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Minority Success in a Hard, Dirty Trade
Whaling in the 18th through early 20th centuries was dangerous, required long stretches isolated from family and community, and required participants to live in squalor. Despite potentially high pay, few jobs were harder or less attractive. Except perhaps, slavery.
“Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy,” by Skip Finley, examines the lives of men who became whalers because it beat the alternatives. These included blacks, both runaway slaves and free-born, Native Americans, and Cape Verdeans: men marked by the color of their skin.
They turned to whaling because all other alternatives were worse. Finley reveals life on a whaling ship between 1750 and 1930: brutish, a cross between working on an oil rig and a slaughterhouse with the additional fillip of wretched food, crowded housing, and round-the-clock hours. It was also dangerous. There were many ways to die whaling and even more ways to get crippled.
It also paid very well. Before petroleum appeared in the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution ran on whale oil. It lubricated factory machinery and railroad engines. Whale oil, not kerosene, lighted factories, offices, and home. Whale oil was scarce and in high demand. Whale crews got a “lay” (a percentage) of every barrel sold. Men got rich whaling, especially in skilled positions.
Working conditions were so appalling and profits so great, whaling ship owners took anyone capable of bringing a ship home filled with oil. Even so, most men avoided whaling unless they lacked better choices. Lacking better choices, Blacks and Native Americans became whalers. Their participation was accepted by New England Quakers dominating whaling between the American Revolution and Civil War, in part because Quakers opposed slavery.
Since performance mattered more than skin color, whaling men of color could rise to positions of leadership, becoming harpooners, mates, and captains on whale ships. Ultimately some became ship owners and investors.
Finley follows the history of more than fifty black and native Americans who became whale ship captains, ship owners, and chandlers (running businesses supplying whaling ships). Revealed is a fascinating tale of the rise and fall of family whaling and shipping dominions run by men of color. This is placed against the backdrop of both American society and whaling during the period.
“Whaling Captains of Color” examines both an industry critical to America’s industrialization, the people that worked in it, and the dynamics that created a color-blind meritocracy in a color-conscious era.
“Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy,” by Skip Finley, Naval Institute Press 2020, 304 pages, $42.00 (hard cover)
This review was written by Mark Lardas who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in History
My family is from Nantucket, so this is familiar to me. Nantucket used to be quite the place for abolitionists and people would come to speak there from all over the country. As a child I used to read books in the town library, the Athenium, where Frederick Douglas once spoke.
This sounds like a good book, I’m going to buy it.
One of the premier units in the Continental Army was the 14th Regiment, which hailed from Marblehead and consisted largely of fishermen, both black and white. Not only could they fight (notably at the Battle of Pell’s Point), they also were Washington’s amphibious specialists. They evacuated the defeated army from Long Island — men, horses, artillery, and wagons — in a single foggy night. They also took the army across the Delaware back and forth, twice.
Good review, Seawriter.
So many facets of our history are only examined when someone writes engagingly about something that might not even rate a footnote in a general textbook. I wish more works like this were included in school curricula.
Wow, does this sound interesting!
Last year Mr. Charlotte read Moby Dick for the first (only!) time. He described a scene early on when the ship’s crew is assembling, and we were both struck by how diverse (in the real sense) a group it was. Sounds like that was really a thing.
Thanks for the review!