Here’s the trailer for the film Minds in the Water, which is “a feature-length documentary following the quest of professional surfer Dave Rastovich and his friends to protect dolphins, whales and the oceans they all share”.
There’s a long, thoughtful review of the film’s UK premiere at Vulpes Libris.
Andrew Nikiforuk has a piece over at the British Columbia-based web magazine The Tyee about whaling and the oil industry, reviewing a book about Moby Dick by energy banker, Robert Wagner Jr. Wagner’s reading of the novel in the context of the modern oil industry and its unwillingness to countenance alternatives offers an interesting perspective on our reliance on cheap oil, and the lengths to which we are prepared to go to defend it. As I’ve noted before, the hunting of whales in the Arctic, before Moby Dick was written, also has parallels with the oil industry in the twenty-first century. By about 1820, as the whales began to be ‘fished out’ in the Greenland sea, whalers moved on to the Davis Strait, to the West of Greenland, which, coincidentally, is where modern oil companies are preparing to drill for oil as their desperation for new reserves increases. The Davis Strait proved lucrative for a while, but a lot more dangerous, and even that, in the end, was fished out:
A couple of years ago Robert Wagner Jr., a well-known Houston energy banker, read the famous novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a former whaler. It’s a rambling and gritty tale about the 19th whaling industry and America’s first energy boom.
The narrative, which richly details the nature of an economic obsession, squarely harpooned Wagner, a good friend of the late energy critic, Matthew Simmons. “I was blown away by the synergies and the comparisons of whaling with the oil and gas industry, ” says Wagner.
For more than 40 years the 69-year-old banker financed Texas oil deals and had a front row seat to the world’s most volatile commodity while working for the likes of Bear Stearns and Arthur Andersen.
And so the maniacal pursuit of a white whale to illuminate North American homes haunted Wagner. It also reminded him how every age irrevocably passes into another whether people are prepared for change or not.
“The rampant obsessive exploration, production and consumption of hydrocarbons that saturates our society today can be read much like the situation for the men on the Pequod,” notes Wagner. The world of “There she blows” and “Give it to him” actually led, if not descended to “Drill, baby, drill.”
I love the Internet. I really do. People are out there doing imaginative things, and coming up with wonderful stuff like Moby Map, an interactive map based on Moby Dick, which “compiles over 350 geographic locations from the novel (with a few mysteries still unsolved!) into an interactive flash based Google map of the world. Also included is the plotted course of the Pequod, accompanied by descriptions from throughout the novel and icons showing historic whaling grounds.” Brilliant.
Hat-tip to Power Moby Dick.
The question of food on board an Arctic whaler is a matter of some mystery. While there are accounts of the proceedings on board ship in the act of pursuing and catching whales, little is known about the lives of the whalers themselves. William Scoresby Jr. documents the provisions loaded onto a whale ship in preparation for the fishery: vast quantities of salt pork, hams, and beef, as well as bread, and potatoes, but little else. Variety might be had in the form of whale meat, fish, or seabirds. Scoresby notes that the price of Shetland oysters doubled when ships were nearby.
Basil Lubbock, whose The Arctic Whalers (1937) remains an important work in the history of the ‘fishery’ devotes little more than a paragraph or two to the subject of food, and then only to say that the ‘half deck’ men received better quality rations than the rest of the crew. These men were skilled hands, and included the second mate, harpooners, cooper, carpenters, and the specksioneer. They shared a mess, where they received their own special menu, which included a ration of cheese, and ‘Sea Pie’. Lubbock gives the following description, taken from a sailor’s log, written in 1820:
This savoury dish was made in layers or decks; the first one of bones to keep the paste from burning to the bottom of the pan; then followed a stratum of fresh beef paste and seasonings, deck after deck, until the great kettle was full. Sufficient water was added to enable the mess to be cooked. (Lubbock, p.53)
Captains fared rather better. The closest recipe I can find to this is in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), in the chapter headed For Captains of Ships:
To make a Cheshire Pork Pie for Sea
Take some salt pork that has been boiled, cut it into thin slices, an equal quantity of potatoes, pared and sliced thin, make a good crust, cover the dish lay a layer of meat seasoned with a little pepper, and a layer of potatoes, then a layer of meat, a layer of potatoes, and so on, till your pie is full. Season it with pepper, when it is full, lay some butter on the top, and fill your dish above half full of soft water. Close your pie up and bake it in a gentle oven.
