“Driftin' round the world in a blubber hunter”: Nineteenth-century American whaling narratives

Mark Richard Bousquet, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the nineteenth-century literature created by and about the whaling industry. American whaling narratives saw the zenith of their popularity alongside the industry's "Golden Age," an era that lasts roughly a half-century (from the 1810s to the 1860s), and is defined by deep sea whaling expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, with voyages lasting as long as four years. I argue that whaling narratives provide new insight from new voices regarding race, environmentalism, and nationalism under the general rubric of labor reform, which in turn offer a new lens to examine Moby-Dick. The guiding question of this dissertation is "How American is an American whaleship?" Through the narratives of Edward Barnard and Horace Holden, I show in Chapter One how whaling narratives are precursors to later nineteenth-century writing on race and race reform, as the racial dynamic is inverted in the South Pacific; the privileges that come with being white at home become disadvantages in the non-white islands of the Pacific. In Chapter Two, I use the Reverend Henry Cheever to argue that an awakened environmental consciousness was too unsettling for a man who boarded a whaleship in order to honor the hard work of American whalemen, and then witnessed those same men slaughtering God's whales with "cruel harpoons" in order to provide oil for the "honorable lamps" back on the continent; instead of pushing at this conflict, Cheever dampens the uncomfortable feelings it unearths, refusing to dwell on the actions of the whalemen and returning to his more comfortable role as their champion. I argue in Chapter Three that J. Ross Browne uses the whaling industry to detail the failed promise of American idealism through the systematic financial abuse of the whalemen by the merchants who run the industry; yet Browne's ideal treatment of whalemen does not extend to non-Americans, as one of his primary calls for reform is the removal of foreigners from the whaling labor force. Browne uses nationalism as a cover for his own vengeance against the Portuguese seaman he encountered on his cruise. Lastly, I take these three areas and apply them to the most famous whaling narrative, Moby-Dick, arguing that Melville's conception of America aligns with neither the continent nor the whaleship but instead offers a third vision of American labor where an individual's skill trumps his skin color, where an environmental awakening can calm a raging hunter's heart, and where systematic industrial abuses are blamed not on foreigners nor merchants, but on a workforce that allows the many to be manipulated by the few.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Schneider, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|American history|American literature

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