Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (review)

In the nineteenth-century United States, whaling was big business. From the end of the War of 1812 to the beginning of the Civil War, over three-quarters of the world's whaling voyages departed from American ports, representing a capital investment of nearly seventy million dollars. The industry sent droves of young men to sea and employed many more ashore in a variety of trades essential to the outfitting of vessels and the processing of whale products. This nation, now a signatory of several pacts banning the practice of commercial whaling, outpaced all others in the wholesale slaughter of some of the world's largest mammals. Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan thus seeks to recapture the centrality of whaling to the history of the United States.

Part business history and part social history, the book spans nearly four centuries and is divided into three major parts. The first and strongest section, entitled "Arrival and Ascent, 1614–1774," offers exquisite insight on the ways that whaling drew European settlers across the Atlantic. Indeed, it would seem that whales were never far from the mind's eye of many of the New World's most famous residents. John Smith, for example, wrote extensively of New England's bountiful cetaceans as a means to lure settlers and pique royal interest in his northern ventures. Aboard the Mayflower, one dejected Pilgrim sighed that "we saw Whales playing hard by us, [which] if we had instruments and meanes to take them we might have made a very rich returne, which to our great griefe we wanted" (31). Capital and labor shortages dictated that most whale products in the seventeenth century were extracted via "drift whaling." Creatures that washed ashore were quickly claimed, cut into, broken apart for profit, and even taxed by local authorities. Over time, as the trade moved off shore, its center became Nantucket Island, a place Crevecoeur described as "a barren sandbank fertilized with whale oil only" (121). Dolin does an excellent job charting the rise of this barren outpost to an area of great renown and even greater profit to the British empire. As with most places in colonial America, the fortunes amassed by Nantucket's elite were built on an exploitation of the labor of a racial underclass; in this case, it was the island's original inhabitants. Hundreds of Wampanoag Indians shipped out of Nantucket, often entangled in usurious relations of debt-dependency that kept them laboring without the prospect of mobility. Here and elsewhere, Dolin emphasizes the ways in which whalemen themselves suffered diminishing returns on their labor despite the often fabulous wealth they helped generate.

Part Two, "Tragedy and Triumph, 1775–1860," finds Nantucket atop the whalefishery world, and, more specifically, the sperm whalefishery. In possession of the globe's largest and most productive whale fleet, Nantucketers literally kept the streets of London alight. Illustrating the increasing interdependence of the eighteenth-century British empire, Dolin reveals how sperm whale oil taken by Nantucket ships off the coast of North Carolina filled lamps along London's streets as part of a crime-fighting initiative in the imperial capital. Certainly no one was more aware of the island's importance than Nantucketers themselves. Terrified of the impoverishing effects of privateering and trade disruption during the American Revolution, Nantucket's scions, nominally attached to the rebellious state of Massachusetts, defied the Continental Congress in attempting to negotiate for themselves a separate peace that would grant them a right to whale and trade for the British. The bargaining power wielded by Nantucket's chief whalers, out of all proportion to their size as a group, is a point Dolin returns to often, perhaps to emphasize the authority conferred on energy cartels then as now. Only a timely end to the war itself kept Nantucket a part of the new nation. Yet the damage was already done; much of the fleet had been captured or plundered, and most of...