"Whalers Heading Towards A Whale" Source: The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Thar She Blows Again

The History of Whales and America (Part 2)

08.02.19

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.

Brian, Nathan, Joanne and Ed uncover the story of Cabin Boys who were women in disguise, find out why a decomposing whale was turned away from a Midwestern Town, and learn all about the Black whaler and entrepreneur who became one of the wealthiest men in America.

ships; whaling

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Segments

Songs of the Sea

Nothing kept spirits up at sea like belting out a rousing work song. Ethnomusicologist Gibb Schreffler demonstrates the call and response format of the sea chanty genre and sings Sally Brown, a popular chanty of the 1830’s.

music; musicology; sea shanties; songwriting; whaling

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Ed Ayers: 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.

Brian Balogh: 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.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: 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.

Brian Balogh: Now, picture a whaling ship out at sea in the middle of the 19th century. During the height of the whaling industry. As the crew worked together, pulling halyards to set sails or pumping the lever windless to set anchor, they sing a type of work song, called a work shanty.

Brian Balogh: (singing)

Brian Balogh: The voice you just heard is scholar Gibb Schreffler. He says sea shanties like Sally Brown were more than just catchy sailor songs. They were actually used to coordinate maritime labor tasks on merchant ships and whaling ships.

Gibb Schreffler: Shanties are always call and response songs. They always have a leader and a chorus. The chorus is performed by all of the crew aside from the leader, and the leader performs as a soloist. And what this means is that the chorus is a fixed part of the song. All of the crew must know that part of the song, so that they can come in and sing it together. However, what the leader or the caller sings is completely optional to his whim, and therefore it’s typically improvised.

Brian Balogh: So this sounds a little like those call and responses in the military, still used today. I hear the ROTC kids march by, and they do a kind of a call and response with the leader. Is there any relationship?

Gibb Schreffler: I believe that the shanty form, and I call it the shanty form because I think about over 90% of shanties have the same form. I believe that, that form is shared with the form of those same military songs you’re talking about. So for instance, a military song might be …

Gibb Schreffler: (singing).

Gibb Schreffler: That’s a two line verse, and that very same line of verse would fit into over 90% of shanties.

Brian Balogh: And what would the musical line be in a shanty? How would that differ if that were a shanty?

Gibb Schreffler: Well, the shanty form differs in that, whereas in that military song, the group of marching soldiers call back the exact line of the leader, whereas that’s the case in a shanty, the group sings back a different chorus. So, for example, the shanty Reuben Ranzo would go something like, “Oh poor old Ruben Ranzo.” And the chorus replies, “Ranzo boys, Ranzo.” And the lead singer says, “Oh poor old Ruben Ranzo.” And the chorus replies, “Ranzo boys Ranzo.”

Gibb Schreffler: And I can fit that military song in, “Oh I’ve got a dog, his name is Jack. Ranzo boys Ranzo. You can throw him a stick and he won’t bring it back, Ranzo boys Ranzo.”

Gibb Schreffler: It’s the way that the caller and the response are exactly evenly balanced in that way.

Brian Balogh: Yeah now that’s fascinating. Tell me about hierarchy here. Were the leaders superior in rank or did they just have better voices even if they were the lowest man on the totem pole to mix metaphors.

Gibb Schreffler: Sure, the leaders absolutely had no formal ranking, or higher or lower or otherwise than anyone else. They were the regular crew members. They came from the regular crew. It could of course be argued and it has been said, though with little documentation to really back it up, that the leader had a higher status perhaps in the eyes of his crewmates. But they were somebody who was considered to be a kind of man of words, somebody who was witty, somebody had the improvisational ability.

Brian Balogh: What were these sea shanties generally about? What were the topics? You want to share some of the lyrics with us.

Gibb Schreffler: There are oftentimes where themes of longing to be on the shore, if you weren’t on the shore.

Brian Balogh: That makes sense.

Gibb Schreffler: Or just typical, I guess if you could say typical working class popular song themes. Now there’s a third maybe one final category of lyrics that I’m not really sure what category you’d put them in to say what they’re about. Because these are lyrics that are characteristic of the popular African-American styled song at the time, which from some kind of literary analysis perspective may oftentimes appear to be nonsense. The bull frog is sitting on the rock and then possum jumped over the bull frog and sort of themes like that, which may often have some kind of deeper meeting encoded into them. But they sound like just things that rhyme.

Gibb Schreffler: Oftentimes more attention was paid to just the images and the sound of the rhyme than trying to create any particular thematic content, because shanties were not, hardly ever were they narrative. You didn’t try to sustain a story over several verses but each verse was a thought in itself.

Paul Cuffee, Black Whaler and Self-Made Man

Historian Jeffrey Fortin tells the story of Paul Cuffee: whaler, entrepreneur and American revolutionary.

Music:

Low Jack by Podington Bear

Patriots (American Revolution); entrepreneurship; whaling

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Brian Balogh: Today on the show we’re returning to the history of whales and whaling in America.

Ed Ayers: We’ll be hearing about women who passed as men on whaling ships.

Nathan Connolly: And we’ll find out how a whale visited the Midwest in the 19th century.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll learn about the African-American roots of sea shanties. While 19th century literature made whaling sound exciting and heroic, the reality was often a lot less romantic.

Nathan Connolly: What do you mean? The long hours, the great food, what’s not to love on a whaling ship?

Brian Balogh: Well let’s just say years at sea, really dangerous conditions on deck, and certain pay. Those aren’t the best selling points but some people saw it as an opportunity. Whaling was appealing to many black men with few other alternatives ashore. Some were already free but others were trying to escape slavery.

Nathan Connolly: Just so we’re clear, they went from being enslaved to being stuck on a whaling ship.

