Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling [Hardcover]

Granville Allen Mawer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2000

Gladiator one minute, galley slave the next. Danger, abuse, excitement and tedium, these were the lot of open boat whalemen in the South Seas for two centuries. The Nantucketers, the first and the best, taught the world how whaling should be done. Ahab's Trade tracks the rise and fall of this first global industry and tells the story of the men who made it. Although they whaled in American, British, French, Australian and New Zealand ships, their calling made them citizens of a closed and isolated world unlike that of other seamen. The good, the mad and the ugly: they are all here to tell their stories and describe a way of life so strange that its survival into our century is almost incomprehensible.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mawer provides an (at times overly) exhaustive account of South Sea whaling, a lucrative commercial enterprise that had its heyday in the early 19th century. Readers will learn everything they ever wanted to know about whaling: the tools of the trade; the techniques for tracking and hunting whales; the methods for extracting whale oil; the difficult relationships among shipowners, captains and crewmen; the fluctuating economics of the whaling trade and its long decline into the 20th century. Nantucket and New Bedford were the twin thrones of America's whaling fleet during the 19th century. As Mawer tells it, British trade restrictions and the depletion of local fisheries forced Yankee whalers south onto hunting grounds near Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Mawer's dispassionate economic analysis of whaling lends a dose of reality to an industry often romanticized. With the emergence of the petroleum industry after the Civil War, the glory days of whaling were over. But the allure of whaling remained, at least in the literary imagination. The author meticulously describes the epic battles of whale against man, citing the famous 1820 sinking of the Essex, which became a source for Melville's whaling masterpiece, Moby-Dick. What Mawer's account lacks, especially when compared with Melville's (an unfair comparison, but inescapable), is the human drama of whale hunting; there are no individuals or events to unify these disparate elements into a compelling whole. Mawer, while scrupulous in detail, fails to elevate readers above the tangled minutiae of a bygone craft, leaving them out to sea. Illus. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Mawer's (Most Perfectly Safe) latest work describes the details of the whaling trade and the life of the whalers in all its brutality and misery. The first offshore whalers, he writes, were probably Basques from northern Spain who began taking whales at sea approximately 1000 years ago. Whaling expanded throughout the centuries--so that by the 19th century, whales nearly had been eliminated in the Atlantic. American whalers from Nantucket and New Bedford were forced to sail the Pacific in search of prey. By then, whalers were little more than galley slaves, starved, abused, and swindled of their pay. By World War I, there was no market for whale oil or bone; whaling had come to an end. Except for Japan and Norway, no one hunts whales openly today. Suitable for libraries with a strong interest in the sea.
-Stanley Itkin, Hillside P.L., New Hyde Park, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 378 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (February 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312228090
• ISBN-13: 978-0312228095
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great whaling history., March 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling (Hardcover)

This is a really good piece of work. I'm a maritime history buff and I enjoyed it a lot. If you're at all interested in the early history of the New England states or especially interested in Nantucket and the way people there made their fortunes, I'd give this book a try. It's a good history that reads like a good novel in places. Highly recommended.