Jonathan Fisher woodcut, published in the 1833 book "Scripture Animals," courtesy of the Jonathan Fisher Memorial, Blue Hill, Maine.

Thar She Blows

The History of Whales and America

07.31.19

Whale deaths are reaching record numbers in 2019. According to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association, gray whale deaths are “notably greater than the average” and have led the NOAA to declare the occurrence an Unusual Mortality Event (UME). In addition, NOAA considers the death rates of North Atlantic right whales an urgent conservation crisis leading the U.S. to begin working with Canada this month to help protect the species.

On this episode, Brian, Nathan and Joanne explore how Native American whalers faced stereotypes within the industry, how whaling went from boom to bust, and learn how a real white whale named Mocha Dick became the inspiration for Herman Melville’s novel.

ships; whaling

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

The White Whale of the Pacific

Moby Dick is often placed within the pantheon of classic American novels. But did you know that Herman Melville drew inspiration from a real white whale that terrorized sailors in the beginning of the 19th century? Joanne talks with scholar Hester Blum about the legend of Mocha Dick.

Music:

Curious Animal Exploration by Bobby Cole

Creepy Castle by William B. Meeks

Winning the Marathon by Bobby Cole

Herman Melville; Moby Dick; folklore; whaling

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and The Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan C: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Joanne Freeman: Let’s start this episode off the coast of Chile near the southern tip of South America, where a great white whale was known to ram boats and terrorize sailors in the beginning of the 19th century. As legend has it, that whale sunk anything that crossed its path, collecting over 100 ships at the bottom of the ocean floor.

Brian Balogh: Joanne, I’m breaking into a cold sweat because I think I read this novel in high school.

Joanne Freeman: No, Brian, this is not Moby Dick. We’re actually talking about Mocha Dick, a real white whale that’s regarded as one of the major inspirations behind Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick. And although rumors of Mocha Dick struck fear in the hearts of sailors in the whaling industry, it didn’t gain widespread prominence until 1839, when an epic account of slaying the albino beast was published in a New York literary magazine, which was read by none other than Herman Melville.

Hester Blum: When I first heard about Mobile Mocha Dick, I was wondering why a white whale would be named for something that we usually associate with chocolate.

Joanne Freeman: That’s scholar Hester Blum.

Hester Blum: But it’s the island of Mocha off the coast of Chile. Stories had circulated among whalers and other ships in the 1810s, 1820s, about this white whale, that was known to be covered with barnacles, and ferocious and an old bull with a distinctive spout. And then in 1839, Mocha Dick became better known to the American public more generally, in an account of his life and his death at the hands of a whale ship in a story called Mocha Dick, published in a New York literary magazine called the Knickerbocker, and written by a man named Jeremiah Reynolds.

Speaker 6: This renowned monster who had come off the victorious in 100 fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, a singular consequence had resulted. He was white as wool. Viewed from a distance, the practiced eye of the sailor could only decide that the moving mass, which constituted this enormous animal, was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon. In short, regard him as you would, he was a most extraordinary fish. Or in the vernacular of Nantucket, a genuine old sog of the first water.

Brian Balogh: Now, the account that ended up getting published in the Knickerbocker, I gather that’s kind of an adventure story. Is that true?

Hester Blum: It is, and it’s part of a genre of literature that was very popular in the 19th century, and particularly in the 1830s and ’40s when this story was published. And that’s a genre of what is sometimes called the found document genre. So the story is presented as if it were a random leaf from a manuscript of a sailor.

Speaker 6: Lashing the sea with his enormous tail, until he threw about him a cloud of surf and spray. He came down at full speed, jaws on with the determination, apparently of doing battle in earnest. As he drew near with his long, curved back looming occasionally above the surface of the billows, we perceived that it was white as the surf around him. And the men’s stared aghast at each other. as they uttered in a suppressed tone, that terrible name of Mocha Dick.