Brian Balogh: Well they were paid a small share of any profit, but the question of whether whaling was a means of escape or further imprisonment lies at the heart of the black whaling experience.

Jeffrey Fortin: [inaudible 00:07:46] sort of intimately involved in the transatlantic slave trade sending ships over to collect slaves, to purchase slaves and bring to the Caribbean and then up along the East Coast of the United States.

Brian Balogh: That’s Jeffrey Fortin Associate Professor of History at Emmanuel College.

Jeffrey Fortin: As the 18th century sort of wears on and New Englanders begin to question the morality of slavery, especially Quakers who were particularly involved in the slave trade early on in funding it. They begin to think, maybe this isn’t exactly what God may find as being ethical. At this same sort of moment there’s a lot of overlap.

Ed Ayers: That is that whaling ships out of New England followed similar transatlantic routes as earlier slave ships.

Brian Balogh: And there are even a few horrific instances of ships leaving New England as a whaling ship, picking up slaves in Africa and dropping them off in South America before returning home.

Ed Ayers: I had no idea.

Brian Balogh: Did whaling ships perpetuate similar types of racism that people of color would have experienced on land?

Ed Ayers: Not necessarily. Ships were a bit of reprieve from racism based on a kind of meritocracy, mostly because well everyone is stuck on a ship together for a pretty long stretch of time, and they had to depend on each other to do their jobs. If they did their jobs well they won respect and gratitude.

Jeffrey Fortin: The Native Americans for example in their journals when they’re on land discuss race all the time, when they’re on board ships ideas and discussions about race sort of take back the back seat. You can see that on board the ships there maybe wasn’t equality, but there certainly was a leveling effect that persons of color experienced.

Brian Balogh: Interesting but did willing ever help people of color access greater opportunities back on land?

Ed Ayers: Sometimes it did for the earliest and perhaps most striking example we can turn to the story a Paul Cuffee.

Jeffrey Fortin: Paul Cuffee was born in Cuttyhunk, which is a small island that’s a part of the chain of Elizabethan Islands in Buzzards Bay, which is on … it’s right next to Cape Cod, but it doesn’t get quite the fanfare as Cape Cod does today. And he was born to a former enslaved African man named Cuffe and his Wampanoag mother.

Ed Ayers: Cuffee shows incredible promise and determination from a very early age.

Jeffrey Fortin: He does become literate at the very least during his teenage years, where he takes over his father’s exercise book, which is a book that he would use to practice writing in. And so when his father dies when he’s about 14, he takes that book over and teaches himself how to write.

Ed Ayers: But Cuffee quickly realizes that being literate won’t be enough to give him a shot at success, and so he sets his sights on whaling as a means to become a self-made man.

Jeffrey Fortin: He actually as a teenager does go to the sea on a whaling voyage to the Gulf of Mexico. And on this voyage he sort of gets a sense of what the possibilities are, and he ends up on another voyage in the Gulf of Maine. From there he takes his earnings and buys the hardware to build his first ship called the Ranger.

Brian Balogh: He’s basically going from being a whaler to being an entrepreneur.

Ed Ayers: Absolutely Brian and just as important Cuffee comes to believe in the Quaker value he’s encountering, and becomes convinced that he has an equal stake in the society emerging around him.

Jeffrey Fortin: On one of his whaling voyages he is said to have killed five or six whales himself as the ship’s captain. I think there was a little bit of aggrandizement there but he can see that power and the money certainly that could be made. But also that he could go out there and demonstrate that he had the skill and the abilities to do the same thing that other whalers did.

Ed Ayers: And so when the time comes to further his own ambitions and to help create a society in which ambition like his can be rewarded, he joins the American Revolution.

Jeffrey Fortin: Then he also takes another step in joining the cause if you will in building a small dory, which is a little rowboat in rowing out through Buzzards Bay to Martha’s Vineyard, and providing Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Islands with supplies because they’re being squeezed out by the British blockade. He is celebrated in newspapers. One of the stories that newspapers always tell about him when discussing him are his daring raids at night through Buzzards Bay to get supplies to fellow patriots.

Ed Ayers: Cuffee was actually captured and held prisoner by the British during one of these risky trips.

Brian Balogh: So it sounds like even as a African-American he had just as much stake in the country getting free.

Ed Ayers: Well not really. He believed in it but he couldn’t vote, but he was determined to try to hold America up to its ideals.

Jeffrey Fortin: He writes a few petitions along with his brother and a couple of other men of color in his hometown of Dartmouth, which later becomes Westport Massachusetts, demanding the right to vote. He’s essentially arguing if you’re not going to give us the right to vote then we shouldn’t pay taxes.

Brian Balogh: It seems like I’ve heard that somewhere.

Ed Ayers: Yeah Brian. Cuffee was trying to hold America up to the ideals espoused by the patriots a few years earlier during the Boston Tea Party.

Nathan Connolly: You might say it’s Cuffee attempt at a black tea party.

Ed Ayers: Well that’s a terrible pun Nathan, and his petitions didn’t yield immediate success. They may have helped sway public opinion, but it was another 20 years until free black man won the right to vote in Massachusetts all the way in 1800.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, two decades is a heck of a long time to wait, but we’ve got to point out that still well in advance of a lot of other African-Americans in the new nation.

Ed Ayers: Certainly, but Cuffee continued to feel the harsh sting of racism throughout his life despite all that he accomplished.

Jeffrey Fortin: Then he comes back from a voyage and his ship gets impounded by the American government because of the war of 1820 and the embargo act. And he travels to Washington DC to meet with Secretary of State to try to get his ship back. And on his way out of DC, he gets on board a stage coach and is relegated to the back of the stage coach. It’s a harsh reality if you will of what his status really was. And this was probably the wealthiest African-American in America at that point if not close to it. And here he is still sitting in the back of a stagecoach.

