Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters

NATIVE AMERICAN WHALEMEN AND THE WORLD This page intentionally left blank NATIVE AMERICAN WHALEMEN AND THE WORLD Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race NANCY SHOEMAKER the university of north carolina press Chapel Hill © 2015 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Miller by Westchester Publishing Services Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Jacket illustration: Detail of harbor traffi c at Cape Horn; courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Whale image from the log of the Abraham Barker; Nicholson Whaling Collection, Providence Public Library Special Collections, Providence, RI. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Shoemaker, Nancy, 1958– Native American whalemen and the world : indigenous encounters and the contingency of race / Nancy Shoemaker. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4696-2257-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-4696-2258-3 (ebook) 1. Indians of North America—New England—History—19th century. 2. Indian whalers—New England—History. 3. Whaling—New England— History—19th century. 4. Indians of North America—Fishing—New England. 5. Indians of North America—New England—Ethnic identity. 6. Whaling— Social aspects—New England—History. 7. Whites—New England—Relations with Indians. 8. New England—Race relations. 9. New England—Ethnic relations. I. Title. E78.N5S48 2015 974.004'97—dc23 2014034897 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 part i. the ship Chapter 1. The Gay Head Harpooner 21 Chapter 2. Race, Nationality, and Gender 40 Chapter 3. The Primacy of Rank 58 part ii. the beach Chapter 4. Cultural Encounters 79 Chapter 5. Cycles of Conquest 93 Chapter 6. New Heaven 110 part iii. islands Chapter 7. Native American Beachcombers in the Pacifi c 129 Chapter 8. Race and Indigeneity in the Life of Elisha Apes 145 Chapter 9. Beachcombers in New En gland 162 part iv. the reservation Chapter 10. Degradation and Respect 181 Conclusion 195 Appendix A. Native American Whalemen’s Database 199 Appendix B. Native American Logbooks and Journals 203 Notes 209 Bibliography 257 Index 289 This page intentionally left blank Tables, Maps, and Figures tables 1. Earnings of James W. DeGrass of Christiantown 31 2. Sampling of Lays of Native Third Mates in the 1840s 60 3. New Bedford Area Whaling Voyages with Native Americans Aboard, 1800–1889 201 4. Native American Logbooks and Journals 207 maps 1. Native Communities and Major Whaling Ports 11 2. Mashpee Wampanoag Whaling Voyages Ended by Disaster 33 3. Fiji Islands 135 figures 1. Page from Joel G. Jared’s Journal 2 2. Whaleman Samuel G. Mingo and His Wife Lucina (Jeff ers) 15 3. Amos Haskins, Captain of the Bark Massasoit 25 4. Page from William A. Vanderhoop’s Journal 35 5. The Sunbeam’s Forecastle 55 6. The Execution of William Humphries on the Globe, 1824 83 7. William Allen Wall, Gosnold at the Smoking Rocks (1842) 96 8. Figurehead of the Awashonks 101 9. Elisha Apes in New Zealand 155 10. Elisha Apes’s Son James (Tiemi Hipi) 156 11. William Allen Wall, Birth of the Whaling Industry (1853) 182 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am very grateful for the support this project received from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. I am hugely indebted to the University of Connecticut Libraries’ interlibrary loan team for all they have done to help me over the years. And I thank the staff of the many archives I visited for their knowledge and patience. Especially gracious given the number of questions and demands I placed on them were Michael Dyer, Laura Pereira, and Mark Procknik at the New Bedford Whaling Museum; Paul O’Pecko at the G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum; and the many staff members who assisted me at the U.S. National Archives at Boston and the National Archives of the Fiji Islands. Many other individuals helped in a variety of ways. At the University of Connecticut, I thank several who received their doctorates in history and anthropology and have since moved on— Patrick Blythe, Elliotte Draegor, Brian Carroll, Jason Mancini, Timothy Ives, Cedric Woods, Meredith Vasta, and Blaire Gagnon; my colleagues in the History Department, especially Helen Rozwadowski, Cornelia Dayton, Altina Waller, Richard Brown, Matthew McKenzie, Micki McElya, Janet Watson, and Shirley Roe; and the community of fellows during my year at the UConn Hu- manities Institute. Researchers affi liated with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a fantastic resource to have nearby, gener- ously shared research fi ndings and responded to questions: Kevin McBride, Paul Grant-Costa (now at the Yale Indian Papers Project), Jason Mancini, and Russell Handsman. Jason and I, in par tic u lar, have had many