Abstract
The nineteenth-century US whaling industry traced its origins, in part, to earlier Native American shore-based enterprise, and, with its aboriginal ship’s names and figureheads, was suffused with the language and imagery of New England’s Indian history. But, as Nancy Shoemaker’s excellent new book makes clear, native whalemen were far more than some symbolic presence aboard American whaling vessels after 1800. They were, in significant numbers, a regular feature of the industry’s workforce. Many Indian whalemen, in fact, were considered skilled enough in the craft to ascend the ranks and become officers aboard a number of ships. As such, native mariners attained a modicum of prestige and competency that would otherwise have been mostly unthinkable in settled society ashore. For this reason, Shoemaker argues, indigenous men continued to catch and kill whales for years after white Americans stopped going to sea in large numbers. An industry associated with low pay and much degradation for citizens was for Indians a source of not only income but also self-respect. And that sense of pride, Shoemaker ably demonstrates, was made possible in large part by the ways in which, at almost every turn, whaling overturned (or at least complicated) the racial thinking that kept Native Americans on land at the political and economic margins of New England society.
In arguing as much – that most Indians afloat eagerly sought employment at sea for the benefits it conferred – Shoemaker subtly reworks a historiography which had long positioned Native American whalemen as an oppressed underclass coerced aboard ships by usurious creditors seeking repayment from their debt-dependent charges. Life at sea was of course, the author concedes, no paradise, but it is imperative that we stop seeing maritime native people as the pawns or dupes of exploitative ship owners. To do so is to replicate much of the racist logic regarding native incapacity that justified their dispossession in the first place. And so, much of Shoemaker’s task as a historian was simply to locate as many of these native whalemen as possible, mostly lost as they were to prior scholars of the maritime world. The archival legwork and painstaking recovery effort this required might be the most impressive feat of the book. As the author makes clear, identifying Indian whalemen can often be difficult – many were not literate, others Anglicized their names, and official documentation at the time used an inconsistent terminology when identifying the race of particular mariners. But beyond all those difficulties was the fact that, depending on circumstance, many native mariners did not explicitly self-identify as such, evidence, as Shoemaker suggests, for the ways in which ships downplayed ancestry or skin color in favor of skill level and rank. Given all these barriers, it is remarkable how much material the author managed to locate, and that in research which took her to archives spanning from New Bedford to Fiji and New Zealand.
The book itself is divided into four principal sections, and in each section, Shoemaker strives to demonstrate, first and foremost, the ways in which whaling exposed the contingency of race in nineteenth-century America. Part One, ‘The Ship’, examines the ways in which ship owners’ desire for an orderly and profitable voyage trumped racial hierarchies which otherwise would have required that Indians remain confined to the forecastle. But an industry that caught whales to make money would promote the best men for the job, and those best men were often Native Americans. Moreover, as Shoemaker shows, shared gender norms among the diverse mix of men aboard whaleships tended to dampen racial tensions; celebrations of masculine prowess and rituals of manly fraternity brought shipmates together as men. And above all, the book argues, respect for rank aboard ship reigned supreme. Rank determined privileges, quality of life, and power aboard ship in ways that defied simplistic racial categorization. In absolute defiance of norms ashore, more than a few whaleships had Indian officers ordering around their white charges. The second section, ‘The Beach’, examines cultural encounters between US whaleships and Pacific Islanders and points to both the regularity with which a stereotyped conception of ‘the Indian’ shaped those encounters, and, the curious ways in which Native American whalemen became less native and more American when in dialogue with indigenous peoples elsewhere. The next portion examines numerous iterations of the figure of the beachcomber, both in New England and abroad. Two fascinating chapters discuss the individual cases of John Sparr and Elisha Apes, two Indian whalemen who resettled in the Pacific and effectively reinvented themselves as conditions warranted. The final section of the book, ‘The Reservation’, looks at divergent attitudes toward native whalemen among white and Indian observers in New England, with the former fixed on themes of degradation and dislocation while the latter insisted that whaling prowess proved Native American competence and skill. In a racial climate that still insisted upon the Indian as either fierce savage or pathetic remnant, whaling provided an alternative narrative that complicated the country’s already complex racial landscape.
Maritime historians thus have much to learn from Shoemaker’s rich, detailed, and nuanced portrait of Native American whalemen. It is a fine social history of the sea, but, more than that, the book works hard to connect the maritime world with the unfolding history of race during the nineteenth century. In so doing, she places in dialogue fields and historiographies that too often stand in isolation from one another. Shoemaker, by contrast, shows us that one cannot fully comprehend that which transpired ashore without looking outward across the sea. The ocean can inflect and refract seemingly timeworn categories of analysis like race and identity with new meaning. Native American Whalemen and the World is thus a model for maritime histories that see the ship not as an end of scholarly inquiry in and of itself, but rather as the start for more far-ranging insight and analysis.