Us Lone Wand'ring Whaling-Men

“Us Lone Wand’ring Whaling-Men”: Cross-cutting Fantasies of Work and Nation in Late
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Whaling Narratives

by

Jennifer Hope Schell

B.A., Emory University, 1996
M.A., University of Georgia, 1998

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh
2006
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented by Jennifer Hope Schell Jennifer Hope Schell

It was defended on
April 21, 2006 and approved by
Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English Jean Ferguson Carr, Associate Professor of English
Kirk Savage, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture Dissertation Advisor: Nancy Glazener, Associate Professor of English

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“Us Lone Wand’ring Whaling-Men”: Cross-cutting Fantasies of Work and Nation in
Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Whaling Narratives

Jennifer Hope Schell, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006

My project takes up a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts about a kind of work which attracted the attention of American novelists Herman Melville, Harry Halyard, and Helen E. Brown; historian Obed Macy; and journalist J. Ross Browne, among others. In my Introduction, I argue that these whaling narratives helped to further develop and perpetuate an already existing fantasy of masculine physical labor which imagines the United States’ working class men to be ideal, heroic Americans. This fantasy was so compelling and palpable that, surprisingly enough, the New England whalemen could be persistently claimed as characteristically and emblematically American, even though they worked on hierarchically-stratified floating factories, were frequently denied their Constitutional rights by maritime law, and hardly ever spent any time on American soil.
In my second chapter, I scrutinize the emerging assumption of an ideological fantasy of masculine physical labor that was specifically American and interrogate how certain kinds of physical labor, farming and whaling among them, were cast as particularly American in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 3 demonstrates that there was something about the work of whaling that resisted these kinds of nationalistic appropriations, and I present a close analysis of Crèvecoeur, Cooper, and Melville’s whaling narratives. My fourth chapter further explores this resistance, and I read Melville’s Moby-Dick alongside J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, arguing that both Melville and Browne—despite their texts’ formal differences—share an intellectual project of configuring certain aspects of the collective, physical labor of whaling as artistically generative. Chapter 5 addresses both reactionary and progressive depictions of whaling wives with regard to domesticity and nationality. My last chapter examines how some separatist-minded Nantucket Islanders demonstrated that federalism was contested not just in the antebellum South, but in other areas of the United States as well. Taken together, all of these chapters address different aspects of the complex and multifaceted identity of the American whalemen, but they also show how a particularly resilient ideological fantasy of masculine American labor develops and gains power, perpetuating itself across time.

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5.0 6.0
4.1 4.2

5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2 6.3
7.0 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................................ 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 211

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PREFACE

This project first began as an outgrowth of a seminar paper which I wrote for a graduate course about late nineteenth-century American periodical literature. Curious about what lingering and nostalgic representations of the declining whaling industry might remain in the turn-of-thecentury American imagination, I set out to track down a sample grouping of texts from the University of Pittsburgh’s nineteenth-century periodical collection. I found only four articles which dealt with the whaling industry, most of which were published in popular periodicals such as the Century and the New England Magazine.¹However, this handful of lengthy articles contained a wealth of interesting material, dealing with particularly enduring nineteenth-century configurations of work identity, national identity, and gender identity. These pieces valorized the New England whalemen, holding them up as examples of what every American could and should aspire to be. They credited whalemen with being some of the first hardy souls to venture into the Pacific ocean, exploring unknown territory and contributing much to the stores of scientific and geographic knowledge. These articles depicted whaling wives as highly liberated women, who insisted on leaving the safety and sanctity of their homes so that they could sail around the world with their husbands on the ships that had heretofore solely been the realm of men. And they intimated that it was on the New England whaleships that the system of industrial capitalism got its start, for they claimed that the whalemen were the ones who invented the assembly line as a means of efficiently organizing workers. While these articles provided me with more than enough material for a seminar paper, I knew that four texts would not be enough to form the backbone of the larger project upon which I wanted to embark. Needing more

¹These four articles were: James Temple Brown’s “Stray Leaves from a Whaleman’s Log,” published in the Century in 1893; Gustav Kobbé’s “The Perils and Romance of Whaling,” published in the Century in 1890; George F. Tucker’s “New Bedford,” published in the New England Magazine in 1896; and an excerpt from Frank T.

