The Golden Age of Whaling attracts my interest because it was such a dramatic and absurd undertaking. During its peak years, the industry had a few hundred sailing ships searching vast areas of open ocean for the earth’s largest living creatures so they could kill them and process their carcasses at sea to obtain valuable […]
Rising Income Inequality during the Golden Age of Whaling
If you worked on a whaleship during the Golden Age of Whaling (ca. 1820-1860), you wouldn’t have known your salary. From the lowliest “boy” all the way to the captain, the salary wasn’t a fixed daily amount, but something distinctive to the whaling industry known as the “lay.” When you a contract to work on […]
The Menu from the Infamous 1918 “Whale Steak Luncheon”
On January 6, 2016, the New York Public Library announced that it was expanding access to more than 180,000 public domain images through improved interfaces and tools (e.g., APIs, metadata). I started looking through the collection and found some amazing items (so far, dozens of images reviewed and 20 “keepers” for further review). Now and […]
A “Conservation Luncheon” in 1918 Featured Whale Meat
Updated, May 2016: 1) The mystery of the “ice cream, bisque of black bread a la Delmonico” is solved in my post about rye bread ice cream! 2) I found the original menu in the NY Public Library archive and comment on it in this post about the whale meat luncheon menu. If you follow […]
How A Voyage and Desertion Inspired Herman Melville
In a previous post about whaling, I mentioned that desertion was a financial strategy used by management and labor. For management, the goal was sometimes to cause a sailor to desert on the return voyage, after the hold was full of whale oil and baleen, thus increasing the profits for those who stayed on board […]
Whaling Voyages as a Team-Building Exercise
(Updated, 12/12/16: fixed broken links, updated cross-references) This post, like the previous one, comes from my recent Ahab-lite obsession with whaling, as well as the recent general interest in Hermann Melville’s monumental Moby Dick – which celebrated its 161st anniversary in 2012 (including my slow plod through it over many months, the Google doodle […]
The Golden Age of Whaling
The mid-19th century was the “golden age” of whaling in America, with hundreds of ships making long voyages – often into uncharted parts of the oceans – to kill whales and process them into key ingredients of the Industrial Revolution: oil to illuminate homes, offices, streets and factories at night; and lubrication for machines. Candles […]