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A Bloody Business: the Culture of Violence on Whaleships

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A Bloody Business: the Culture of Violence on Whaleships MULTIFACETED FACTORIES OF DEATH: THE THREE COMMUNITIES OF THE AMERICAN WHALESHIP by MICHAEL DANIEL TOTH Bachelor of Arts, 2015 Otterbein University Westerville, Ohio Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts December, 2020 Copyright by Michael Daniel Toth 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ........................................................................................................................iii List of Tables ..........................................................................................................................iv I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………….….1 II. A Community A Part of and Apart from the Republic............................................10 III. A Multicultural Community...................................................................................34 IV. A Community of Violence......................................................................................63 V. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………91 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..96 Vita Abstract i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1............................................................................................................................64 Figure 3.2 ...........................................................................................................................65 Figure 3.3............................................................................................................................71 Figure 3.4 ...........................................................................................................................76 ii LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1............................................................................................................................69 Table 3.2 ...........................................................................................................................82 iii Introduction "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."1 On the night of February 11, 1823, a savage storm raged in the Pacific Ocean sending waves crashing down onto the deck of a whaleship. Every wave that smashed against the gunwales drove the ship towards its doom on the shallow coral reefs of the French Frigate Shoals. Broken upon these treacherous formations the ship would vanish beneath the waves for one-hundred and eighty-eight years, her crew clinging to small boats until they were rescued the next morning by a fellow whaleship the Martha. This newly lost whaleship, the Two Brothers out of Nantucket, and her captain on her final voyage was none other than George Pollard, Jr, who two years earlier had captained the infamously ill-fated voyage of the whaleship Essex. While, at only thirty-two years of age, he was still fairly young, Pollard's loss of two whaling ships in a row ensured that he would never captain a whaling ship again—in fact, he would spend most of his remaining life ashore as a night watchman. That the Two Brothers was the very ship that had returned Pollard and the other Essex survivors to Nantucket after their months adrift at sea, and that her very next voyage was entrusted to the man who had so recently led a ship to destruction can be said to be a truly Shakespearean irony. The quick rescue of her crew came from the fortuitous happenstance that the Two Brothers had been sailing closely at the time of the storm with the whaleship Martha partaking in the practice of the gam.2 The Martha had successfully 1 Herman Melville, “Moby Dick or the Whale” in Moby Dick (Third Norton Critical Edition), ed. Hershel Parker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 16. 2The gam was practiced whenever two or more whaling ships met and agreed to sail together for a while, often engaging in social visits back and forth between their ships, and agreeing to split any whales that they encountered during that period. 1 taken shelter nearby and rode out the storm largely unscathed. She deployed her whaleboats to rescue the stranded Two Brothers crew the next morning once the storm had cleared, and they had enough light to navigate the dangerous shoals. But why did two American whaling ships sail so close to a largely uninhabited part of the Hawaiian island chain in 1823?3 While they had almost certainly moved closer to the treacherous shores seeking shelter from the storm the broader answer to that question is that they were engaged in the American oil boom of their era. Before petroleum-based oils became the fuel of society and industry, the world was lit by the rendered fats of the largest mammals alive on the earth, and much of the whale oil which came out of the Pacific Ocean did so on American whaleships. Beyond that, whale oil served various industries of that time, from lubricants to soaps, and even to perfume. The global market was hungry for whale oil, and the American whaling fleet would continue to grow steadily until the late 1850s, with the New Bedford fleet in 1857 topping out at 329 vessels and more than 10,000 men. Who were the thousands of men who crewed these hundreds of American whaling vessels between the 1790s and the 1850s, and how do we understand them? That is a question that has long been asked by the small collective of historians who have devoted themselves to whaling history, and often answered in parts, but never as a whole.4 Eric Dolan’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America serves as the most comprehensive modern book on the general history of the whaling industry in the area now known as the United States. Dolan traces the story of the industry from the early colonial era in 3Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (Viking Penguin Press, 2000), 208-210; CNN Wire Staff, “Sunken ship of 'Moby-Dick' captain found,” CNN.com, February 12, 2011; Jason Graziadei, “Wreck of a Nantucket whaleship identified in Pacific,” The Inquirer and Mirror (Nantucket, Massachusetts), February 28, 2011; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Lost whaling shipwreck with link to Melville's Moby-Dick discovered in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands”, Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument Press Release, February 11, 2011. 4“Yankee Whaling,” New Bedford Whaling Museum, last modified August 3, 2016; US Bureau of the Census, 1960, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, 445; Derek Thompson, “The Spectacular Rise and Fall of U.S. Whaling: An Innovation Story,” The Atlantic, February 22, 2012. 2 the 1600s to its relatively modern, ending in the mid-1920s. His core view of the whaling industry is that of a highly profitable industry, drawing Europeans to the shores of the New World in hopes of being able to take part in the exploitation of natural resources for their own gain. This industry grew during the following centuries requiring ever-growing numbers of whalers, the vast majority of whom did not care about the damage that they were causing as long as they could still turn a profit. While this book seeks to include a social history that spreads itself to cover the American mainland, it relies primarily on economic records which ensures that the main focus of the text is the economic history of the industry. This is certainly an important aspect of the whaling industry—as its ever-declining profitability was key to its downfall—but in understanding the whalers themselves it serves to present them as solely motivated by money. While money was assuredly a major component of their being, it also most definitely cannot be said to be the entirety of their being.5 Similarly, Granville Allen Mawer sought to highlight the history of the South Seas whaling industry in Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling. Basing his research heavily on the much-analyzed texts of prominent members of the whaling industry such as Alexander Starbuck, W.H. Macy, J.T. Jenkins, and George Good, Mawer’s primary divergence is to add to the story using primary documents drawn from archives in Australia. This allows him to broaden the story of the fight for the South Sea whale fishery by bringing in new perspectives. This includes the interesting, and significant, story of the London whaleship Emelia—which on her 1788-1790 voyage became the first commercial whaler to ply her trade west of Cape Horn— whose journey serves to disprove the long-held belief that Yankee Whalers were the first whites to take the whaling industry around the horn. Making sole use of well-mined records and 5Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 3-7, 10, 58, 194, 290, 322-325, & 446. 3 Australian records also serves to limit his argumentation on the struggle to primarily American and British interests, while not necessarily providing much on how to understand the sailors or their communities. A much stronger focus on the American whaling industry’s full fight for the South Seas whale fishery can be found in Edouard A. Stackpole’s Whales and Destiny: The Rivalry Between America,
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