Whalesong and Chants Democratic

Once upon a time, historians of science regarded the decades that stretched from Isaac Newton to Charles Darwin as a vast historical Sahara, a blank temporal expanse during which nothing much happened. But as it turns out, a lot did happen. As Graham Burnett has beautifully observed, for example, a New York court case over the natural, social, and commercial statuses of whales reveals a lively debate about the living world that took place in an era of supposed inconsequence. Rather than an arid Sahara, we have the teeming seven seas. Out of that salty cradle of life, I want to haul in yet another interesting marine specimen, this one from a slightly earlier period, the late 18th century, in order to clarify what science in early America signified before and after the American Revolution.¹

I present to you not a whale, but a whaleman. Timothy Folger was a native of Nantucket, who, like many from that small island, took to the sea for his livelihood, eventually becoming a ship's captain. Posterity might have forgotten him were it not for his famous cousin, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother was from Nantucket. If Franklin's rise to fame and fortune is a matter of public history, it was also a matter of family pride—his relatives rejoiced in their kinsman's achievement in becoming the first scientific American, the first person born in the New World who was regarded as the equal of European men of science, and the first to enjoy cultural visibility and political power because of his scientific achievements. Wherever the eminent Franklin went, his waterborne Nantucket kin followed; they would call on him in Philadelphia, London, and even Paris.²

In 1768, while Franklin was living in London, he enjoyed a well-timed visit from Timothy Folger. The year 1768 marked the first stage of the troubled relations between American colonists and British administrators. Franklin himself felt stung by British criticism, both because he was a spokesman and lobbyist for American interests in London and because of his absenteeism from America, where he was supposed to be serving as Deputy Postmaster General. Serendipitously, as it would turn out, it was at this moment that British officials put a question to him: Why did it take longer to get a postal packet ship to New York than to Boston?

Franklin in turn put the question to Timothy Folger, who was evidently amused at this evidence that British packet boat captains were perfect idiots. Little did they know that their travel to New York was delayed because they were navigating against the current of the Gulf Stream, which they avoided in the more northerly passage to Boston, hence the differential in travel time. To this explanation, Folger added an interesting fact: Nantucket mariners knew the Gulf Stream best because they sought it out—along its warm edges, whales went to catch fish, so that was where whalers went to catch whales.

Plotting the sea: Maury's "preliminary" whale chart of 1851 (mentioned by Melville in a footnote to Moby-Dick). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Franklin now had a bit of maritime knowledge with which he could champion American know-how and defend himself against criticisms that, by living in London, he neglected his postal duties. He wrote up his cousin's testimony, sent it to his superior at the post office, and also asked Folger to mark on a chart of the Atlantic Ocean the extent and course of the Gulf Stream. Franklin forwarded this now-lost manuscript to the post office so that the chart of the Gulf Stream could be printed and distributed to all those clueless British packet boat captains. This was done and the result was the first map of the Gulf Stream, the joint handiwork of a landsman, Benjamin Franklin, eminent man of science, and his cousin, whom Franklin described as "an intelligent whaleman of Nantucket." Thus had some key knowledge about the fluid, whale-filled seas been captured and displayed on dry land.

The charting of the open ocean was in fact just becoming a...