Ed Ayers: Toward the end of his life Cuffee started worrying about how newly freed slaves would be able to support themselves in America. He had a proposal for what he thought newly free black men could do. He encouraged them to go whaling.

Ed Ayers: (silence)

Whale on a Train!

Between 1880 and 1882, a whale visited towns in the Midwest on the back of a train. Scholar Jamie Jones has traced the story of the show men who put the whale on display, and reconstructed its increasingly smelly journey across the US.

American Midwest; freakshow; whaling; zoos

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: Okay Brian here’s a question for you. What would you do if you really wanted to see a whale and the Discovery Channel wasn’t due to be invented for another hundred years?

Brian Balogh: You know Nathan I’ve really never thought about that question before.

Nathan Connolly: You just wait for the train.

Brian Balogh: The train?

Nathan Connolly: Check it out. For two years between 1880 and 1882 a whale toured the Midwest on the back of a train. People came from far and wide to see the sideshow attraction like no other. And the best part it was called The Prince of Whales.

Brian Balogh: You’re making that up Nathan.

Nathan Connolly: No there’s more, because of course the longer the whale was on the tour the worse it smelled. Jamie Jones is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And she has traced the story of the whale and the two entrepreneurs’ that put it on the train.

Jamie Jones: The two proprietors were George Newton a lawyer and sometimes a real estate agent from a small town in Massachusetts called Monson. And he’d had an idea for a long time that it would make a great Barnum-esk sideshow exhibition to get away all and tour it around the country. In fact George Newton wrote to P.T. Barnum and initially in 1880 before he eventually teamed up with his with his partner, to see if Barnum did want to get to him. And Barnum secretary wrote back to him and said, “that Barnum’s time was so taken up that he could not give any speculation such attention”. Although I think we can read between the lines and see that Barnum thought this was a bad idea, a smelly idea.

Jamie Jones: Eventually George Newton partnered with a man named Fred Engelhardt, who was a sports promoter and a former sports journalist in the Midwest in St. Louis in Chicago. Fred Engelhardt had a lot of connections, he knew how to set up these pop up exhibitions, he had a lot of contacts in the Midwest. And he partnered with George Newton and they formed the Pioneer Inland Whaling Association in 1880.

Nathan Connolly: Now you have to walk me through the logistics of something like this. How do you take a living animal the size of a whale from the ocean, presumably on the East Coast and get on a train heading west toward Chicago?

Jamie Jones: What happened is George Newton went up and down the East Coast meeting with whaling captains. And by this point in 1880 the US commercial whaling industry is really on the decline. Starting in the 1860s petroleum petro oleum, it’s a rock oil came into the market to replace whale oil as a source of machine lubrication and illumination. And so commercial whaling for whale oil was really on the decline. And I think that Newton might not have been able to find a whale and captain to bring in a whole whale, if in fact the market for whale oil had been stronger. So in some ways the fact that this whale made it to shore at all I think is a testament to the decline of this industry and the rise of fossil fuel mineral extraction and consumption.

Jamie Jones: Newton goes up and down the East Coast looking for a whaling captain who’s willing to harpoon a whale as close to shore as possible, tow it back to him on shore. It sounds like from Newton’s letters that he tried a lot of different whaling captains before he finally found one in Provincetown. Then in November of 1880 he got a telegram saying that his contact in Provincetown had captured him a whale. Newton then hired someone to tow the whale from Provincetown Harbor to Boston Harbor, which is a good distance. And there at Boston, they contracted with the dry dock people to create a kind of cradle, something that might be used to lift a large ship out of the water and bring into dry dock for repairs, but they adapted all of this sort of dockside infrastructure for a whale.

Jamie Jones: They lifted it out of the water and put it on two specially reinforced rail cars that had been built for the purpose of exhibiting this whale. From what I understand although the proprietors are very cagey about the details for reasons you can probably imagine. It seems like the whale was at least partially cut open and gutted and filled with a combination of salt and ice.

Nathan Connolly: This sounds like an extraordinarily expensive proposition.

Jamie Jones: It does seem like a very expensive proposition, but it also seems like for a while at least it was a money making proposition. During the whales exhibition in Chicago especially in January it made a lot of money. There it seems thousands and possibly even on some days tens of thousands of visitors who are paying something like 25 cents a head to come into this exposition hall and view the body of the whale. So for a while at least I think that the whale also made a lot of money.

Nathan Connolly: The whales debut is in Chicago is that right?

Jamie Jones: The whale was debuted at this huge exposition building in Chicago which was very near the lake and near a lot of the railroad connections at the time. It’s actually on a site that is now the site of the Chicago Institute of Art. So the sort of place where there were a lot of industrial trade shows in Chicago, and it was a place where big public exhibitions like this could be staged. The whale debuted to great acclaim. A lot of people came. Visitors were invited to come and peek inside the mouth of the Whale, which was called the place where Jonah went in. This whale’s body as it’s being exhibited, is also being embedded in all of these cultural stories about whales from the 19th century going all the way back.

Nathan Connolly: A visitor begins his observation generally at the head of the fish, looks into his capacious mouth, feels of the long bony hair that supply the place of teeth. Hunts for the eyes, the snout and then the ears. Walks along the side of the creature. Catches hold of the huge fin, punches the monster in the side as if to ascertain if it is rib-less. And finally brings up at the tail of the huge fellow where the broad flukes are spread.

Jamie Jones: After Chicago the whale goes to Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit. Now in April things were starting to go bad, the whale is starting to smell. From the very, very beginning Newton is very anxious about how long this show’s going to last. And in his letters home to his son, he nicknames the whale the bird. He writes constantly, “If the bird gives out, we go out of business for a while.” So he’s very worried about the bird giving out. And in April of 1881 in Cleveland the bird was giving out.

