The Great Whale Trial: Science and Society in the Early Republic

It is a pleasure to have this occasion to revisit Trying Leviathan, and to engage the thoughtful responses gathered for this forum. My aim in this brief introduction will be to give a workable précis of my book, sufficient to orient a reader unfamiliar with the "Great Whale Trial" to the exchanges that follow.

But first, a semi-gratuitous anecdote. Several years back, in the thick of the research that would lead to this study, I ran into a distinguished colleague (a scholar of medieval Islamic law and politics) at a conference on the West Coast. After an exchange of pleasantries, he asked me what I was working on, and I said something about the natural history of whales in the 19th century. Much to my surprise (nay, dismay), this expert on the dynastic problems of the Abbasids immediately launched into an impassioned and informed account of the mid-19th-century upheavals in the American whaling trade, and their implications for conceptions of extinction in the years immediately after the publication of The Origin of Species. Did I think that the industry had been driven to penury by petroleum-based substitutions for whale oil, or by increasing scarcity of spermaceti in temperate waters?

Taken more than a little aback, I stammered something about the jury still being out on the question—and then found the courage to ask him how he had come to be quite so conversant with the history of marine exploitation in the antebellum period. He explained that he had recently ordered a copy of a multi-author volume published by the University of Chicago Press entitled In Pursuit of Leviathan, which he had assumed was a new study of Hobbes—only to discover that it was a 600-page econometric analysis of the American whaling industry. He hadn't really intended to read it, but gradually found himself sucked in. After a rip-roaring conversation about historical techniques for reconstructing pre-exploitation cetacean biogeography, he and I agreed that what the historical profession needed most urgently was the insinuation of subtle randomizers into our intellectual life, a little stochasticity proving a wonderful antidote to disciplinary ennui. I came away picturing roulette wheels in the book display of the next AHA meeting.

Title page of an early American primer on marine life. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

This encounter goes some way to explaining the title I would eventually give to my book, since I figured there must be at least one other voracious political theorist out there who could be duped into buying a book about whales—for his own good, naturally. My editor, with the clarifying energies of her breed, insisted upon the make-no-mistake subtitle: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, which I fear rather gives away the game.

So what is Trying Leviathan about? Let me take that question under three heads: subject, structure, and argument. As far as subject is concerned, Trying Leviathan is a study in the history of science, and it is centrally concerned with changing ideas of "natural order" (systematics and taxonomy) in the century spanning the major works of Linnaeus (1758) and Darwin (1859). The narrative heart of the book focuses on a peculiar trial that unfolded in New York City in 1818-19, James Maurice v. Samuel Judd, in which a jury of ordinary Americans was asked to rule on the ancient and vexatious question of whether a whale is a fish. This issue came to law as a result of a statute requiring the formal inspection of all fish-oils traded in the state of New York—the wording of which led one crafty shopkeeper with a passing knowledge of Continental comparative anatomy to hazard barring the door to an inspector seeking to peruse three barrels of spermaceti oil, said oil hailing from the spermaceti whale, which said shopkeeper categorically denied was, according to the best authorities, a fish. The inspector snorted and issued a summons, setting...