From Publishers Weekly
In her informative, engaging book, Creighton, a history professor and author of Dogwatch and Liberty Days: Seafaring Life in the 19th Century, offers valuable insight into the existence of real-life Ishmaels and Ahabs at the height of the American whaling industry. Her underlying investigation fits into current scholarly interests in "otherness" as she weighs two camps?one insisting sailors were misfits, alien to landbound norms; the other claiming that they were simply "working men who got wet." But Creighton's study isn't sunk by theoretical jargon; it's an accessible reconstruction of shipboard life and the feelings of sailors towards officers, each other and those left behind. Part of her research is based on newspaper accounts and other terra-firma evidence, but more is from the diaries and logbooks of some 200 sailors. What becomes clear is that embarking on a years-long whaling voyage wasn't farming the sea. Everything was different: law, earnings, food, rituals, power structure, social interaction, even gender roles (one sailor notes: "started the sewing society again... stitch on stitch, patch on patch is all the rage."). It was also deeply boring (one record reads: "something was done this day but i dont know what it was now, anyhow it began at 7 A.M. and finished at 2 P.M. what it was i cant remember.") and hugely dirty (another sailor describes rendering the blubber, saying "Everything [is] beshit."). But for all that, when the sailors detail their fear of the journey's dangers, anger at officers, their anxiety that hometown girls may betray them or may reject them altogether as "filthy whalemen," they show themselves to be profoundly, universally human.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"...an intriquing probe of the heyday of the industry..." The Midwest Book Review
"In her informative, engaging book, Creighton...offers valuable insight into the existence of real-life Ishmaels and Ahabs at the height of the American whaling industry....Creighton's study isn't sunk by theoretical jargon; it's an accessible reconstruction of shipboard life and the feelings of sailors towards officers, each other and those left behind." Publishers Weekly
"Margaret Creighton has written a fascinating book on the world of whalemen in whaling's golden era. From her reading in more than two hundred diaries and letters, Creighton shows how factors such as gender, religion, and the profit motive produced the whalemen's rich and lively culture. This is an insightful piece of historical scholarship and a good story as well." E. Anthony Rotundo, author of American Manhood
"...a commendable analysis of the whaleman's experiences....Rites and Passages is important reading for anyone interested in American whaling....an essential reference for further work in this field." Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr., Nautical Research Journal
"...this is a book well worth reading. The depth of research alone is impressive. Frequent quotations from the sailors' diaries and letters allow the reader to form personal opinions of the matters at hand....She has created a convincing "chapter of human history." John F. Battick, International Journal of Maritime History
"...this remains a valuable and important book in a field that remains dominated, at least obliquely, by the genius of Melville." Stephen Innes, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"...artful and engaging....a well-written and beautifully illustrated book..." Simon P. Newman, The PA Magazine of History & Software
"Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870, Creighton takes the historiography of American Whaling well beyond its traditional boundaries to investigate issues as subtle and affective as gender identity, masculinity and femininity, the influence of race and class, and the rites of passage from adolescence into manhood. With this book, the ongoing conversation about the import and effect of American whaling has been advanced and updated significantly. Even the most casual student of whaling should have this intriguing book on his or her self." Glenn S. Gordinier, The Mariner's Museum Journal
Book Description
Uses the personal testimony of over 200 American whalemen to illuminate the social history of deepwater sailing in the mid-1800s.
Book Description
Drawing on their diaries and ship logs, this study places sailors at the center of a social history that explores the ways in which the sea and the shore have intersected. It argues that whaling life and culture were shaped by the American mainland as well as by the exigencies of ocean life.
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