Jamie Jones: Newton and Engelhardt tried their first big spectacular effort to try to preserve the body of the whale and make it fit for exhibition. They hired a team of butchers to treat the whales body with some kind of chemical substance, and they said in some reports that they fumigated the whale or that they coated it or that they embalmed it. There’s a lot of these, this language of decontamination or even kind of preparing the body as if for a funeral. And because Newton and Engelhardt are masters of publicity, they’re writing about their efforts to remediate that whale, to sort of save the whale from its own putrefaction. And they’re making a kind of another press event out of the whales decline because they are such geniuses of publicity and promotion.

Nathan Connolly: Now in spite of these efforts, I have to imagine that as the whale starts to rot, people do start to slow down to a trickle.

Jamie Jones: That’s right, and the news coverage of the whale show really changes. Starting even as early as February, but intensifying around April and May. And the coverage is less about the spectacle of the whale and what a marvelous exhibition it is, and more about how ungodly it smells. And how you can smell the whale for miles before you see the whale.

Nathan Connolly: I can only imagine.

Jamie Jones: I can only imagine too. I had the opportunity to see a beached whale in Connecticut a couple years ago in fact, and just the smell is just … It really is over overpowering. So I can only imagine how … It’s been what? From November to April. It’s been six months that the whale’s been out of the water and decomposing. It seems as though the whale show itself was thrown out of Toledo because of the enormous smell, and civic leaders were getting involved in treating the show as a public nuisance in some places.

Nathan Connolly: Toledo, what a smell, fishy smell. To the heavens it seemed to swell. We asked our friend if he is acquainted here, he says “No.” So to do no good to ask why this aroma. But passing along a handbill is thrust into our hands telling us of the whale dead and in bad odor being in the city, and then we understood whence this all pervading perfume. The Kalamazoo Telegraph, May, 1881.

Jamie Jones: They tried their second last ditch effort to preserve the whale, or rebuild it, or keep it a kind of going to show in the summer of 1881. And again a very highly publicized event. Engelhardt set up in rural Michigan a site that he called a camp a Beilein, again kind of publicizing and making myth even out of the disaster of this show. Where he hired a team of taxidermists from Detroit to come up and rebuild the whale from the inside out. And Engelhardt’s account of Camp Beilein is very colorful. Newton by this point has gone home to Massachusetts, who can blame the guy. And Englehart writes home to Newton to give him a report on how the project of rebuilding the whale is going.

Jamie Jones: At one point Englehart says this. We are here, in saying that, I say almost all that can be said. Mosquitoes, flies, bugs and snakes predominate and form the largest part of the atmosphere. The work is terrible, you have no idea. But to the press, who are trying to find this site and visit it, and see exactly what kind of alchemy is going on at Camp Beilein Englehart is nothing but positive, talking about the genius of these Detroit taxidermists, and the fact that the whale will be ready for its grand re-debut in just a few short weeks or months. And again Englehart is making of this a great spectacle of publicity even as the whale itself is rotting down to nothing.

Nathan Connolly: And the fact that I guess that whaling itself was literally a dying trade is also not lost on some of the observers.

Jamie Jones: Right, absolutely. Whale oil production reached its peak, peak whale oil in the 1850s. In the 1840s and ’50s were when the US commercial whaling industry was booming. For example during the decade of the 1840s we know that at least 2363 whaling voyages were launched from US ports. By the 1880s when the Prince of Whales is making its tour across the US, only 736 whaling voyages are leaving. And that’s I think because the market for whale oil in the US is declining very rapidly given the abundance and the relative cheapness of producing petroleum that’s coming from the oil fields in Pennsylvania.

Nathan Connolly: What’s the ultimate fate of this giant carcass?

Jamie Jones: It’s hard to know. The archive starts to run cold in the spring of 1882 and 1883. I know that things are not always what they seem is exemplified in the case of this whale. The skin and tail of this monarch of the vasty deep was all that it purported to be, but its frame alas was of iron in Hickory and its flesh of sawdust and other deceptive light weights. Which I think in some ways allows us to reverse engineer what happened perhaps at Camp Beilein or in Cleveland when Newton and Englehart were frantically trying to remake the body of a whale to keep it on the road as it decomposed.

Nathan Connolly: I was talking to Jamie Jones, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s working on a book about energy, obsolescence and the decline of the US oiling industry.

Sea Chanties and the West African Paradigm

Returning to our discussion on sea chanties, Gibb Schreffler explains how these work songs are rooted in African American musical tradition. And stay tuned to the end of the segment for a chance to hear Brian “sing” a chanty of his own.

Music:

Smile Everyday by Keith Anthony Holden

African American culture; African American music; sea shanties

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: I want to return to our discussion of sea shanties. Earlier in the episode we learned about how they were used to coordinate labor tasks, and we heard an example of a typical work song. Today many people assume that shanties have an English heritage. But according to scholars Gib Schreffler sea shanties can be traced back to the 1830s originating from African-American music, and borrowing heavily from popular minstrel songs at the time.

Nathan Connolly: Also a quick warning to parents with children listening. Brian attempts to sing a shanty at the end of the segment. This may be a good time to cover their sensitive ears.

Gibb Schreffler: Well I do as I believe that shanty is as genre is a music. I believe that was a genre that emerged in the Americas, more specifically in what we could call the African diaspora of the Western Atlantic. So I would include the United States along with other countries of the Caribbean, and then this kind of black Atlantic world. The genre emerges there, and it’s in the paradigm I would say of West African song in which, I was about to say work song but again I want to be careful. It’s not only for work specifically, but it’s a paradigm in which the practice is to embed song in physical action. Whether that’s in a play action, a dance action or whether it’s a work action.