Hester Blum: And in the course of sailing around the Pacific, ships would encounter each other and say, Have you seen this white whale? Have you encountered Mocha Dick?” It became a kind of calling card, and that’s an aspect of the story that Melville picks up in Moby Dick as well. When the ship say to each other, “Has thou’st seen the white whale?” But much of the story then consists of the active, exciting, full action narration of the mate describing how he and his whale boat are capturing the whale. And it ends with their description of their ultimate triumph over this creature.

Speaker 6: Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured more than 70 feet from his noddle to the tips of his flukes, and yielded 100 barrels of clear oil with a proportionate quantity of head matter. It may emphatically be said that the scars of his old wounds were near his new. For not less than 20 harpoons did we draw from his back, the rusted mementos of many a desperate encounter.

Joanne Freeman: So, obviously there must be some kind of relationship of one to the other. Did Mocha Dick Inspire Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?

Hester Blum: Yes. It’s fairly widely acknowledged that Mocha Dick was one of the sources that Melville drew on in writing Moby Dick, which came out 12 years after the Reynolds’ story was published. And the Reynold’s story was published in a New York literary magazine, that Melville would have likely read or would have encountered. He was a New Yorker. He aspired to be part of that New York literary scene. It’s likely that he saw the story, and even if he never got his hands on a copy of Reynolds’s story in the Knickerbocker, Melville might have heard the story of the white whale when he himself was a working sailor, which he was for a total of seven years.

Built on ‘Greasy Luck’

At the height of the whaling industry, the whaling capital of the world was the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The whaling boom brought in everybody from boat steerers to bankers. Today, New Bedford no longer hosts whaling vessels. Instead, it has cultural artifacts like scrimshaw and giant paintings to emblemize the industry’s legacy. We talked to Michael Dyer, Curator of Maritime History for the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Hymn of the Exile by Jahzzar

Masssachusetts; New Bedford; New Bedford Whaling Museum; artifacts; whaling

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’ll be looking at the history of whales and whaling in the Americas.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll be hearing about the town that made its fortune out of whaling.

Nathan C: And we’ll be discovering the role that native Americans played in this mighty industry.

Brian Balogh: And there’s so much to say about whales in US history, that next week we’d pick up the tail again.

Joanne Freeman: Okay. Brian, are you talking whale tail or story tale? Or both, I guess?

Brian Balogh: Either way I just put it down, Joanne.

Nathan C: Commercial whaling no longer exists in the United States. But back in the 19th century, it was big business. At its peak, there were more than 700 American whaling ships across the world. In the early 1850s, these vessels killed more than 8,000 Wales a year and brought in more than 5 million pounds of baleen. That’s the thick bristles made of Keratin that’s inside a whale’s mouth.

Joanne Freeman: Whale products could be found in every room in the house. It was used for soap and candles, but also for street lighting and industrial lubricants. The whale was nothing less than the chemical factory of the 19th century.

Brian Balogh: But the whaling industry wasn’t just about oil and blubber. It also extended into the culture of whaling communities. For example, women of whaling families often used whalebone as a way to keep their corsets stiff.

Nathan C: Ouch.

Brian Balogh: What do you know about that ouch, Nathan.

Nathan C: Nothing at all.

Brian Balogh: There’s also plenty of art depicting the whaling world. The longest painting in the US is actually a piece called The Grand Panorama of a whaling voyage around the world.

Nathan C: The longest. Really? How long is it?

Brian Balogh: Get ready for this. It’s 1300 feet long. That’s longer than the height of the empire state building.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: This panorama shows different scenes of a whaling trip from navigating through erupting volcanoes in the Cape Verde islands, to returning home to the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Joanne Freeman: Wait a minute, we’re talking little local New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Brian Balogh: Yup. That’s right. At the height of the whaling industry, New Bedford, Massachusetts was the whaling capital of the world. You can actually go to New Bedford today and see The Grand Panorama.

Michael Dyer: That’s a really stunningly beautiful thing drawn by a Benjamin Russell, who is a whaleman out of New Bedford.

Brian Balogh: That’s Michael Dyer. He’s the curator of Maritime history of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He says this guy, Benjamin Russell, was actually a failed businessman who decided to go out whaling. And he illustrated different scenes in a sketchbook along this journey.