Elsewhere in the same chapter is a recipe for a ‘Catchup to keep twenty years’:
Take a gallon of strong stale beer, one pound of anchovies washed from the pickle, a pound of shalots peeled, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of whole pepper, three or four large races of ginger, two quarts of the large mushroom flaps rubbed to pieces. Cover all this close and let it simmer till it is half wasted then strain it through a flannel bag, let it stand till it is quite cold, then bottle it. You may carry it to the Indies. A spoonful of this to a pound of fresh butter melted makes a fine fish sauce or in the room of gravy sauce. The stronger and staler the beer is, the better the catchup will be.
Cross-posted from Letters to Elizabeth
In late eighteenth century England there were few opportunities for rising up through the social ranks, or even improving on one’s financial situation. Most people lived a life of hand to mouth, dependent on the harvest, and the availability of work. Labourers tended to remain labourers, and ordinary sailors remained, on the whole, ordinary sailors. In its boom years, between about 1760 and 1820, Arctic whaling was an exception. Sailors who had talent with the harpoon, or who showed leadership in a whaleboat, had a real chance to earn more, and to have a ‘career’ in the modern sense. Whalers were paid a share of the profit on the catch, so in a good year, some of them might have more money than they needed to see them through the winter. It was not uncommon for whaleship captains to have begun as ordinary seamen, and then, having impressed the owners of the ship, made their way through the ranks to a command of their own.
This was true of William Scoresby Sr., the father of the better known Scoresby, the Arctic scientist. Scoresby Sr. was originally a farmer, but went to sea in 1785 as an ordinary sailor on board the whale ship Henrietta. He so impressed the master, and the ship’s owners, that in 1791, two years after the birth of his famous son, he was given command of the Henrietta. This success allowed him to move his family to a large house in Whitby, to send young William to a good school, and eventually to become a shipowner in his own right.
In Elizabeth Gaskell’s romance Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) there is evidence that this was not an isolated case. The novel is not one of Gaskell’s best known, and it is at times rather melodramatic, but it is one of only a small number of novels set amongst whalers. Early in the novel, Gaskell describes the town of Monkshaven (Whitby, North Yorkshire) in the 1790s, and the press gangs that roamed the streets waiting for the return of the whalers from Greenland. Whalers were exempted from the press gang, as the supply of oil was deemed too important to put at risk. Whalers signed up for the following Spring’s voyage could, in theory, show their papers and be set free. In reality, and in Gaskell’s story, whalers were as susceptible as any other sailor, whether they had papers or not. Interestingly, Gaskell speculates that the possibility of social improvement made Northern whalers less willing to be pressed than sailors in “southern towns,” since a sailor on the deck of a frigate had much the same hard life as a sailor on a cargo ship:
… it is certain that the southerners took the oppression of the press-warrants more submissively than the wild north-eastern people. For with them the chances of profit beyond their wages in the whaling or Greenland trade extended to the lowest description of sailor. He might rise by daring and saving to be a ship-owner himself. Numbers around him had done so; and this very fact made the distinction between class and class less apparent; and the common ventures and dangers, the universal interest felt in one pursuit, bound the inhabitants of that line of coast together with a strong tie, the severance of which by any violent or extraneous measure, gave rise to passionate anger and thirst for vengeance. A Yorkshireman once said to me, “My county folk are all alike. Their first thought is how to resist. … [From Sylvia's Lovers, Chapter 1.]
