Water, Whales and Women: Remembering the American Whaling Industry

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 17^th 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-19^th 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.

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.

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.¹ 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 whaling² 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”³ 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 spans⁴ round in the middle of every whale that come upon the shore of this quarter part and no more.”⁵

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.”⁶ He even notes that on a more communal level, in the town of East Hampton school-children would be dismissed from December 1^st to April 1st for the purpose of locating and processing whales. By demonstrating that whaling was significant enough to the 17^th 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.

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 18^th century,⁷ 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.⁸”

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 

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.⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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 17^th and 18^th 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.”¹²

With this understanding of the historical role of women in traditional 19^th 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.”¹³

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.” ¹⁴

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.¹⁵ 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.”¹⁶ 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 19^th 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 18^th to 19^th 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.¹⁷ As sexual acts were limited aboard, once a ship came near land, much of the whaleman's lay¹⁸ 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.”¹⁹ 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.”²⁰ 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.”²¹ 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.²² 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.²³

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.²⁴ 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.

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.²⁵ 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. . .”²⁶ 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.²⁷

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.²⁸ 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.”²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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.”³¹

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.³²

Modern Japanese whaling vessel.

That the whaling vessels of the 17^th through the early 19^th 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

Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America. W WNorton and Company Inc, New York, NY. 2007.

Druett, Joan. Petticoat Whalers, Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920. Collins Publishers, Auckland New Zealand. 1991

Leach, Robert J, and Gow, Peter. Quaker Nantucket, The Religious Community behind the Whaling Empire. Mill Hill Press, Nantucket MA. 1997

Norling, Lisa. Captain Ahab Had a Wife, New England Women and the Whalefishery 1720-1870. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea, The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Penguin Books. New York, NY. 2000

1Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America. W WNorton and Company Inc, New York, NY. 2007. p. 24

2“Drift” or “shore” whaling was the earliest form of whaling in the American Colonies. Dead whales (usually pilot whales) would wash ashore and quickly be processed by the locals; the oil, bones and various valued parts harvested. Feuds quickly sprang up, as well as a complex system implemented to safeguard the rights of individuals to the whales. Firstly, the person who discovered the beached whale had rights to the carcass, but as time went on, many beachcombers would offer a share to whoever would process the whale for them. As this practice continued, oftentimes cross-county transactions would occur, much to the anger of the locals, who felt entitled to the wealth it would bring. The government on more than one occasion had to step in and regulate. At that time, whale oil had more commercial value than domestic, and so it was usually brought to large towns like Boston to be sold, while the bones and baleen would be harvested to make combs, corset braces, and various other sundry. In an industrializing world, whale oil was invaluable- seen to have no peers when used to lubricate the machines of the industrial revolution. This was to hold true well into the late 19^th century, with the advent of synthetic lubricants.

3Dolin, p. 47

4Span most likely refers to the measurement of blubber around the midsection of the whale. This was often eaten, not refined for oil by the indigenous peoples.

5Dolin p. 44

6Dolin, p. 53.

7During the early 18^th century, American whalers began to turn their eyes to the open sea, as their ready supply of drift-whales began to dwindle. Originally they had stripped the whales ashore, or having ventured out into the immediate waters, brought the blubber to shore to boil in large brick ovens known as tryworks. Eventually they began to cosntruct the tryworks on the decks of ships, thereby creating a floating factory capable of sailing far out to sea and processing the blubber as they went. They would sail to islands and sell the barrels there, rather than returning to nantucket. This system enabled them to embark on four to five-year voyages into the Pacific.

8Norling, Lisa. Captain Ahab Had a Wife, New England Women and the Whalefishery 1720-1870. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. p. 1-2.

9Leach, Robert J, and Gow, Peter. Quaker Nantucket, The Religious Community behind the Whaling Empire. Mill Hill Press, Nantucket MA. 1997. p. 8-9.

10Norling, p. 3.

11Norling, p. 3.

12Norling, p. 4.

13Norling, p. 57.

14Norling, p. 16.

15Norling, p. 89.

16Norling, p. 53

17Druett, Joan. Petticoat Whalers, Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920. Collins Publishers, Auckland New Zealand. 1991 p. 8.

18The salary a whale-man was paid. This was usually given at the end of a voyage, but a whale-man could borrow money from the captain against his lay, to be subtracted plus interest later. This often led to large debts being accrued, and it was common practice for whale-men to serve consecutive voyages in order to pay off their lay.

19Druett, p. 11.

20Druett, p. 74.

21Druett, p. 11.

22Druett, p. 19.

23Druett, p. 19.

24Norling, p. 4

25Druett, p. 9.

26Druett, p. 19.

27Norling p. 7.

28Druett p. 74.

29Dolin, p. 93.

30Dolin, p. 93.

31Dolin, p. 93.

32Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea, The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Penguin Books. New York, NY. 2000 p. 24.