Michael Dyer: But he came back, and he was going to make some money as an artist. He was tapping into the most popular themes of the day, as far as keeping the interest of a 19th century public. So he was talking about literary themes like Robinson Crusoe, like The Mutiny on the Bounty, like the Wreck of the Essex.

Brian Balogh: Dyer says, when Russell painted The Grand Panorama in 1848, New Bedford was bustling. The whaling industry brought in everybody from boats steerers to bankers. The town also welcomed a painless would be writer, Herman Melville. In December of 1840, Melville came into New Bedford to climb aboard the Acushnet and go out to sea. He’d go on to write about the thriving port in Moby Dick.

Speaker 8: In New Bedford fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters. And portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding, for they say they have reservoirs of oil in every house. And every night, recklessly burned their lengths in spermaceti candles.

Brian Balogh: Yes, business was good in New Bedford. As the whaling industry grew, Dyer says the city became one of the wealthiest in the country.

Hester Bloom: New Bedford was the fourth largest seaport in the USA. Now that’s saying something in a maritime culture. The USA was a maritime nation. New Bedford was sitting on $46 million dollars on it’s five banks, in the middle of the 1840s.

Joanne Freeman: So how did New Bedford become the whaling capital? What ended up setting it apart from places like Nantucket?

Brian Balogh: I got one word for you, Joanne. Location, location, location. Nantucket was an island, and New Bedford was on the mainland. It had dense forest on one side and a strong river on the other. But the glory days of whaling didn’t last forever in New Bedford. The beginning of the end for the industry came in 1859 with the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania. Then just a couple of years later, the civil war came along.

Michael Dyer: The civil war really did affect the whaling industry. In that the CSS, Alabama, the CSS, Florida, these commerce raters, the Shenandoah, targeted Yankee whalers, and they targeted them on purpose. Antebellum America was a maritime nation. Much of that maritime trade was centered in the northeast, but all of it depended on lighthouses. And if you could knock out the whalers that were providing the sperm oil to light houses, it could really cripple commercial navigation. And that was exactly what the confederate commerce raiders did, was they targeted Yankee whalers.

Brian Balogh: What happens to New Bedford after the civil war? How did the city respond to the decline of the whaling industry?

Michael Dyer: New Bedford merchants began putting their money into other things. Very shortly after the war, within five years of the end of the civil war, the second biggest textile mill in New Bedford was built. But these textile mills in New Bedford just grew and grew and grew. And so it really, it changed radically. Smokestacks rising big. Three, four story brick factories, that are three city blocks long. The people who came into work in the mills were French Canadians. They were, Portuguese islanders. They were English, highly specialized English mill operatives who came in. That radically changed the look of the place, because the whalers began to dwindle.

Joanne Freeman: So obviously Brian, whaling has a really rich history in New Bedford. But what does it end up meaning to the city today? How is whaling remembered there today?

Brian Balogh: Dyer says you can see the whale door knockers and weather veins around the town, but there’s also some really interesting artifacts that have been collected by the museum.

Nathan C: I love museums. What do you got?

Brian Balogh: Well, we talked earlier about the Grand Panorama that’s located in New Bedford. Actually, the painting is so long it can’t fit inside the museum. But there’s still a lot inside the place that can give you a sense of whaling at its high point. There’s huge whale skeletons, old harpoons and spears, and the model of a whaling ship. And on top of all that, they have the world’s largest collection of scrimshaw art. Okay.

Nathan C: Okay, hold on. You’re going to have to help me out again. I know I’ve heard something about scrimshaw bone or something, right?

Brian Balogh: That’s exactly right, Nathan. Dyer gave a tour of their Scrimshaw Gallery. Here he is with some more details.

