Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race by Nancy Shoemaker (review)

Nancy Shoemaker’s Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race is an important addition to the growing literature on what Martha Hodes (“The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race,” American Historical Review 108, 2003) has memorably termed “the mercurial nature” of race. Clearly written and persuasively argued, American Whalemen and the World examines how Native Americans who served on nineteenth-century New England whaleships experienced being Indian as they traveled around the world and then returned home. Race, as scholars have often observed, is contingent on time and place. What Shoemaker adds to this understanding is the degree to which racial classifications are also situational. Shoemaker illustrates how the situation in which a native New England whaleman found himself shaped how others thought about him as an Indian and thus his lived experience of being Indian. Native New England whalemen experienced race in a number of different ways, depending on whether they were aboard ship (“The Ship,” Chapters 1, 2, and 3); on a beach in the Pacific Ocean, encountering another kind of native (“The Beach,” Chapters 4, 5, and 6); a foreign resident on a Pacific island (“Islands,” Chapters 7, 8, and 9); or back in New England (“The Reservation,” Chapter 10).

New England whaleships were perhaps as close to a meritocracy as any Indian was likely to experience in the nineteenth century. Because of a pressing need for labor that created a racially diverse workforce and a desire to maximize profits, ship owners hired Indians they deemed to be capable whalemen to serve as officers. Native American officers enjoyed the privileges of rank in better accommodations, as well as the knowledge that owners, crews, and the law supported their authority to issue orders to white subordinates. Race was not, as Shoemaker explains, absent from the reasoning of owners in their decisions to employ native officers. Indians were widely believed to be blessed with superior eyesight and a gift for hunting that made them valuable additions to a whaleship.

A native whaleman’s status on board ship as an officer trumped some aspects of race, but it was on the beaches of the Pacific Ocean that the racial status of Indians became particularly ambiguous. As part of the vanguard of American domination, native whalemen were viewed on the side of civilization in a confrontation with racially inferior savages. Native whalemen were thus the sort of foreigner that their ancestors had faced on the shores of seventeenth century New England. In Part 3, “Islands,” Shoemaker shows how the native whalemen who settled on Pacific islands were always considered foreigners and thus indistinguishable to the local population from the missionaries and other Americans bent on colonization. Even the United States Navy treated native whalemen as American citizens worthy of government support and protection. Finally, as Shoemaker chronicles in Part 4, “The Reservation,” it was in their return to New England that native whalemen once again experienced the perception that they were part of a degraded race that had lost even the exotic appeal of their earlier savagery.

Shoemaker’s decision to divide her discussion into four parts is effective. It gives her story a clear narrative arc that imposes a degree of order on a very messy process. As Shoemaker is careful to point out, “the racial category Indian in nineteenth-century America was inherently contradictory and just as mobile as the Indians themselves” (p. 18). These four different situations native whalemen experienced also metaphorically mirror, in Shoemaker’s telling, different stages in the process by which Europeans colonized America and America was, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, putting the Pacific under its dominion. From the earliest encounters on the beach, when trade was mutually beneficial and the newcomers were primarily interested in the extraction of resources, to the invaders’ later desire to appropriate land and...