolin includes some points on
this in his book, in particular the way in which African Americans
were viewed on whale-ships. Native Americans certainly did serve on
Whale-ships, but Dolin would argue that their treatment was superior
to that of African Americans. “Account books from Nantucket show
that between 1721 and 1756 there were Indian whalemen who annually
earned four times the salary of the average seaman in Boston.”
Whether or not this is any indication of the state of affairs aboard
a whaling vessel is up to speculation. It is important to remember
that a “seaman” could refer to a merchant, fisherman, or what
have you. Dolin does note that they were by and large treated poorly,
though this piece of information could be suspect in regards to the
comparative salaries of whale-men to other seafarers.
Whaling during this time was vastly more lucrative than many of the
other industries of sail, so perhaps ethnicity is not as indicative
of difference in this comparison as are the occupations themselves.
Regardless, the treatment of African Americans was far from
desirable, and reflective of treatment of them ashore. As Dolin
notes,
“Blacks,
too, were employed in the whale fishery, with or without their
consent, and almost always under inferior conditions. Such
circumstances are hardly surprising, given that blacks, at the time,
were viewed primarily as property and a cheap source of labor. It was
hardly uncommon to see ads for whaling supplies to be placed
alongside ads for slaves, as the “Advertisement” section of the
Boston News-Letter revealed
in November 1723. The first ad told of a merchant in Boston who had
“lately imported from London, Extraordinary good Whale warps . . .
made of the finest hemp,” which were available in “Quoile” or
“Quantity” for a reasonable sixteen pennies per pound. The next
ad read, “A likely Negro Woman, fit for Town or Country, to be
Sold, Inquire of the Printer thereof and know further.” Thus coils
of rope and a black human being were tantamount: simply merchandise
to be bought and sold at will.”
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Absalom Boston, 1785-1855. Captain of The Industry,
a ship manned by a purely African-American crew. |
That
slaves were sold to the ships, and forced to labor in the
whale-fishery is clearly indicative of their station within the
whaling world. It would be hard to argue that they were treated any
differently at sea, especially in a setting which was so stratified
in it's very nature, with the ship-owner at the top, then the
captain, and the dreaded first mate- the executor of punishment
during the long voyages at sea and very often the natural enemy of
the able-seamen.
One
aspect, however, which is often conspicuously lacking is that of the
effects of the whaling industry upon the global whale population, a
topic which is particularly relevant to modern times. As maritime
historian Nathaniel Philbrick says in his book In the Heart
of the Sea, in the later years
of the nantucket whaling empire, so many of the whales had been
killed, that they had begun to disappear from the coast of
Massachussetts. Ships had to go further and further afield to find
whales, so ravenous were they for the precious resource.
By
1819, Nantucket was well on its way to reclaiming and, as the whalers
ventured into the Pacific, even surpassing its former glory. But the
rise of the Pacific sperm-whale fishery had an unfortunate side
effect. Instead of voyages that had once averaged about nine months,
two- and three-year voyages had become the norm. Never before had the
division between Nantucket's whalemen and their people been so great.
Long gone were the days when Natucketers could watch from shore as
the men and boys of the island pursued the whale. Nantucket was now
the whaling capital of the world, but there were more than a few
islanders who had never seen a whale.
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| Modern Japanese whaling vessel. |
That
the whaling vessels of the 17th
through the early 19th
century depopulated the vast quantities of whales in the Atlantic is
not unique only to that fishery. Mark Kurlansky, in his book “Cod,
A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World,”
provides a grim account of the overfishing of Cod along the Atlantic
seaboard. That Dolin at least did not address the decline of whales
in his book is somewhat surprising, given current international
controversy with countries such as Japan over the legality of
whaling, and the policies thereof. Nevertheless, Dolin's book serves
as an ambitious work; to provide an accessible and fascinating
history of this remarkable industry which has shaped so much of
American culture.
It
is clear from reading the works of Norling and Druett, as well as the
grim realism of Dolin's work that much of the nostalgic romanticism
of the sea not only ignores, but obscures the truth. Norling's
assertion that the sea was a deeply gendered space is certainly true
in concept, though Druett's scholarship on the large number of women
who accompanied their husbands displays a vastly different reality.
Dolin's scholarship is an important place to begin ones' study, and
his inclusion of legal documents makes it clear to the reader just
how crucial the industry was to the development of a growing nation,
though it does have it's setbacks, as would be expected of a
large-scale, comprehensive work. Dolin's work would lend itself to a
focused analysis of just how prominent whaling culture was within
colonial society, as the amount of governmental regulation on the
matter is somewhat unexpected, especially in the an early stages of
colonial history.
It
is easy while reading and imagining the maritime world to fall prey
to romanticism. To a degree it would seem unavoidable in dealing with
a history involving so large and moving a force as the ocean. Though
the history of the ocean alone is fascinating, it is the romanticism
and the nostalgia for the sea and the thriving and diverse industry
of fishing which has provided so much literature and culture to the
world. While obscuring, it is a similar curiosity and desire for
adventure is what sent innumerable people to the sea throughout time,
and in a way links the modern historian to the historical adventurer.
It is part of what drives maritime historians to dig deeper to
discover more about the fascinating and sometimes bizarre world of
the whaling-ships of yesterday.
Bibliography
Philbrick,
Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea, The Tragedy of the
Whaleship Essex. Penguin Books.
New York, NY. 2000