Michael Dyer: Scrimshaw, of course is a very fine work that was done on ship board during whaling voyages, with materials obtained in the fishery. Including the skeletal bones of whales could be cut down nice and thin, and joined together into these complex swifts and yarn winders. There could be the teeth of sperm whales, that were extracted from the jaw, and polished and engraved with all kinds of scenes and pictures, copied from magazines, and books, and ship portraits and all. Whatever struck the sailor who was doing it. So, the scrimshaw provides a wonderful insight into the culture of whaling. Around the same time that we’re talking, the 1830s, and ’40s and ’50s.

Brian Balogh: Scrimshaw isn’t just art for art’s sake. It also had practical purposes. Dyer says it was often whittled into tools. And like we mentioned earlier, it was even used in women’s corsets as something called a busk.

Michael Dyer: So a busk is a stiff piece of material that would go down the front of a lady’s corset. The corsets were designed to keep your figure upright. And whalemen would make these busks and give them to their wives, or girlfriends, or other female members of their family. But, to me they’re fabulous because they speak so directly to the maritime culture that these people were living in. It’s not just the sailors, it’s not just the merchants, it’s the entire community.

Michael Dyer: So that, you see a busk like this one, where you’ve got a whale boat with six guys in it, and they’re being towed along behind a sperm whale that spouting blood, and they’re getting ready to stab it with a whaling lance. This is engraved in color on a piece of whale skeletal bones. So this is, this is a piece of whaling art that a man’s going to give to a woman to put in her underwear. This is part of a culture.

Brian Balogh: You can spend all day looking at the scrimshaw in this gallery, but there’s one piece in particular that stands out.

Michael Dyer: This particular sperm whale tooth is one of the great pieces of scrimshaw by Frederick Myrick of Nantucket, and he and he would engrave a little poem on these teeth. He did 37 of these teeth, and many of them have this poem. And it says, “Death to the living, long life to the killers. Success to sailor’s wives, and greasy luck to whalers.” So that’s a perfect synopsis. That is the perfect insight. That is the perfect statement. If you want understand Yankee whaling, it goes like that. Death to living, long life to the killers, Success to sailor’s wives, and greasy luck to whalers.

Joanne Freeman: Wait a minute. Greasy luck to whalers. Sometimes when I hear of a nifty phrase, I say to someone, “I want to keep that.” I don’t know if I want keep greasy luck to whalers, guys.

Brian Balogh: You have good judgment, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman: Thank you Brian.

Brian Balogh: It might seem a bit odd to think of a time when whaling reign supreme as an industry. But thanks to these artifacts, we can get a glimpse into the story of places like New Bedford. So I want to thank Michael Dyer again, and the New Bedford whaling museum for giving us this glimpse into the past.

Anacharsis Cloots Deputation

Joanne continues her conversation with scholar Hester Blum about the brutality and danger of whaling, while also showing how Mocha Dick and Melville’s Moby Dick romanticized whalers as representative of universal rights and American industrial prowess.

Deep Thoughts by Joel Thomas Hunger

Moby Dick; romanticism; whaling

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: So we’ve heard about the economic boom that the whaling industry brought to New Bedford, and the northeast coast of the United States. And while it was a profitable business, the act of hunting whales and harvesting sperm oil was actually extremely brutal. We heard from scholar Hester Blum earlier. Here, she explains how the dangerous life of whalers was glorified in both Mocha Dick and Melville’s Moby Dick.

Hester Blum: As you may know, whales are much larger than whale ship. And they’re hugely larger than whale boats, which were the smaller craft that whalers used to actually hunt whales. If one is not steeped in the history of whaling, one might not realize that the whale ships are the engine that brings the sailors to the site of whales, and also processes their blubber into oil. But, the whale ships are not the place from which sailors hunt the whales. They lower boats. There’re usually about six wheel bolts on each ship, and a couple are kept in reserve, and those boats can be 10 to 12 feet long, only.

Hester Blum: And from those boats, which usually hold five or six men, the sailors are on the surface of the water. They’re just a foot or two off the water, and facing a whale that can be 10 times their size.

Joanne Freeman: I can’t actually even imagine how terrifying that would be. I mean, I guess there’d have to be a strategy, right? If there are several different boats, that they’re going to have to figure out some kind of way to surround the whale so that he doesn’t have one target or something.

