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Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. By Eric J. Dolin. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. Pp. 460. Cloth, $27.95.)
Reviewed by Brian Rouleau
In the nineteenth-century United States, whaling was big business. From the end of the War of 1812 to the beginning of the Civil War, over three-quarters of the world's whaling voyages departed from American ports, representing a capital investment of nearly seventy million dollars. The industry sent droves of young men to sea and employed many more ashore in a variety of trades essential to the outfitting of vessels and the processing of whale products. This nation, now a signatory of several pacts banning the practice of commercial whaling, outpaced all others in the wholesale slaughter of some of the world's largest mammals. Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan thus seeks to recapture the centrality of whaling to the history of the United States.
Part business history and part social history, the book spans nearly four centuries and is divided into three major parts. The first and strongest section, entitled "Arrival and Ascent, 1614-1774," offers exquisite insight on the ways that whaling drew European settlers across the Atlantic. Indeed, it would seem that whales were never far from the mind's eye of many of the New World's most famous residents. John Smith, for example, wrote extensively of New England's bountiful cetaceans as a means to lure settlers and pique royal interest in his northern ventures. Aboard the Mayflower, one dejected Pilgrim sighed that "we saw Whales playing hard by us, [which] if we had instruments and meanes to take them we might have made a very rich returne, which to our great griefe we wanted" (31). Capital and labor shortages dictated that most whale products in the seventeenth century were extracted via "drift whaling." Creatures that washed ashore were quickly claimed, cut into, broken apart for profit, and even taxed by local authorities. Over time, as the trade moved off shore, its center became Nantucket Island, a place Crevecoeur described as "a barren sandbank fertilized with whale oil only" (121). Dolin does an excellent job...