Gibb Schreffler: The song doesn’t necessarily exist as a separate entity in itself, but it’s a vocalization, a sound that you make within another activity where you’re you’re moving your body in some way. And this paradigm I believe was carried with Africans to the New World, and was re-imagined in what came to be African-American music. And African-Americans use this type of genre. Shanty was not the only form, there was more than one type of work song form. But they used them in various working context across the whole network of African-American life. All the way from the deepest plantations from there down river, into the seaports and then eventually onto the ships.

Brian Balogh: When would you place that time wise? I don’t mean a specific day but roughly which decades or what periods of American history in this case?

Gibb Schreffler: About the second half of the 1830s was when a very notable context emerged for multiracial labor. Wherein white workers entered what could have been considered up to that point a black labor context, and that was the context of loading cotton aboard ships and ports of the Gulf and the United States. I believe that was the time period when as it turned out this labor of loading cotton was one of if not the best paid labors you could do on shore, best paid manual labor. It was a coveted profession, and many local white Americans as well as many immigrants from Ireland and Germany especially had been coming at the time we’re entering this profession in number.

Gibb Schreffler: That’s about when I think we can start to narrow down. And then we start to see accounts after that of these immigrants had come on ship, and then they worked for a season because cotton loading was a seasonal profession. When that season is done, they go back onto a ship and become sailors and we read of people on the ship saying, “Wow this crew that we have is excellent. These are the guys who work loading cotton in one season, and now they’re back on the ship, and they can set all the sails with all these songs and very efficiently, and they work very hard.

Brian Balogh: Could you talk to me a little bit about the connection between sea shanties and minstrel.

Gibb Schreffler: The development of the shanty genre was happening at precisely the same time as the blackface minstrel genre of music was developing in the United States. We know that the minstrel music was at that time the middle of the 19th century I’m talking about. Kind of starting in the 1830s, having its first peak actually in a year. We can pinpoint 1843 and then continuing from there the minstrel genre was the most popular genre of music in the United States, and eventually spread globally. And this would have been popular music with all of the sailors. Whether the sailors were white or black, they were interested in this type of music. It was the popular music.

Gibb Schreffler: I think we need to throw aside the notion that sailors on their ships would have a sang what they would have considered to be traditional songs. They weren’t necessarily interested in singing old songs, they were interested in the music they liked, so it was music that was current to them. And the current popular music by all accounts was minstrel music. Then we know that the sailors on their off duty time when they weren’t working their entertainment music in this period was largely made up of minstrel music as well, which they would recreate with the instruments like the banjo and the fiddle and the tambourine.

Gibb Schreffler: We also know that when sailors got to port for entertainment they would head to a theater and maybe see a performance of minstrel music. Now, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about minstrel music. What resonates with us in hindsight is the racist nature of the genre, and there’s no discounting of that, and there’s no … we shouldn’t yield any ground to the fact that that was part of the minstrel genre. But it’s interesting as well to consider that at the time minstrel music was starting to develop, this was for many white Americans, it was their first exposure to something like Black American musical style.

Gibb Schreffler: And this was a style that caught on like wildfire amongst white Americans. And the ear;ier minstrel music perhaps more than many people realize, probably was a good reflection of African American musical style. Now that range of a spectrum you could have a really awful interpretation or you could have quite a good one. But in general it was in the ballpark of what could be identified as an African American musical style, and thus I think it made African-American musical characteristics familiar to a very, very large audience and made them popular.

Gibb Schreffler: By this point the mid 19th century Americans generally, if we could say that, and then soon the whole world was becoming more familiar with the characteristics of African-American musical style. This made the reception of shanties that much easier since they were also an African-American musical style. I’ll just conclude by giving you a close comparison between one minstrel song that’s very familiar, and the shanty form, and perhaps one of the most famous minstrel songs was Steven Foster’s, “De Camptown Races” published in 1950.

Gibb Schreffler: And of course that’s the song that goes, “De Camptown ladies sing dis song—Doo-dah! doo-dah! De Camp-town race-track five miles long—Oh! doo-dah day!” Now that song is in the exact form of a shanty, I could say the halyard shanty. The one used to haul on the lines that raise the sales. Doo-dah, doo-dah. Those are two pulls. Doo-dah is the first one, the second doo-dah is your second pull. And then that’s your first chorus, and then you have a second Chorus “Oh, doo-dah day. On “oh” you would pull and on “day” you would pull. And that’s exactly like I could sing Ranzo boys Ranzo as I sang earlier.

Gibb Schreffler: I could sing my Reuben Ranzo and go, “Oh the camp town ladies sing this song, Ranzo boys Ranzo. The camptown racetrack five miles long, Ranzo boys Ranzo.” I believe the minstrel songs had that form, because they emerged more or less from African-American musical style, and the shanties also came from that origin. So they happened to have the same lyrical form, and the shanties singers borrowed from minstrel song lyrics all the time.

Brian Balogh: I’ve always associated sea shanties with English heritage. In my case specifically Benjamin Britten. But I couldn’t be the only one who assumes that the heritage of sea shanties are Anglo-american white. How did we get so off track?

Gibb Schreffler: Well in the 19th century the writers about shanties did not think that they were English or British primarily. In fact British writers commented on the genre, and said, “Look at these songs, look at their lyrics, what they’re singing about. They have the absolute aroma of the Americas to them.” And American writers would look at them and say these songs have the sound of black American music. But in the early 20th there emerged the rather new phenomenon of academic folklore.

Brian Balogh: Oh come on, don’t tell me the answer to this is academics screwing up again, come on Gibb.