Hester Blum: Exactly. There’s usually a kind of triangulation. Often whales tend to travel in pods, so sometimes each ship will be dispatched to a different whale. And what happens is that the sailors row as fast and as hard as they can to get close to the whale, at which point the harpooneer, the man in the ship, who in the boat that has the Harpoon plunges it into the whale. It’s attached to thousands of feet of thick rope. In an ideal situation, if the whale is not killed instantly by the harpoon, the whale will pull the boat from this long rope until it tires, until they’re able to get closer to a strike it again, until it bleeds to death, until it gives up the chase.

Hester Blum: And so it’s a very dangerous job. Maritime labor is not a safe profession, even today. But whaling was in particularly dangerous for reasons that you might imagine Whales could very easily knock the small boats, and knock men out of the boat. They could get tangled up in the whale lines. There are all kinds of accidents that could happen. But what makes the story of Mocha Dick unique, and what turn makes Melville’s Moby Dick different is that, the whale is represented not just in hitting or knocking or disrupting the smaller whale boats. But in targeting the larger whale ship.

Joanne Freeman: I see. So particularly dirty, rotten, and nasty whale.

Hester Blum: Exactly.

Joanne Freeman: Who has a mission.

Hester Blum: Indeed. And a whale that seems to have some kind of sense of agency, that it’s targeting the ship. Which is not always the circumstances in which hunters or fishermen encounter the natural world.

Joanne Freeman: I’m assuming that both the story of Mocha Dick and the story of Moby Dick or partly capitalizing on the fact that, I would assume the sea and whales, in addition to making good stories, are probably foreign climates to many people. So I would assume that, that’s a place where people could imagine adventures taking place. Is that true? That there were sort of a romance to the sea?

Hester Blum: There was definitely a romance to the sea. And one thing that’s interesting about Moby Dick, and Mocha Dick as well, is that for all of the huge popularity of sea narratives of sailor stories, up until Moby Dick, and Mocha Dick to a certain extent too, whaling was not necessarily the focus of those stories. They were more interested in naval battles, or in pirate stories, or in exotic travels to places that would not be familiar to white Americans or white Britains. Such as the South Pacific or the Antipodes.

Hester Blum: And so most sailor narratives talked about those kinds of travels, or represented naval battles. Whaling is a really dangerous and dirty business. It’s a heavy industry. The whales are processed industrially on the ship. They are giant cauldrons that are burning oil. They look like floating factories in a time when industrialization is starting to produce factories, visible in cities. Whale ships look like floating giant industrial factories, when they were processing oil.

Hester Blum: And so whaling was not an elite maritime trade at all. It was much more elite to even be a merchant sailor, much less a naval sailor, which was probably the most elite. And so what Moby Dick has done as a cultural legacy, is give the impression that whaling was more popular and more beloved a profession, that it actually was. But what Melville also did in telling the story was stress the ethnic racial diversity of whale ships, which Melville celebrated. But that ethnic and racial diversity is also because it was not an elite profession.

Hester Blum: So it was open to sailors who might not have found their way onto a naval ship in the same way. Sailors from multiple nations, black sailors, native sailors. And so the vision of the world of whaling that Melville gives us, was designed to elevate those mariners, renegades and castaways as he calls them. But people would have known about whaling because it was the largest industry in the US for several decades of the early 19th century.

Hester Blum: The petroleum trade, which the refinement of petroleum begins in 1859, after which whaling becomes less important. Whale oil was used for lighting, for lubricating machines, for the engine of much of the economy. But after petroleum is refined, which is easier to refine, it’s less expensive. It’s less dangerous. It’s had much more cataclysmic results for the state of our planet, but at the time-

Joanne Freeman: There is that.

Hester Blum: There is that. At the time the people would have known about whaling because of the oil that it produced, because of the baleen, and the various whale products that were used throughout the economy.

