Sisters of the Sea

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.