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Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

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Growing up as I did in southeastern New England - a childhood that included well-remembered trips to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts - whaling has long been part of my personal fabric of the historical past. Eric Jay Dolin's "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America" meticulously details that part of the past. In his preface to the book, Dolin (trained in environmental studies) sets out his purpose as being to "re-create what whaling was, not to address what it should be now." And similarly he warns that "this book does not pass judgment on American whalemen by applying the moral, ethical, and cultural sensitivities of modern times to the actions of those who existed in a bygone era."

Dolin succeeds admirably in re-creating historical whaling, going back to early English and Dutch whaling efforts and discussing whether coastal American Indians actually engaged in anything beyond "drift whaling" (i.e., opportunistically making use of the carcasses of whales washed ashore). Allthough Basques had crossed the Atlantic as early as the mid-Sixteenth century to pursue "shore whaling" (rowing out from shore installations to hunt and kill whales), it was in particular the English colonists of northeastern American in the Eighteenth century who particularly made an art of deep-sea whaling, sailing out into the Atlantic on long voyages to pursue their prey. Whaling became a major source of economic tension in the decades leading to the American Revolution. Although the years of war (and the War of 1812 a few decades later) for a time diminished the strength of the American whaling industry, it grew dramatically by the time of its "Golden Age" in the 1840s, although various factors including the ready availability of petroleum from newly discovered oil wells soon thereafter sent whaling into a severe decline from which it never recovered.

"Leviathan" is well-written, both comprehensive in scope and yet at the same time vividly detailed, examining the romance of whaling in the South Seas (a romance particularly enjoyed by those who were safe and dry on land) and the dirty, harsh reality of spending months and even years at sea hunting the great creatures. Whaling was not a good way for the typical seaman to earn a fortune; indeed, at the end of a long voyage a man aboard a whaler was likely to make barely enough money to get riotously drunk before shipping out again. Dolin carefully examines the bleak economics of whaling and the political complications that sometimes accompanied it (such as the precarious and uncomfortable position occupied by the great whaling center of Nantucket during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, faced with the overwhelming might of the Royal Navy and the necessity to make a living almost exclusively through an industry that inevitably exposed its ships and men to capture or death at the hands of the Royal Navy. And Dolin explores life on whaling ships with its great demands and dangers and its everyday facets. Like Herman Melville, Dolin does not neglect writing about the whale himself, weighing the relative qualities of such whales as the right, the sperm, and the bowhead.

Reading Leviathan by Eric Jay Dolin was indeed a treat. This book tells the tale of the History of Whaling in America with precise details and in such a narrative form that one is intrigued by reading the volume. I truly did not want the chapters to end-as the writing was so well done.

The comprehensive foot notes for each chapter, were in themselves a treat to read and the knowledge that they contained was indeed valuable and enhanced the reading of the book.

I grew up in New Bedford, MA, once the whaling capital of the world, and took a course in the History of Whaling many years ago--and much of what Dolin tells I had never heard. Kudos to Mr. Dolin. I cannot wait for his next book to appear

If you have read Herman Melville's _Moby Dick_, you have an accurate idea of what American whaling was in the middle of the nineteenth century. Melville did not just tell the story of mad, doomed Captain Ahab, but included one chapter after another about whales, the history of whaling, the process of capturing and processing whales, and much more. It is a wild book for a wild enterprise, and for all its magnificent pessimism, it was published in 1851 when American whaling was booming. Melville must have thought that whaling would go on forever, but technology and economics changed vastly only a few decades after his masterpiece came out. His book was badly received and forgotten until the 1920's and will never be forgotten again, but American whaling, upon which much of our economy and even our democracy was based, will never come back. The great industry has a big and entertaining profile in _Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America_ (Norton) by Eric Jay Dolin. Dolin is an environmentalist who has written books on wildlife refuges, but this is certainly not a "Save the Whales" treatise. Whether whaling ought to continue (by other nations, of course) is not covered here, nor whether Americans should have been involved in so gross a slaughter for so long. Whalers could not have had our ecological credentials; they were merely taking part in an industry of fishing in an extreme form. They also could not have expected that their particular enterprise would be so influential to American history, one of Dolin's themes here.

