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Blood, Oil, and Turtles: The Voyage of the Maria (1832-1836) and the Political Ecology of the American Whale Fishery

Thu, March 30, 3:30 to 5:00pm, The Drake Hotel, Michigan

Abstract

This paper asks how placing contests over energy and life at the center of analysis might change the way historians understand the worlds that American whalers made and negotiated through their voyages to, and work in, Pacific whaling grounds during the nineteenth century. Colonial American deep-sea whaling voyages triggered an Atlantic street lighting revolution radiating from London, while a New England run candles-for-slave(ry) trade helped illuminate and circulate processes caught up in colonial transatlantic sugar slavery. Later, American whale oils lubricated an industrial revolution in cotton manufacturing, eventually overwhelming the capacity of the American fishery to meet the demand for both light and lubrication. This paper explores the geography of labor of the fishery as it moved into the Pacific. The story will focus primarily on a single four-year voyage of the whaling ship Maria, a world hunt recorded in unusual detail by first-time whaler and low-ranking crew member Richard Hixson in a mostly surviving journal. Through Hixson’s accounts, it becomes clear just how contested, how politicized was every aspect of the inescapably collective work and life in the fishery, from (re)supplying and navigating Spanish ports, to gamming and deserting, to capturing whales and trying out whale oil. Along the entire voyage, Hixson and the other crew were forced to negotiate and share their small wooden world not only with one another, but with parasites, roaches, monkeys, chickens, and Galapagos tortoises, only some of which were brought on board deliberately. Where and how whalers secured the means of life at sea, and how that work came into conflict with the material and spatial requirements of accumulating and transporting sperm whale oil produced a fascinating spatial politics that historians have yet to fully appreciate.

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