Bullen’s longer narrative The Cruise of the Cachalot: Round the World After Sperm Whales, published in Scientific American in 1899.

vwhaling narratives for my sample grouping, I set out to explore representations of the whaling industry which appeared during the heyday of whaling—the early to mid nineteenth century.
Prompted by a desire to know more about the extracts which constitute the opening sections of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, I used Melville’s list of whaling narratives as a starting point for my research. As I soon discovered when I turned to these narratives themselves, this diverse array of extracts—taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster, and the writings of Thomas Jefferson, among other sources—only addresses a modicum of the myriad issues and concerns that emerge from the full texts. For the most part, Melville seems to have selected his quotations with an eye towards emphasizing the grandeur and impressive size of whales as well as the dangers inherent in working in the whaling industry—note the quotations from Joseph C. Hart’s Miriam Coffin and Harry Halyard’s Wharton the Whale-Killer!—but delving deeper into texts such as these yields even more complex configurations of work, national identity, masculinity, and domesticity than these short quotations reveal on a surface level.
I found Melville’s extracts to be quite helpful in that they provided me with a sample set of narratives with which to begin my research, but I am also indebted to a significant body of relatively recent historical scholarship which has taken up whaling and representations of the whaling industry as a subject of analysis. Both Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea and Lisa Norling’s Captain Ahab Had a Wife helped to broaden the scope of this project by filling in some of the gaps in Melville’s text selection. Rarely, if ever, did Melville include whaling narratives written by, about, or for women and children. Philbrick’s book points out that Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster was so popular that it made its way into various schoolbooks for children, and Lisa Norling’s scholarship makes quite clear that whaling wives, too, had quite a bit to say about their husbands’ work. Informed by this research, I was able to round out my sample grouping of whaling narratives and include women’s writing as well as precautionary and scientific stories about whaling and whales written for children.²
In order to constitute my sample grouping of whaling narratives, I turned to the Morse whaling collection at Brown University and the whaling collection at the Providence Public

²In my appendix, I have provided a bibliography of relevant whaling narratives as well as information as to where these texts might be found. The appendix does not constitute a complete survey of all of the whaling narratives in the archives, but it does contain all of the relevant texts which informed my study.

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Library in Providence, Rhode Island, both of which contain a significant number of manuscripts, personal journals, and other writings about the whaling industry. A simple search on whaling in the online catalogue of the Providence Public Library yields 164 results, and the Morse Collection contains approximately 1,100 whaling narratives. These two archives were not my only resource, however, for, along the way, I discovered that whaling narratives are collected by many history buffs and fans of nautical literature. These narratives may or may not have been popular when they were originally published, but collectors in this field seem to have an insatiable appetite for anything ever written about the New England whale fishery, and their interest in whaling narratives has resulted in various republications of whaling narratives which were previously available only in archival collections such as the one at Brown University. Many whaling journals were passed down as family heirlooms through the generations, and several twentieth-century descendents of whalemen have published narratives written by their ancestors. Both Nelson Cole Haley and William Henry Nichols’ journals are now readily available to the general public, in large part because of the efforts of their descendents. Therefore, I was able to find many narratives—in their original print versions and twentiethcentury reprints—in bookstores across the country which specialize in rare and collectible texts.³What’s more, I thought it important to read selections from the various other kinds of nautical literature that appeared in America and England throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I found that the subject of whaling often made its way into texts not centered squarely on the industry. Despite the fact that the American whaling industry was quite regionally specific, writings such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer all make reference to whales and whaling.⁴Employing all of these modes of research, I managed to amass a fairly significant grouping of whaling narratives from all sorts

³Most bookstores, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, separate their literature according to genre or subject and each have separate sections dedicated to nautical writing, but one in particular, The Newport Bookstore in Newport, Rhode Island, has created a separate sub-category of nautical fiction comprised solely of whaling narratives. Internet websites such as abebooks.com made it possible to search the catalogues of many used bookstores at once and made it much easier to track down and purchase many of the whaling narratives I have included in this study, no matter where the stores, themselves, were located. ⁴Some of these narratives take up whaling more thoroughly than others. Frederick Douglass mentions whaling in passing in his list of the kinds of work that African Americans perform in the United States. Crèvecoeur devotes five sections of Letters from an American Farmer to whaling, and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot contains a single whaling episode.