The passengers of the _Mayflower_ itself saw whales playing off the beach of their new land, and learned from the Indians that the shoreline could be combed for cast-up whale carcasses. These "drift whales" (usually pilot whales) could be cut up and boiled for oil to be burned in lamps. Refusing to wait for the next whale carcass to be cast up, the colonists took up shore whaling, whereby they set out in open boats with harpoons to kill the whales and bring them back ashore to process the oil. Eventually, they had picked the off-shore regions clean of most of the whales and had to look further out. The technology of such ventures was improving, so that larger ships could be used, eventually with their own on-board tryworks to render and barrel the oil. Just as whalemen had to venture further and further to accomplish shore whaling, so they had eventually to sail all over the world to find sperm whales. It was a tough occupation. The hunt was not the only danger, although a sperm whale could turn a whaleboat into splinters with its tail. The process of rendering a whale involved the sharpest of instruments, often wielded on sixteen foot poles, while the ship tossed on the waves. There was a constant danger of fire from the tryworks, or simple bad weather that could wreck a ship, or even vengeful whales, which existed in reality as well as fiction.

Twenty years after the heyday of the time of _Moby Dick_, American whaling was spiraling downward. Dolin cites many factors in its eventual demise. There was disruption from the Civil War. There was outdated technology; American whalemen were slow to take up explosive harpoons or harpoon guns because they were not part of whaling tradition. Whales were getting harder to find, even in the wide-ranging voyages of the nineteenth century. But Dolin reproduces an 1861 cartoon showing the main culprit. The cartoon has happy whales improbably clothed in formal dress, at a Grand Ball in honor of the newly discovered oil wells in Pennsylvania. A banner in the background reads, "We Wail No More for our Blubber". Other means of lighting were coming from the ground and not the sea, and the strips of baleen (not found in the jaws of the sperm whale but in others like the bowhead) lost their market once fashions became corset-free around the turn of the last century. The American whale fishery is no more, but will be preserved forever in Melville's great work. Dolin's is less epic, but is quite as entertaining as a factual volume can be. He reports on the great fishery, but does not make moral judgment about the rectitude of the slaughter, nor does he have much to say about the whaling trawlers that can now take as many whales in a year as a New Bedford whale ship could take in its working lifetime. Here is a great whale miscellany, with stories of mutinies, military war waged against whalers, killer whales, Nantucket tycoons, stenches, grime, ships entrapped in polar ice, women sailors disguised as men, prostitution, scrimshaw, the opening of Japan, foreign policy intrigues, and more. Dolin's book has a great bibliography, and splendid illustrations, and presents a long and complicated history full of engaging details on every page.

I am the author. Just wanted to let people know that the Kindle version of Leviathan has been fixed -- it now includes both the text and the images. Thanks. I had to give the book a ranking to make this comment, so I hope you don't mind that I gave it a 5-star. What else would you expect!

I'm giving the book five stars for content: many other reviewers have covered the book's qualities more than adequately. My review is strictly about the Kindle edition. There are two serious problems with the Kindle edition:

1. There are no links to access the end notes. Given that it is very cumbersome to access end notes in Kindle without links, and given that this book makes extensive use of end notes, I consider the lack of links to be inexcusable.

2. There are no images. The printed editions have numerous high-quality black and white illustrations, which would be a natural to include in the Kindle book. However, there is not a single illustration in this Kindle edition.

Based on these two problems, I'd say the publisher tried to cut corners in creating a Kindle version of this book. I will be requesting a refund, and I recommend that people hold off on ordering this book for Kindle until the publisher releases a version that is functional and complete.

Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having nothing in particular to interest me in current fiction, I thought I would embark on a quest to re-read (or, read for the first time) some of the classic literature I had neither understood nor appreciated in high school and college. My first effort was Melville's Moby Dick -- I daresay I was the only person reading it on the beach that summer. I fell in love with it and wished to master it. So, among the other works I've tackled, I re-read Melville's symbolic adventure yearly...whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.

A dear friend, learning of my affinity for the tale of the white whale, recommended Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan. This book is more than deserving of all the kudos and awards it's garnered so far. Mr. Dolin makes what could be dry, dusty subject matter vibrant and relevant; the historical figures are alive and the depth of detail he uncovered in his research is astonishing. Everything about whaling is explained in the context of the times (Colonial America, the Civil War, Quasi War) and everyday life -- both on whaling voyages and for families at home -- is an important part of the story.

When I pick up Moby Dick again this fall, it will be with a new appreciation and perspective for Ishmael, Ahab and the Pequod. I recommend this book without reservation for anyone interested in Moby Dick or American history.

