Multifaceted Factories Of Death: The Three Communities Of The American Whaleship

Abstract

By the 1840s the American Whaling industry in the Pacific had reached its zenith with hundreds of ships crewed by thousands of men plying the waters from the Artic to the Antarctic seeking out whales to kill and turn into precious barrels of whale oil. These floating factories of death were both a major and crucial industry in the early American nation as the oil they produced not only lit the world but greased the gears of industry, and filled the bottles of the finest parfums. Further, the bones of the leviathans that they killed were clamored for in the worlds of art and fashion. The men who went to do this most dirty of deeds, the original oil industry, have acquired a mythos about them drawn heavily from popular imagination, and the book Moby Dick which much like its titular antagonist looms ever present. However, to truly begin to understand these men fully for who they really were, the community of the whaleship itself has to be understood, as that was where they spent a disproportionate amount of their time. This thesis argues that the whaleship can be understood as three distinct types of community. First, they were communities that were a part of, and apart from, the larger veins of society and politics, particularly in the early decades of the American nation. Second, the whaling ship was a multiracial and multicultural community with members drawn from across the globe. Finally, the whaling ship contained a widespread and perpetual culture of violence that permeated nearly every aspect of day to day life.