Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 - Hardcover

Creighton, Margaret S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521433363 ISBN 13: 9780521433365

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Traditional accounts of whaling celebrate exotic locales and dangerous exploits but shed little light on the lives of the men who went to sea. Rites and Passages places sailors at the center of a social history of whaling and explores the ways in which the history of the sea and the history of the shore have intersected. Drawing on the evidence of ship logs and sailors' letters and journals, Margaret S. Creighton examines American whalemen during the industry's peak--the mid-nineteenth century--and argues that whaling life and culture were shaped by both the American mainland and by the exigencies of ocean life. Unlike other accounts of seafaring, this work brings gender into the maritime equation, not only with a discussion of the ways that women figured in this male-dominated world, but also with an examination of the ways that seafaring served as a rite of passage into manhood. Professor of History at Bates College, Margaret Creighton is the author of Dogwatch and Liberty Days: Seafaring Life in the 19th Century and co-editor of Iron Men and Wooden Women: Gender and Maritime History. She has been guest curator at The Peabody Museum of Salem and the U.S.S. Constitution Museum of Boston.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Rites and Passages presents a social history of American whaling. Drawing on the diaries of sailors and on ship logs, this volume examines the beliefs and behaviors of men who labored at sea. It looks at the relationship between sailors and society ashore, reexamines the "tyrannical" sea captain, and studies the social dynamics of the ship's company. In particular it considers the ways in which whalemen related to women and how seafaring served as a rite of passage into manhood. For more than a century the American public has understood whaling primarily through the work of a gifted man named Herman Melville. It is clear that other whalemen had tales to tell as well, and in Rites and Passages they share their compelling vision of life at sea.

Reviews

In her informative, engaging book, Creighton, a history professor and author of Dogwatch and Liberty Days: Seafaring Life in the 19th Century, offers valuable insight into the existence of real-life Ishmaels and Ahabs at the height of the American whaling industry. Her underlying investigation fits into current scholarly interests in "otherness" as she weighs two camps?one insisting sailors were misfits, alien to landbound norms; the other claiming that they were simply "working men who got wet." But Creighton's study isn't sunk by theoretical jargon; it's an accessible reconstruction of shipboard life and the feelings of sailors towards officers, each other and those left behind. Part of her research is based on newspaper accounts and other terra-firma evidence, but more is from the diaries and logbooks of some 200 sailors. What becomes clear is that embarking on a years-long whaling voyage wasn't farming the sea. Everything was different: law, earnings, food, rituals, power structure, social interaction, even gender roles (one sailor notes: "started the sewing society again... stitch on stitch, patch on patch is all the rage."). It was also deeply boring (one record reads: "something was done this day but i dont know what it was now, anyhow it began at 7 A.M. and finished at 2 P.M. what it was i cant remember.") and hugely dirty (another sailor describes rendering the blubber, saying "Everything [is] beshit."). But for all that, when the sailors detail their fear of the journey's dangers, anger at officers, their anxiety that hometown girls may betray them or may reject them altogether as "filthy whalemen," they show themselves to be profoundly, universally human.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521433363
• ISBN 13: 9780521433365
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250