Squeezing the history of whaling in America into a mere 370 pages of text is no easy task, but Eric Jay Dolin grapples manfully with his task.
He has enough factoids left over for dozens of page-long end notes.
With the possible exception of religion, no other aspect of our history is as well-documented as hunting whales. It seems that almost everyone who could write about whales felt compelled to.
The Basques, who started it all, and the Indians didn't write, but everybody else did. And whaling seemed to anticipate many of the great disputes of the colonial and early national period.
Generations before Sam Adams, "dangerous, rash and pig-headed" Long Island whaleman Sam Mulford was protesting taxation without representation.
More than a hundred years before John D. Rockefeller had heard about oil, the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers had formed a spermaceti trust.
Before Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan, Capt. Mercator Cooper of the whaler Manhattan had forced the Shogun to crack the door -- and introduced the Japanese to their first contact with African-Americans.
There may be a wooden codfish hanging over the speaker's desk in the Massachusetts legislature, but whales brought in more money.
With such a wealth of material, Dolin necessarily skimps a few topics. Whaling may have been of utmost importance to Maui and Honolulu in the mid-19th century, but the islands rate only a couple of sentences in Dolin's big picture.
But I noticed only two important elements that he left out entirely.
He writes about women who went to sea in whalers, both the rare disguised seamen before the mast and the more numerous captain's wives (and sometimes children as well); but he does not mention the practice of some captains of hiring island women as "temporary wives" for the length of a cruise.
And while he mentions the taking of "scrag" whales in the colonial period, he treats these as undersized or sick right whales, ignoring a theory that the scrag was really the Atlantic gray whale.
The Atlantic gray, unlike the Pacific gray, is extinct, but what caused that is unknown. If it was hunting, then it is the only example of a cetacean that was killed off by men.
Dolin ends his tale in 1924, when the Wanderer set sail on what was to have been the last American whaling expedition of the Golden (and Wooden) Age.
Wanderer wrecked just outside the harbor.
By then, the steel-muscled harpooneers, the bucko mates and the gimlet-eyed captains of America's fabulous -- but veritable -- whaling era had been replaced by industrialized steel vessels from Norway, Britain, Russia and Japan.
The whales had won. They are still here, but the American whaleman is deader than the dodo.

As one who's been on a killing ship when she was hunting sperm whales in the South Indian Ocean, I can say that Eric Jay Dolin knows what he's talking about. The whaling industry comes alive in Leviathan under his skillful pen and fills in one important element in the great growth of our country in the 18th and 19th centuries. If you've been around these great creatures, if you've taken a trip just to spot one, if you've lamented the continued hunting of them then this book is a must-read. Whaling's become a political issue in recent years, but Dolin's book deals with time before that, an little-known part of America that's well in the past but should not be forgotten or neglected. Whales helped build New England and Leviathan opens a door on an era that stands at the foundation of our country.

The history of whaling is an interesting topic in both surviving for consumption and its use in the economy of that time. To note - the Quakers owned the largest percentage of whaling ships and were very successful in their endeavors but the coming of the industrialization age curtailed the need for whale oil. Excellent read, on time, great condition.

Unsurprisingly, Eric Dolin provides us with a history of American whaling. What is surprising, though, is the enjoyable way in which he tells the story.

This is not a dry academic history, nor is it an economic history of the impact whaling had on the growth of America. Instead, it is the tale of how Americans, starting in earliest years of colonization, and running through the demise of whaling just after World War I, were shaped by the pursuit of these giants of the deep.

Dolin spans the globe in his tale - he tells the reader of early whaling just off the East coast of the United States, he discusses ships chasing whales around the Cape Horn, up into the Arctic, and even in the South Pacific, near Australia. His history focuses on the men (and sometimes women) who worked on the boats and what these folks did with the whale.

Naturally, it is a sad tale to know that Americans used a very small portion of the whale and simply discarded the remainder of the carcass, but it is important to know why - and Dolin gives us that information; he tells us that the whale oil was the desired product, and only part of the whale was needed for that product.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a tremendous amount - I could smell the salt in the air during the whaling voyages, and I could envision the docks teeming with activity when the ships were either setting out or returning from their (often) several year treks around the globe. Fascinating reading for anyone with any interest in American history, critical reading for anyone with an interest in how Americans viewed the whale and other creatures of the deep during this 300 year period.