A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 mid-18th 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 […]