vii of different genres, some that have garnered more critical attention than others, some written by women and some by men, and some that have enjoyed far more popularity than others.
It is important to point out that my study of the whaling industry is not intended to be an exhaustive or completely comprehensive survey of all texts ever written about whaling. When dealing with such a massive array of texts, it is necessary to cull them down to a manageable number. I have extracted a series of representative texts from these collections in order to closely examine the kinds of ideas and modes of expression about whaling that have appeared from roughly the late eighteenth century, when the whaling industry was first achieving some degree of prosperity and recognition, up through the late nineteenth century, when the whaling industry was rapidly declining. My methodological approach is similar to that of Michael Denning in Mechanic Accents, for he found it impossible to examine every one of the tens of thousands of dime novels produced in nineteenth-century America. Instead, he used a set of smaller representative samples—each arranged according types of plot and the motifs common to them—to examine certain trends and modes of expression which were common to the group as a whole, all the while maintaining his primary focus, working-class issues.⁵I have assembled texts written by and about both men and women, narratives written by industry outsiders and industry insiders, novels which take up diverse facets of the industry, pieces which praise and condemn the industry’s labor organization, and selections which include some which were quite popular when they were published, some which were not very popular, and some which were never published at all. Since the topic that all of these narratives have in common is a particular kind of work, I, like Denning, have maintained a particular focus on intersecting issues of work, gender, and class.
Although publication history has not necessarily been a primary concern of mine, as it is for Michael Denning, I have attempted to pay careful attention to the circumstances surrounding the contemporary appearance and reception of these texts where it has been relevant to my analysis. Recognizing that versions of national and working identity manifest themselves in different ways depending on the kind of narrative or its intended audience, I have noted in places the level of popularity of something like Owen Chase’s sensational narrative of the Essex disaster and Roger Starbuck’s dime novel, The Golden Harpoon. For the most part, I have relied more heavily upon published narratives rather than the many personal journals that lie in relative

⁵Denning’s chapters, in turn, variously address female factory workers, tramps, detectives, the Irish, and outlaws.

viii obscurity in the Morse Collection. This choice was largely based upon my interest in the public circulation of nationalized fantasies of physical masculine labor, but I refer to these personal journals, by both men and women, at times as a means of gauging how these ideological fantasies make their way into the lives of everyday citizens.

Having read Moby-Dick and Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

and The Many-Headed Hydra (which Rediker co-authored with Peter Linebaugh) prior to any of these other whaling narratives, I came to this grouping of texts expecting to see an international focus rather than a national one. Given that the New England whalemen traveled further and spent more time away from U.S. soil than the merchants and pirates Rediker discusses, I was convinced that these whalemen, and the wives who sometimes sailed with them, would see themselves as cosmopolitan world travelers and would write about themselves as such. I discovered, however, that embedded in almost all of these narratives was an intense and somewhat surprising preoccupation with nationality on behalf of both industry insiders and outsiders. Authors of all kinds were posing the questions: What did it mean to be an American who never lived on American soil? How did working in this industry, or being married to someone who did, make one more or less of an American? Thus, I had to re-think my approach and question my own preoccupation with globalization. It was only once I put aside my preconceived ideas that I could take this sample grouping of texts and develop an argument that seemed to explain the disjuncture between what I had thought I would see and the kinds of concerns and configurations of identity I saw emerging from the texts: a particularly American fantasy about the value of masculine physical labor that developed, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into an ideology that was so powerful and compelling that it brought all kinds of workers, whalemen among them, into its explanatory currents.
I would like to thank a number of individuals without whom this project would not have been possible. The staff at the John Hay Library were immensely helpful, gracious, and patient in locating various whaling narratives in their archives and granting me access to them. Susan Smith’s graduate seminar in nineteenth-century periodicals introduced me to both the rewards and frustration inherent in conducting archival research. My dissertation advisor, Nancy Glazener, has provided me with her valuable insights and suggestions from the very beginning of this project, and she carefully read and commented upon various drafts of each chapter. Generous offering their insights, Jean Carr and Susan Andrade, members of my committee,

ix certainly contributed greatly to the shaping of this work. Kirk Savage, too, was kind enough to share his opinions on the chapters; his interdisciplinary perspective has been quite informative. Jeff Hole and Adam Johns, fellow Melville enthusiasts, provided mutual support and challenging commentary on portions of the chapters and asked careful and thought-provoking questions about the direction of the project and Melville’s role in it. Colleen Donovan’s scholarly inquiries into the nature of British national identity suggested many interesting counterpoints to my discussion of American national identity. My invaluable friend, Stacy Lucas never failed to remind me about what is really important, and her words of wisdom always kept me grounded and focused. I would especially like to thank my parents who first took me to the New Bedford Whaling Museum a long, long, long time ago and who have provided incredible amounts of support and encouragement over the years. Finally, I would like to express my immense gratitude to my “dear and loving” husband, Matt, whose staunch and unwavering belief in me made the completion of this project possible; he helped make the process easier in more ways than he will ever know, and for all this and more, I thank him.