Joanne Freeman: So actually let me ask you a sort of out of the blue question, but given that you know so well, both the knickerbocker story and the Melville version, or gloss on it, between those two tellings of this kind of epic adventure story, are there differences between the two that you find particularly striking or revealing?

Hester Blum: That’s a great question. I was struck in looking at the story anew, that Reynolds, his story ends with a call for a kind of American global economic prowess. He ends the story by saying that the death of Mocha Dick and the success of the whaling industry is what he calls, and I’m quoting here, “The natural result- [crosstalk 00:26:19]

Speaker 6: Of the ardor of a free people have a spirit of fearless independence generated by free institutions alone, can the human mind attain its fullest expansion in the various departments of science and the multiform pursuits of busy life.

Hester Blum: And so Reynolds cast this story in an American nationalist light. Moby Dick while celebrating in many things about American democracy, has a much different and much more internationalist vision of what whaling is and what whalers are. He’s also explicitly elevating the labor interests of a particular working class, and advocating for them as a working class. At one point in Moby Dick, and this is a phrase that Melville uses in several novels. He calls whalers, and this is a name that is an unusual one and you might not have heard before, he calls them an “Anacharsis Cloots deputation”.

Joanne Freeman: I have definitely not heard that before.

Hester Blum: Not familiar with Anacharsis Cloots? He was an oppression advocate for international and universal human rights in the late 18th century. And he’d shown up at a parliamentary conversation and at an assembly, with a rainbow assortment of peoples from all over the world. And Melville makes the argument repeatedly that sailors are this is Anacharsis Cloots collection, that they represent universal rights and universal freedom. That’s a different sense from what we have from the Reynolds, which is stressing American prowess and American industrial night. Melville’s a little more skeptical of that.

Joanne Freeman: Well, it’s fascinating, first of all, because I’m sure that there are many people thinking and adventure stories not necessarily going to have this, in the case of the Reynolds’ story, this great sort of nationalistic gloss. But it’s even more fascinating then that Melville has such a broader perspective, and widens that message even more.

Hester Blum: He does. It’s also characteristic of Moby Dick as a whole in that, he Melville is drawn from the rental story, certainly. He’s also drawing from the story of the wreck of the Whaleship Essex in 1820, which was first popularized by a narrative written by its mate Owen Chase. This produced a popular recent history called In the Heart Of the Sea, and a movie by the same name. And that story of the Owen Chase is also about a whale, not a white one, deliberately ramming a ship. And so, that’s another source for Moby Dick, but also there are hundreds and hundreds of other sources.

Hester Blum: Melville was drawing indiscriminately from his wide reading, and from the many stories that sailors tell. So part of that process of transformation of Mocha Dick, is not just taking the story of this unusual whale, and the way that it is hunted, but embroidering the story and filling it in with this incredible body of knowledge. It becomes this accretion of all the pieces of whale stories.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. I mean, our conversation here is just making it so apparent why Mocha Dick and Moby Dick are such powerful forces. And I guess why Moby Dick, even for the many people who haven’t read it, is a presence, even now.

Hester Blum: It’s a book that I’ve read dozens and dozens and dozens of times, and I’m shocked anew every time I read it. By something I haven’t noticed, or some turn of language or something weird, and odd and funny. It’s just an endless gift to live with that novel.

Joanne Freeman: Hester Blum is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State University.

‘I Killed Moby Dick’

In 1902, whaler Amos Smalley was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when he came across a great white whale akin to the infamous Moby Dick. Smalley was Native American a part of the Wampanoag Tribe. More than 50 years later, he published an essay about his adventure. But whaling in Native American communities extends far beyond Smalley. Native whalers were a major part of the workforce and often faced stereotypes within the industry. We talked to Nancy Shoemaker, History Professor at UConn and Ramona Peters, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Mashepee Wampanoag Tribe.

Submerging Blue-Black by Podington Bear

Nocturnal by Podington Bear

Moby Dick; Wampanoag Tribes; stereotypes; whaling; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan C: Mocha Dick may have been one of the inspirations from Melville, but it wasn’t the only white whale terrorizing sailors across the seat. In 1902, a whale ship called the Patina set sail out of New Bedford. Onboard the ship was a man named Amos Smalley. He was Native American, and part of the Wampanoag tribe of Aquinnah on Martha’s vineyard.

