America’s Early Whalemen: Indian Shore Whalers on Long Island, 1650–1750 by John A. Strong (review)

america’s early whalemen recalls John Strong’s earlier work on the Unkechaug and Montaukett but foregrounds whaling as a common element of their histories. Drawing on whaling contracts, family business documents, and land records, Strong joins a number of scholars recognizing that maritime activities expanded Native worlds and European colonialism beyond North America’s lands. Andrew Lipman has identified Indians in the offshore whaling industry that developed after King Philip’s War, and Nancy Shoemaker has examined those whalemen’s ventures abroad in the nineteenth century. Strong locates that industry’s origins in seventeenth-century Long Island’s shore whaling operations, which established hunting and processing techniques and set precedent relying on—and seeking to control— Native labor. Explaining his intent to “open a window on the cultural transition experienced by the Native peoples of Long Island” (xi) during the first century of European settlement, Strong acknowledges that this is a book as much about whaling as a vehicle for English colonialism on Long Island as about whaling itself.

Strong argues that whaling became the central activity through which Indians and colonists interacted on Long Island. Artifacts, whale songs, and myths attest to the significance of whales in Long Island Indians’ cultures, even if evidence for precontact whale hunting remains sketchy. Drift whales constituted fortunate accidents for Indians and English settlers, the former reserving claims to fins and tails, while the latter extracted oil and baleen. These complementary benefits encouraged cooperation, Indians reporting beached whale carcasses to English officials, who hired Native laborers to process them. The profits injected scarce capital into the island’s agrarian economy, prompting colonists to organize several companies in the 1660s to hunt whales spotted offshore. By the industry’s peak in the early 1680s, as many as fifteen Long Island companies employed nearly two hundred Indians to kill seventy to eighty whales per year.

Despite their critical role, Natives reaped few of the enterprise’s benefits, the proliferation of shore whaling ventures instead extending European colonial power by transforming Native political structures, economic relations, and material lives. Colonists competing over drift whales bolstered the authority of sachems who cooperated in selling coastal lands. Indians familiar with navigating open water in small boats and handling harpoons and lances obtained goods on credit and earned higher wages than day laborers onshore. However, debt relations trapped whalers in servitude, and colonial ordinances that set wages and enforced labor contracts suppressed a competitive market for whaling labor. Ultimately, these ventures relied on Native skills and labor, but only English colonists possessed the necessary startup capital, political support, and access to Atlantic markets. Even when Shinnecock and Montaukett Indians organized their own whaling company and secured an agreement with Southampton in 1671, it was effectively marginalized by an English monopoly.

Strong’s familiarity with local archives and tribal histories produces fascinating examples of particular whaling operations and individual experiences, including a remarkable chapter that follows the Montaukett whaler Papasaquin over several decades. Paradoxically, these vignettes are simultaneously the most compelling and most frustrating aspect of the book. If Strong describes shore whaling as “a ‘joint creation’ of two cultures” (78), the image that emerges remains largely of individual Native men navigating English institutions. Strong considers these episodes in terms of assimilation and accommodation, even as he points to grave goods, Indigenous clothing styles, and extensive kinship systems as evidence of cultural continuity.

The strength and persistence of Native traditions hint that Strong is missing opportunities to consider how Native values and strategies might have shaped the whaling enterprise. He attributes Indian whalers’ prominence in colonial affairs to their language skills and familiarity with Europeans, but whaling also might have perpetuated traditional ways of acquiring status as men employed hunting skills to procure material goods. Payment on commission undoubtedly benefited English investors who avoided paying regular wages in poor whaling seasons but might also—like instances of contract-jumping— have reflected Native desires...