Gibb Schreffler: Well you have a cohort of English folklorists. They’re very enamored with the idea of folk, and they’re developing theoretically the idea of this word folk which had not been in great usage up to that point. And they’re thinking about it in these ways like, well folk speaks to the true essence of a people. It’s kind of what’s inside of you, it comes with you as a people not as a culture that any people could learn, but it’s almost in your DNA. And we could recover the English spirit in the English people if we can recover kind of our true essence of the folk of the past. And people looking at shanties on one hand were looking for a specific thing, so they had their sort of confirmation bias.

Gibb Schreffler: They wanted to pure folk essence so they were rejecting any kind of popular musical source. They already had their idea in mind that it was English, so they’re being highly selective in the material, and presenting that and shaping it to fit the narrative that they had.

Brian Balogh: Well we’re gonna do a call in response right now. You ready?

Gibb Schreffler: Okay.

Brian Balogh: I just learned a deeply cool thing.

Gibb Schreffler: I just learned a deeply cool thing.

Brian Balogh: You just made the story ring.

Gibb Schreffler: You just made the story ring.

Brian Balogh: That’s all I got Gibb. Thank you so much for joining us on Backstory.

Gibb Schreffler: My pleasure.

Brian Balogh: Gibb Schreffler is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College. (music)

Sisters of the Sea

Literary scholar Anita Duneer outlines women’s roles on whaling ships and shares what their lives were like through diary entries. Then, artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos talks about women who passed as men on whaling ships and explains the project she undertook to gain insight into their lived experience.

Music:

Holding Hands by Podington Bear

ships; whaling; women’s history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: In the 19th century if you happened to be a young boy cooped up in the heavily populated East Coast, the world of cowboys and Indians might seem just to remote to even dream of. But instead you might look up to whalers as the epitome of the American masculine ideal.

Anita Duneer: The heyday of whaling in 19th century America is really sort of tied in with the masculine of freedom at sea, that ran counterpart to the allure of the American west. This is a romantic notion that imagined the freedom, and the space of adventure to a large degree because it was outside the boundaries of civilization.

Brian Balogh: That’s Anita Duneer. She’s an Associate Professor of English at Rhode Island College.

Anita Duneer: They were trying to escape the busy world of women, so you think of … If we think about Huck Finn trying to avoid being civilized by Aunt Sally, or of course Ishmael who was drawn to the water to avoid the boredom and drudgery of being nailed to his office, to office desks. But that was also wrapped up with this idea of this space that was what I call the maritime romantic ideal, which is often associated with the notion of the brotherhood of the sea.

Brian Balogh: Wait a second, weren’t there any sisters of the sea? In fact, now that I think about it, that has a better ring to it?

Ed Ayers: Well in reality there were sometimes women on board. But even when there weren’t any women, whaling ships often replicated gender roles among the men on board anyway.

Anita Duneer: The division of labor replicated certain gender roles that in the absence of women were assumed by men. The men that were assigned positions typically associated with women’s work, the cook, the steward, and the cabin boy who would serve as a valet and housekeeper for the captain’s quarters those were often coded as feminine. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the harpooners, the hunters were seen as hyper masculine.

Nathan Connolly: Interesting, so even in the far flung reaches of the sea, whalers allowed civilization to creep on board their ships.

Brian Balogh: Good point Nathan in Ed are you saying that there actually would be woman on board?

Ed Ayers: Well sometimes. And if there was a woman onboard it would have been the captain’s wife. I guess you could say that getting to bring your wife along was a perk of the job.

Brian Balogh: One of his perks perhaps, but probably not much of a perk for her.

Nathan Connolly: I thought used to say that bringing a woman on board was bad luck.

Ed Ayers: Yeah there were a lot of superstitious beliefs and a lot of ambivalence about women going on board whaling ships from all concerned, from the ship’s owner to the women themselves.

Anita Duneer: Owners liked the idea that a woman on board would be a civilizing influence, thinking for example that the captain would not condone illicit sexual encounters between the men and island women. The biggest argument against wives onboard was really the potential conflict of interest. Because if a captain believed his wife to be deathly ill, she was going into labor, he felt as though she needed to go ashore this could influence him to leave lucrative whaling grounds in order to take his wife to port.

Brian Balogh: As for the captain’s wives once they were out at sea, some tried to make do and carry on with her maternal duties even amid the chaos of a long grueling voyage. One captain’s wife kept a diary about her experience raising kids while wheeling.

Anita Duneer: Well Eliza Williams talks about her trying to keep her little boy safe during a gale. And she writes about an awful swell and everything is rolling about the ship. And she writes, it seems as if she is going under sometimes. The chests and trunks that are not made fast go across the cabin. Another thing that she talks about is trying to keep the child clean. And anyone who has tried to keep a two year old out of a mud puddle or away from harm may be amazed at the challenges of motherhood on a whaling ship. She writes all three of the ships are boiling today. We are also caulking decks, and consequently are dirty enough.

Anita Duneer: Willie has a good time with it all, and between the oil and tar I can’t keep him clean and hour.

Nathan Connolly: I got to say, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for keeping kids away from boiling whale blubber, that deftly doesn’t sound like a fun parenting situation.

Brian Balogh: Yeah these were pretty courageous parents Nathan. Can you imagine how many times they had to listen to, “Are we there yet?”

Ed Ayers: But not all captains wives had the determination to make it work. Eliza Brock also kept a diary of her journey at sea, and well she hated every minute of it.

Anita Duneer: Her diary is in the Nantucket Historical Society, and it is full of pages and pages of original poetry and it’s all just extremely mournful. One stanza of poetry reads, “When will kind fortunes set me free, that I shall leave the boisterous sea. I love my friends, I love the shore, I long to leave of oceans roar.”

Nathan Connolly: So you’ve got whalers chasing freedom at sea, and I bet many of the captains wives probably were chasing freedom on the shore when they got a chance.

Ed Ayers: Oh certainly. This sentiment is probably best expressed in the Nantucket girl song.