conversations, especially after he also developed an interest in New En gland natives’ maritime world. During my year at the American Antiquarian Society, I received much useful feedback and encouragement from Caroline Sloat, Jim Moran, Robert Bonner, Seth Rockman, Jenny Anderson, Jeff rey Sklansky, and others who belonged to the community of fellows that year. Formal and informal conversations in response to my queries, while at conferences or in discussions following pre sen ta tions I gave, also had an impact on this book, for which I thank David Silverman, Susan Lebo, Ed- ward Gray, Judith Lund, Christina Snyder, Lisa Norling, Martha Hodes, Daniel Mandell, Ann Fabian, and Joshua Reid. For my New Zealand re- ix search, I received invaluable aid from Betty Apes, Angela Wanhalla, Lachy Paterson, Mark Seymour, Tony Ballantyne, Michael Stevens, and David Haines. In Fiji, I greatly appreciated advice received from Ian Campbell and David Routledge. In the fi nal stages of writing this book, I began another project, which has ended up appearing in print fi rst: Living with Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New En gland Whaling History, published in 2014 by the University of Massachusetts Press. A wonderful afternoon spent with Ramona Peters at Mashpee, when she told me of her family’s whaling history and what it meant to her, inspired the oral history project, and I learned much from the other people who contributed oral histories: Eliza- beth James Perry and Jonathan Perry of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe and, at the Shinnecock Indian Nation on Long Island, Elizabeth Haile, Holly Haile Davis, and David Bunn Martine. Early on, Linda Coombs of- fered guidance on how to proceed with the oral histories, and later she or- ga nized opportunities for me to present my research at the Aquinnah Cul- tural Center. Ramona Peters also invited me to talk at Mashpee and gave me a tour of the Mashpee meeting house. While these individuals’ sugges- tions and willingness to share their vast knowledge on Wampanoag, Shin- necock, and New En gland native history more generally has infused both books, the perspective presented here is entirely my own (meaning that none of them should be held responsible for anything I say). Chapter 8, “Race and Indigeneity in the Life of Elisha Apes,” was previ- ously published in Ethnohistory (Winter 2013, volume 60, pp. 27–50). In Appendix B, table 4, a list of native- authored logbooks and journals, ap- peared fi rst as the appendix in Living with Whales, which also reprints some of the documents analyzed in Native American Whalemen and the World. My article “Mr. Tashtego: Native American Whalemen in Antebellum New En gland,” in the Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2013, volume 33, pp. 109–32), gives an overview of nineteenth- century native whaling using some material from this book, mostly drawn from chapters 1–3. x : Acknowledgments NATIVE AMERICAN WHALEMEN AND THE WORLD This page intentionally left blank Introduction Years ago, while whizzing through a microfi lm reel of whaling logbooks, I saw a familiar name fl ash across the screen, Joel G. Jared. With incredu- lity, I reeled back to the fi rst page of the volume, and there it was: “Joel G. Jared, Belonging to Ship Amethyst of New Bedford.” If I needed confi r- mation, midway through the journal, he had signed his name again, this time adding “born Gay head Chillmark.” Jared was indeed a Native Ameri- can whaleman, one of many hundreds of native men whose voyages on nineteenth- century American whaleships took them around the world. In his journal, he diligently recorded the events of the day for over fi ve years beginning with his second whaling voyage, aboard the Amethyst from 1846 to 1850, and continuing while on the bark Samuel & Thomas of Mattapoi- sett from 1850 to 1852. Traces of another, later voyage on the bark Mary Frances of Warren, Rhode Island, fi ll up the journal’s few remaining pages.1 The volume itself resides in the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library collections and is in sad condition, its binding collapsed, the pages splotched and age- worn. Otherwise, it looks and reads much like any other of the thousands of extant logbooks and private journals inspired by the nineteenth- century American whaling industry (fi gure 1). In daily entries, Jared described the weather, sail handling, and latitude and longitude and recorded life aboard ship: lowering boats to chase whales, boiling whales into oil, stowing oil down below decks, eating plum duff and salt horse, gam- ming (socializing) with other whaleships while at sea, sighting the Azores and Galapagos Islands, anchoring at Paita and Maui, a “Portugee” and other men dying aboard ship, knife fi ghting, and fl oggings.

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