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Whaling intelligence: news, facts and US-American exploration in the Pacific

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

FELIX LÜTTGE*
Affiliation:
University of Basel, Department of Media Studies, Holbeinstrasse 12, 4051 Basel, Switzerland. Email: felix.luettge@unibas.ch.

Abstract

This paper investigates the history of a discursive figure that one could call the intelligent whaler. I argue that this figure's success was made possible by the construal and public distribution of whaling intelligence in an important currency of science – facts – in the preparatory phase for the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842). The strongest case for the necessity of the enterprise was New England whalers who were said to cruise uncharted parts of the oceans and whose discoveries of uncharted islands were reported in the local press. The document that stood at the core of the lobbying for an expedition was a table that newspaperman and public lecturer Jeremiah Reynolds had compiled after interviewing whaling captains in the country's principal whaling ports. Presenting whalers’ experience in tabular and synoptic form, Reynolds's table helped forge the figure of the ‘intelligent whaler’, a mariner who had better geographical knowledge than other seafarers. By investigating the paper technologies that produced the ‘intelligent whaler’, this paper shows how Reynolds's translation of ‘whaling intelligence’ from news into facts marks the beginning of the intelligent whaler's long career in US-American debates about expansionism, exploration and science.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Janet Browne, Anke te Heesen, Susanne Schmidt and Robert Brennan for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

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47 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 1.

48 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

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50 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

51 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

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70 Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that being part of the gentry was a requirement for fact production. Shapiro, op. cit. (57), pp. 75–76, however, convincingly shows that while ‘gentlemanly status may have a role for those engaged in creating experimental “facts”, the community could not be so small for the “facts” of natural history gathered from distant climes’.

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74 Beginning in 1848, Matthew Fontaine Maury, superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, collected hydrographical information by asking captains to fill in standardized forms, so-called abstract logs, in exchange for nautical charts drawn on the basis on these very abstract logs. See, most recently, Achbari, Azadeh, ‘Building networks for science: conflict and cooperation in nineteenth-century global marine studies’, Isis (2015) 106, pp. 257–82CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hardy, Penelope K., ‘Every ship a floating observatory: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the acquisition of knowledge at sea’, in Rozwadowski, Helen and Anderson, Katharine (eds.), Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800–1970, Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2016, pp. 1748Google Scholar; and Smith, op. cit. (6), pp. 74–106.

75 John Downes, quoted in Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 239.

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77 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 117. This point has been made most emphatically by D. Graham Burnett, who also quotes Rodman's letter to Reynolds; see Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8), p. 200.

78 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 117.

79 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

80 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

81 H.R. Doc. No. 2, 29th Cong., 1st Sess., 1845, p. 689.

82 Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, 17 March 1843, p. 8.

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86 Melville, op. cit. (1), p. 239; see also Krajewski, Markus, ‘Kapitel 53: The Gam. über oralen Verkehr auf See’, Neue Rundschau (2014) 125(3), pp. 175185Google Scholar.

87 Cheever, Henry, The Whale and His Captors; or, The Whaleman's Adventures, and the Whale's Biography, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850, p. 206Google Scholar.

88 On the US Exploring Expedition see Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8); Joyce, Barry Alan, The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Expedition, 1838–1842, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001Google Scholar; Smith, op. cit. (6); Stanton, op. cit. (27); Margolis and Viola, op. cit. (21).

89 Wilkes, Charles, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, vol. 1, London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845, p. xxvGoogle Scholar.

90 Wilkes, op. cit. (89), p. xxvi.

91 Wilkes, op. cit. (89), p. xviii.

92 Pratt, op. cit. (12), p. 27.