Anita Duneer: She says, “I have made up my mind now to be a sailor’s wife, to have a purse full of money and a very easy life.” And then later she says, “Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor and send him off to sea for a life of independence is the pleasant life for me.”

Ed Ayers: And in reality the vast majority of women happily stay behind on land.

Nathan Connolly: And those women could have gained some independence on land I suspect, unlike the whalers trapped in those long voyages.

Ed Ayers: Yeah and their sense of isolation might help explain the myths that began to spread, myths about women sneaking onto whaling ships disguised as men.

Brian Balogh: Okay Ed. Clearly you’ve been watching too many HBO shows. That’s not something that really happened right?

Anita Duneer: We know of a few women who masqueraded as men on whaling voyages, but we really don’t have much evidence, because they didn’t write diaries, they didn’t write their stories down like the whaling wives did. We don’t know that there were many, but we do know that there were one or two. But we do know that that was a popular idea, a popular sort of romantic fantasy about the cross-dressing cabin boy.

Nathan Connolly: But since we don’t have access to these women’s stories as told from their own perspective, we spoke to an artist. Naveen G. [Condosos 00:46:51] who imagined what it would have been like onboard a willing ship disguised as a male. And in a piece of performance art she actually went on a ship and tried to embody the experience of these women who went on whaling ships disguised as men.

Brian Balogh: Now that’s really a commitment to her craft.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely. Here’s how she describes what she imagines life was like on board.

Naveen G: The things that always struck me was this feeling of isolation, being in a very enclosed space and not being able to leave that space at any point. But being surrounded by a vastness, I think that’s the real dichotomy that really interested me. And I think that maybe time as well. I can imagine that the notion of time must have been very different as well. You had these kind of huge stretches of boredom. I think all in all I’m not sure how much fun it was.

Brian Balogh: So you’re saying that to fill the boredom they started imagining that women were onboard with them?

Nathan Connolly: Exactly, that could be one explanation.

Naveen G: Often the mythology is that this woman has met a sailor or on shore, and she has fallen in love with him. And when he has to depart she is so forlorned that she decides that she must go and join him wherever he is, so she dresses as a man in order to do this. The end goal is normally love. They’re trying to rejoin something or somebody rather than wanting that life for themselves. But they think that’s much more … the stuff of stories.

Nathan Connolly: In one of the few recorded instances we have a woman disguising herself as a man on a whaling ship, it seems like romantic love was hardly a motivation. We know about the story of Georgina Leonard through other sailors correspondence about her. Scholars have been able to piece together how she tried to pass herself off as George Weldon on a whaling ship in 1852.

Naveen G: She’d already had several brawls with her fellow crew members, but she pulled a knife on one of her fellow crew members when she got into a fight with him, when she was accused of not rowing well enough and sort of being lazy, and she pulled this knife out and at the moment of her being punished back on the boat she went to the captain to reveal her gender, and to say to him actually sort of taking my shirt off on deck in front of the crew when you have to punish me which was normally like being given strokes on the back or something, “I think I’m going to try and get out of this by telling you that I’m Georgiana rather than George.”

Brian Balogh: Well it sounds like she’s pretty much in charge in this story, deciding how and when to present herself as masculine or feminine.

Ed Ayers: So how did Naveen go about emulating Georgina?

Nathan Connolly: She went on a restored 19th century whaling ship with other academics, researchers and museum patrons. And throughout the trip committed to trying to emulate what Georgina must’ve gone through in trying to pass herself off as George.

Naveen G: I went to a barber and had my hair cut short. I tried to like drop my voice a bit deeper than what it normally is, and talk slightly differently, and hold myself slightly differently. And I sort of tried to embody this present. But then whilst being on the boat, I was filming myself performing actions that would have been day to day things that woman trying to conceal her gender, you know Georgina passing as George. How would she get dressed in the morning or undress at night without revealing her body. How do you deal with having a period when you’re on board about. How would you deal with that? Would you must up your clothes. The other thing was, how do you go to the toilet? How do you pee or do other things in public in a way that would’ve been very normal, with again without revealing that which is there or is not there.

Ed Ayers: Well it sounds like a lot of work even to be pretending to be a man on a ship, I can’t imagine what it would have really been like.

Nathan Connolly: A very different picture emerges from the sea shanty that was most commonly sang, the handsome cabin boy.

Joanne Freeman: It is of a pretty female as you shall understand. She had a mind for roving into some foreign land. Attired in sailors clothing this fair made did appear, and engaged with the captain to serve him for a year. “Oh doctor, of doctor”, the cabin boy did cry. The sailors swore by all that’s good the cabin boy would die. The doctor ran with all his might and laughing at the fun, to think the cabin boy should have a daughter or a son. The sailors soon found out the joke and all begin to stare. The child belonged to none of them they solemnly did swear.

Joanne Freeman: The captain’s lady to him said, “My dear I wish you joy, for either you or I betrayed the handsome cabin boy.”

Naveen G: That she has to like be a sex object, that’s her role. The only way of being discovered is through your body doing what a female body will do, which is to give birth, because you’ve been having sex with the captain, rather than because you were doing your job and maybe you fell out of the sales and you broke your leg and they had to undress you.

Ed Ayers: In these popular myths women on whaling ships were deprived of agency, objectified as something to be desired or the butt of a joke.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah and while the history of women in whaling may be sparse, and does require us to fill a lot of gaps. The way women were affected by whaling, the stories told and imagined about them do tell us a lot about how wide the possibility of finding freedom at sea truly was, or more often was not. (silence)

Nathan Connolly: So guys help me imagine a world where there is no plastic, there is no petroleum there’s just this giant whale as basically the chemical factory for American life. Apparently everything in one’s house could be seen in one way or another relating to this industry. And I’m trying to imagine how all encompassing whaling must have been to the average American in the 19th century.