Nancy S: He is remembered largely because he was one of the last people to go whaling. So if you go to Aquinnah today, you are very likely to hear about Amos Smalley, and see some of his relics in the gift shops that are on the Gay Head cliffs.

Nathan C: That’s historian, Nancy Shoemaker. She’s written about the history of Native Americans and whaling. She says Smalley started whaling as a teenager, and eventually became a boats steerer. His job was to send deadly harpoons into the whales.

Speaker 1: Okay. But what does this guy, Amos Smalley, have to do with Moby Dick?

Nathan C: Well, one day, while they were selling near the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, Smalley and the rest of the crew came across a whale unlike any they had seen before.

Speaker 6: Suddenly, as we drew near the whale, Andrew spoken a voice I’ll never forget, “That fish is white. He’s white all over.” The men were nervous now too, Some of their faces looked almost as white as the whale. West beckoned to me to stand up. I put my paddle down easy, took my place in the bow and lifted the harpoon. Then I saw him, the full bulk of him. Every inch of him whiter than the spray he was kicking up.

Nathan C: That’s an excerpt from an essay Smalley published with the help of a writer from Reader’s digest in 1957. Now I’m not going to reveal the title of the essay, not just yet. Let’s first return to the high seas.

Speaker 6: It was my job to Harpoon that whale, white or black, and I braced myself to do it. Now came what was almost a stammer from Andrew West, “Give it to him Old Tomahawk. I got my iron into him, all right, or I thought I did. But seconds passed. I leaned forward listening to the sound of the bomb exploding. Finally I heard the muffled pong, pong far down inside. There was a quick flurry on the surface and the water shot up like a fountain as the whale went down, straight down, taking the line fast. Everybody in the boat was tense thinking he was going to drag us down with him. I reached for the knife in case we had to cut loose. But in the gray dusk I could hardly see the rope. Down, down he went, taking out 20 fathoms. Then he stopped and we waited, breathless.

Speaker 1: Now I’m waiting breathless.

Nathan C: Okay Brian, I’ll relieve your stress. This essay is called, I killed Moby Dick. So small and the crew succeeded in their hunt and continue their voyage. This essay came out more than a half century after Smalley’s adventure. But at that point, many of the aquatic community already knew the story.

Nancy S: So Smalley was a great raconteur. And he had apparently, this is what people from Aquinnah have told me, that he would sort of meet the ferry as it arrived at Martha’s Vineyard, and was a in a way I kind of street performer or told his tales. And well known enough so that there was a sort of resurgence of interest in whaling in the 1950s. A major Hollywood movie with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab came out in 1956, and Smalley was well known enough, and invited to the premiere a surviving whaleman.

Nathan C: But Shoemaker says the relationship between Moby Dick and Native Americans goes deeper than even Amos Smalley. When the novel came out in 1851, the whaling memoir was already a popular genre. And Shoemaker says, Herman Melville perpetuated stereotypes already present in these memoirs about native whalers.

Nancy S: For those people who are familiar with Moby Dick, he does have a new England Indian character Tashtego. Tashtego is a harpooner. Now, having been a whaleman himself, Melville vent whaling on the Acushnet for a year in the early 1840s. He knew that there was no rank called harpooner on a whale ship, they were boat steerers. But he exaggerated the spear throwing aspect, and his three harpooners are all what you might call primitives. Tashtego, the New England Indian, Daggoo who’s an African, and Queequeg, who is most famous, and is the Pacific islander and portrayed by as a cannibal.

Nancy S: Again, you can see Melville’s playing on this idea that these people are natural hunters, naturally bloodthirsty, natural killers. They all have these sort of exoticized first single names. And that wasn’t the case at the time, so Mew England Indians in the mid 19th century, they had names like Jesse Webquish Jr. Or names that you wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians like Joel Jared. So, Melville knew this, but he was just playing off of a public expectations and romanticizing.

