Went to the Devil: A Yankee Whaler in the Slave Trade by Anthony J. Connors (review)

In Went to the Devil: A Yankee Whaler in the Slave Trade, Anthony J. Connors asks why American whaling captain Edward Davoll became involved in the illegal slaving voyage of the Brutus in 1860. Connors builds a convincing case arguing that Davoll's corruption did not stem from any particularity in his circumstances or character. Instead, Davoll's whaling career was typical and, as was common among his peers, full of ups and downs. Though more than one ship agent recognized his competence by hiring him as captain, Davoll never realized the secure income and comfortable domestic situation to which he aspired. Whaling was risky business for anyone employed in it, and especially so after the industry started on its long decline in the 1850s. Connors implies that if Davoll had not been enticed into the unsavory but highly profitable slave trade, some other down-on-his-luck New Bedford whaling captain would have stepped in and done the same.

Since Davoll dies two-thirds of the way through the book, Went to the Devil does more than just give a biography of his life. The first part of the book is indeed very biographical in its method. Readers follow Davoll from his birth in the small whaling port of Westport, Massachusetts, to the larger whaling port of New Bedford. We learn about each of his whaling voyages; his rapid progression up through the ranks; the amount of oil obtained or in some instances not obtained; and essentially anything else about Davoll that Connors was able to glean from extant logbooks, correspondence, and shipping papers. Because a rich cache of Davoll's letters to his wife have survived, we hear much about Davoll's marriage and how the demands of whaling work, most notably his long absences, put a strain on their relationship.

The latter part of the book details his penultimate voyage, when Davoll acted as the front man for the Brutus as its owners pretended to outfit it for a whaling voyage with Davoll as captain. When the vessel arrived in the Azores, according to plan it would seem, Davoll left the vessel, and his first mate took over as captain for the Brutus's passage to Africa and then, with a cargo hold of enslaved Africans, to Cuba. A crackdown on Americans engaging in the Africa–Cuba slave trade eventually led to Davoll's arrest for having aided and abetted the slavers' voyage, but his death from typhoid fever resulted in his case never being prosecuted. In the last few chapters, Connors discusses the larger context, demonstrating that Davoll was a bit player in a rash of illegal slave trading by whalers on the eve of the Civil War. Six New Bedford area whaleships were implicated, and as Connors shows, a number of New Bedford locals were drawn into what was a vast international operation and network of illegal slave traders. One of the most compelling of Connors's observations is how well-suited whaleships were as a cover for human trafficking. They had large, open cargo holds for storing oil, the trypots for boiling blubber into oil could be used as cooking kettles to feed hundreds of people, and whaleships carried plenty of barrels that were intended for oil but could be used to store fresh water. Another valuable point Connors makes is his reassessment of New Bedford. The city has a historical reputation for fostering abolitionists and welcoming escaped slaves (most famously, Frederick Douglass). These morally virtuous pillars of the community lived side-by-side with people willing to shun the law and community norms—people who had few scruples when it came to making money.

The ideal audience for Went to the Devil is the general public. Readers new to whaling history will find it a readable, well-informed account. To fill in gaps in...