Ed Ayers: Well I think just about any household would have been fortunate to have had whale oil to run its lamps, so much superior to anything else that was available to light your home. Far better than tallow candles or fire. It had this clean burning, even kind of sweet smelling whale oil was one of the greatest luxuries that you could have.

Brian Balogh: And less visible but probably just as important was lubricating machinery. We’re talking about the very period that the American industrial revolution is taking off, and all those clanking machines or many of them anyway are lubricated by whale oil.

Nathan Connolly: They’re not just driving parts of the American economy, they’re also objects of mythology. The Americans are wrapping stories around these animals and the hunting of them. What does tell us if anything?

Joanne Freeman: Well certainly it seems to touch on a kind of theme that Americans plugged into literature and culture definitely in the 19th century. And that is the American as independent, and strong, and mastering nature. It seems like whaling tales plug right into that idea of what the American was often seen as in the 19th century.

Ed Ayers: Yeah I think there’s an element that the whaling industry remains kind of pre-industrial for a long time even though as Brian says it actually plays a critical role in early industry. You have the, you think about Moby Dick which I just listened to as an audio book over many hours recently. [crosstalk 00:55:14] Yeah exactly. And I was fascinated by it. And what was fascinating was not only the story, but also the incredible detail about what’s involved in actually extracting this oil from the whales. As people may recall from the book they didn’t read in high school, that enormous numbers of pages are spent talking about what’s involved in not only capturing the whale but then sort of hanging it beside the ship and excavating it basically, and then boiling it down.

Ed Ayers: I think that [inaudible 00:55:49] Melville uses the story to talk about the remarkable diversity of people on the ship. People from four corners of earth a so-called cannibal an African-Americans enslave boy, an African. And he has all these people on there I think to say something to about just sort of the ravenous hunger for these rare goods that nature has provided. It’s a scary novel about how we are driven by an almost irresistible urge for evermore.

Brian Balogh: What strikes me is even though this is really an international enterprise, they’re going into international waters, and we know that America from the very beginning is a trading nation connected to the whole world. Yet this whaling community is such a world unto its own. You just think about the folks on the ship itself. They went out for sometimes for well over a year, multiple years. And so on the one hand they’re connected to a nation that is trying to take its place among nations, and there’s certainly connected to trade. On the other hand, the isolation, and the kind of specialization that you folks have talked about. The skills required to extract the oil, not to mention catch the whale. It’s such a discreet, isolated community in so many ways.

Nathan Connolly: As a child of the ’80s I have to say that my earliest recollection of anything having to do with whaling is actually by way of science fiction. And it’s through Star Trek. And particularly the fourth Star Trek where the crew of the enterprise steals a Klingon vessel and tries to save all of existence by bring a whale from the past back to the future. Great movie, great movie. But it does actually speak to a real shift in the way that whales were considered. I mean this is not the kind of beast of the pre-industrial age, but this is actually a symbol of earth on the brink.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m curious if there’s again something that we can learn about the evolution of the whale as a symbol, that somehow sheds some light on our own progress as a country.

Joanne Freeman: Oh that’s really fascinating right? The whale starts out as a as a scary thing, representing this uncharted space, and then it becomes linked to the industrial revolution and it’s a sort of mechanical/productive thing, and now it’s an endangered magical thing of the past. That’s pretty striking.

Brian Balogh: Nathan my friend from South Florida, you skipped one crucial stage in Joanne’s march-o-time, and that’s consumption.

Nathan Connolly: Consumption.

Brian Balogh: I don’t mean consuming the whale, I mean entertainment. You obviously were never dragged to the Seaquarium to see Hugo the killer whale. And it’s important to remember that before we started saving the whales, we enjoyed them as spectacles of entertainment. And it wasn’t just the Seaquarium. There were similar attractions out in California. Americans marveled at being able to keep such huge animals in captivity, and it was part and parcel of the whole 20th century fascination with leisure, and consumption and entertainment.

Nathan Connolly: A think about the 19th century you have the symbol of this whale as a beast of the unknown, as a critical piece of an industrial world. And then you think forward into the 20th century and you have whales on bumper stickers, or on posters with rainbows flying through space. I mean there’s an entirely different meaning of the whale as part of our visual grammar, and our cultural grammar as Americans. I’m curious if there’s anything that that tells us, that concrete transformation of the whale symbol from the 19th to the 20th century.

Ed Ayers: Well in many ways that’s the domestication of the whale that we were unable to accomplish in nature. We can’t actually bring them to heel so to speak, but what we can do is turn them into a symbol, a commodity. And a matter if fact we’ve already passed to the place now where save the whales has become almost a joke to some people.

Joanne Freeman: It’s true.

Ed Ayers: It has become seen as the very embodiment of the fruitless environmentalism, like being a tree hugger. It’s passed even beyond the bumper sticker to the post bumper sticker.

Joanne Freeman: And save the whales, the whole idea of save the whales interestingly really does in a warped kind of a way celebrate or certainly symbolize the whale as victim. Whereas, a lot of what we’ve been talking about on this episode is the whale as this thrashing threat. Not only have we domesticated it, but we’re sort of domesticating it and symbolizing it as suffering at our hands.

Ed Ayers: And yet you know what strikes me as the great common theme in all this, is a kind of awe for the whale of a sense that they are mysterious. If you think back about all the superstitions surrounding the whale, even at the time of their peak hunting. Today we watch them on IMAX and really marvel at the ability to navigate the world in these oceans and patterns we still can’t understand. I think there’s still a kind of mystery about them that makes them perpetually interesting.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email at backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Backstory Radio. But whatever you do don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: Back Story 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 Herbert Baster Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.