Nathan C: And even though native New Englanders were stereotyped as natural whale hunters, Shoemaker says there was little evidence that shows that they actually hunted whales before colonists arrived. Instead, they mostly harvested whales that wash up on shore. But over time, native Americans became a big part of the whaling workforce. And as the industry grew, the stereotypes stuck with them.

Nancy S: American Indians are put in the position of being boat steerers or harpooners. They actually just follow the same track as white men, until they hit a glass ceiling. In the 1820s, the glass ceiling was boat steerer. So they could start as a green hand and they would rise usually as far as boats steerer. But then in the 1840s, there’s such a need for reliable, trustworthy officers as these whale ships become internationally diverse. And where most of the crew can’t speak English, or a lot of the crew can’t speak English, these Indians become very valuable as officers. And so, then they start being promoted until they hit a glass ceiling around second grade or first material.

Nathan C: Despite the glass ceiling, whaling still offered a good source of income for some native whalers. Ramona Peters grew up in the whaling community of Mashpee on Cape Cod. She still lives there today as part of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. She says years ago, whalers were seen as celebrities in the community.

Ramona Peters: And these men would have been millionaires. It was not just middle income at all. In time, it became a real profession, and some of our people were sought after. In which case they made quite a bit of money. This was the only industry and where upward mobility was offered to us as well.

Nathan C: But Peters says, money didn’t always come easy for native whalers. In the early days of the industry, some native Americans were denied their earnings.

Ramona Peters: Some of the English captains started to drop our people off, our men, off in different random places along the way, on the way back. So that when the ship came back home, they didn’t have to be paid. So they’re, they’re [inaudible 00:38:49], as they called it, their lays was not transferred. When these men finally we found their way home, it might take a year, or months and months. So, our men began to put their lay in their wives names, and so their wives could show up at the dock and collect the pay.

Nathan C: That’s an incredible story. I mean, you can almost visualize somebody wandering from New Orleans or you know, somewhere in Central America, Yucatan, trying to get back to Massachusetts. Unbelievable. And then the women would, the strategy. it sounds like that they developed, it was a way for them to exercise some authority over the folks who were overseeing the industry.

Ramona Peters: Right. Correct. These native men were high ranking. But on land, we all face the same level of racism.

Nathan C: Today, Peters says whaling has a complicated legacy in communities like the Mashpee Wampanoag. On the one hand, it provided a chance for some people in the tribe to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but at what price? The Wampanoag regard whales as special. But the industry severely lowered their population in New England. Just for example, right whales once flourished in the region, but today they’re one of the most endangered species in the ocean. Peters is now part of efforts to ensure that all whales remain safe around Cape Cod.

Nathan C: But stories and folklore persist in the community of whaling adventures and famed whalemen like Amos Smalley. Peters recalls the time she ran into the charismatic Smalley one day on the docks.

Ramona Peters: I happened to be there with another grandmother. She was visiting a friend of hers, and I guess I was dilly-dallying. She said I could stay there at the docks and watch the ships coming in and out, and she’d be back for me. So I spent a good part of that day there watching him. He was there, a crowd. He would really, he was actually collecting money as well, for his stories. People would gather around and he was, “I’m the one who killed the [inaudible 00:41:01] Moby Dick. That great white whale.”

Nathan C: Ramona Peters is a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. We also talk with historian, Nancy Shoemaker. She’s the author of many books, including Native American Whalemen in the World, The Contingency of Race.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today. Next week, we’ve got a whale on a train. Women who disguise themselves as male whalers, and Brian sings a sea shanty. Do get in touch. You’ll find as a BackstoryRadio.org, or send us an email to Backstory Virginia.Edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BackstoryRadio. Whatever you do, hope you enjoy some greasy luck.

Nathan C: Special thanks to our voice actors this week, James Scales and Daniel TwoFeathers, as Amos Smalley.

Brian Balogh: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 11: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham, from Virginia Humanities.