The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen During Two Centuries, 1635-1835 (review)

50Bulletin of Friends Historical Association in a hundred and thirty he describes the whole Society at its height; then summarizes reasons for its decline. Appended are the hitherto unpublished "Millennial Laws" of 1845, an estimate of Shaker population, a selected bibliography (omitting the author's other works), and a careful index. This undocumented but reliable account sacrifices the individuality of each Family and the dynamics of later periods for the sake of a general, topical picture. The discussion of basic tenets is underdeveloped. The thirty-three contemporary illustrations are unidentified. There is more to be written about Shakers, but few will write so well. Earlham CollegeThomas Bassett The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen During Two Centuries, 1635-1835. By Edouard A. Stackpole. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. 1953. 510 pages. $7.50. For two centuries whaling was largely a Quaker enterprise. In 1775, one learns from Edouard Stackpole's Sea-Hunters, 128 out of 132 vessels engaged in the industry were Quaker-owned. The beadroll of their skippers—Gardners, Husseys, Rotches, Barneys, Swains, Macys, Rodmans, Coffins, Folgers—reads like the membership list of Nantucket Monthly Meeting. One wonders what it meant to the life of the meeting to have its weightiest members, its "pillar Friends," dispersed, as they were likely to be at any given moment, throughout the watery parts of the globe, thousands of miles from home—some in the lonely reaches of the South Atlantic, some on the edge of Antarctica, some among the uncharted atolls of the central Pacific, some off the coast of remote Japan. One wonders roo what Quaker domination meant to the development of the industry. More than once Edouard Stackpole insists that Quakerism contributed something distinctive, something essential. But he never tells us what that something was. This seems a pity, for he tells us nearly everything there is to know about the industry. No one, surely, has ever read more logbooks and diaries of whaling voyages than he has done. As a result, he has been able to cram his book with a wealth of good yarns, of salty personalities, of utterly fascinating details. Indeed, there are almost too many details; at times his superabundant material seems to get out of control, and one feels that a little more selectivity would have produced a clearer, sharper, more memorable picture. But one should not complain of an embarrassment of riches. Besides its copiousness, this book has many substantial merits. It gives, for example, the best account this reviewer has ever seen of the process by which Nantucket threw off little whaling colonies in other parts of the world—Dartmouth in Nova Scotia, Hudson in New York State, Milford Haven in Wales, Dunkirk in France, the Falkland Islands off the Straits of Magellan. Another merit is the wholly justified prominence it gives to the career of the statesmanlike but too-little-known William Rotch, a Book Reviews51 Friend who deserves to stand in the company of the great Quaker men of affairs, alongside William Penn, John Bright, Moses Brown, Abraham Darby, and George Cadbury. The Sea-Hunters, I repeat, has many major merits—and some minor but annoying defects. For one thing, it has been carelessly proofread. I noted over two dozen typographical errors before I stopped counting. (I am charitably assuming that "Mount" for the supposed author of Mourfs Relation [p. 16], "Arcadians" for the inhabitants of Nova Scotia [p. 41], "Eldridge" for Elbridge Gerry [p. 102], are misprints, but I fear I cannot make this assumption about the way the name of our Association's President is rendered on page 477.) The index is curiously selective. And one wonders if that good Quakeress, Captain Samuel Joy's wife, was so overcome with apprehension and grief that she really said to her two boys: "Thee must prepare yourself for sad news, my sons . . ." (p. 404). Still, the merits of this stout volume far outweigh its defects. In more senses than one, it is a whale of a book. F.B.T. ...