Abstract
By his own admission, Midwesterner Greg Bailey, editor of The Voyage of the F.H. Moore and Other 19th Century Whaling Accounts, knew little of nineteenth-century whaling when he discovered the unpublished narrative of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whaleman Samuel Grant Williams. The narrative is in two parts; a 1916 synopsis of Williams’s 1873–1874 sea journal and 15 pages of an unfinished book. Any unknown account such as this has intrinsic value that varies depending on content and treatment. In some, the value is the meticulous record of a voyage, unvarnished and largely unedited, that offers readers a previously unseen set of experiences from which to extract their own analyses on everything from weather patterns, to flora and fauna, to native cultures. In others, a strong editorial voice weaves a comprehensive tale from scraps and fragments. In the best, a rich source is presented in full with an editor exploiting other resources to introduce, conclude, annotate, and offer some pithy comments that tie up the entire package.
Bailey takes a novel approach to this account of an 1873–1874 whaling voyage out of Boston. He leads by presenting Williams’s writings in their entirety and with minimal editing, but also with minimal comment or assessment. Instead, to flesh out the 85-page narrative, he excerpts three seminal contemporary accounts of the American whale fishery: Francis Allyn Olmsted’s Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (1841), J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), and Charles H. Robbins’s The Gam (1899), thereby adding 100-plus pages to create a publishable-length product. The three nineteenth-century works – a cruise to regain health, a diatribe against the industry’s abuses, and an old captain’s reminiscences – are respected, established primary sources and are not under review.
Bailey’s choice of these excerpts will no doubt expand an unfamiliar reader’s knowledge of nineteenth-century whaling if read after (or perhaps before) Williams’s account. A far more valuable strategy would have been to integrate this information throughout the original narrative, apply it to the knowledge gained via the new material, and build a complete picture. Instead of a beginning, middle, and end, Bailey presents four separate and incomplete pictures.
In a spare preface, Bailey offers a summary of the utility, scale, scope, and economic importance of American whaling, a thumbnail genealogy of Williams, and some discussion of the ship and captain. These are helpful to the lay reader and adequately display what must have been an ambitious self-education on the topics. Nevertheless, in these few analytical moments, Bailey spends too much time discussing the horror, bloodiness and moral repugnance of the whale fishery, and dwells on racist or jingoistic language. I recall fewer than a dozen slurs (many unknown but clearly derogatory), mostly directed at various islanders. The hot-button ‘n-word’ appeared only two or three times; far fewer than in other contemporary accounts. This focus is distracting, as nearly everyone interested in historic whaling has already concluded that their interest is not incompatible with modern environmental sensibilities or racial attitudes.
Unattended questions include how Bailey discovered the account, and why Williams created it. He wrote the narrative in 1916 using his 1873–1874 sea journal and seems optimistic, positive, and at times almost delighted to be whaling, even though the industry was notorious for monotony, hard work, low pay and poor conditions. While Bailey includes parts of J. Ross Browne’s polemic, as editor he never questions how the interceding 50 years might have led Williams down the primrose path of nostalgia. Likewise, Bailey does not question why Williams chose to revisit the experience of his youth in the early decades of the twentieth century; a time when maritime topics gained a certain cachet in American culture. It is no accident that these decades saw dozens, if not hundreds, of old men publishing accounts of their youthful sailing adventures.
Ostensibly, if one sets out to write a book about whaling, one should know something about whaling. This reader wonders how such a rich source might have fared in the hands of someone more versed in the nineteenth-century American whale fishery or better skilled at working with primary source materials. To his credit, Bailey did track down the vessel’s official logbook and he cross-references it throughout. However, he sometimes fails to make seemingly obvious connections. At one point, narrative-writer Williams tells that second mate Charlie Tucker left the ship at Key West on 1 June, yet when referencing the official logbook, editor Bailey calls the writer who ‘had a talk with the Old Man [the captain] and consented to give me my discharge’ on 28 May ‘anonymous’. In Williams’s unfinished book manuscript (which was handwritten), Bailey falls back on using ‘[illegible]’ when more experience with either nautical terminology or handwriting would have helped him extrapolate missing words. In the most egregious example, ‘We . . . soon had the good old bark fastened [illegible] and stern’, there are precious few words that would reasonably fit. And at the risk of sounding peevish, though not entirely Bailey’s fault, repeated typesetting substitutions of the numerical ‘1’ for a lower-case ‘l’ (often within the same word, such as ‘litt1e’) were unfortunate, to say nothing of the contemporary graphic designer’s ‘copyright 2014’ cover illustration of a banal and inaccurate whaling scene, when one considers the number of classic whaling images available in the public domain.
Still, the value of this work is that readers gain access to an unknown account, which might lead a neophyte to other important original accounts of American whaling. For more serious readers, the rationale behind the book’s lens of nostalgia is worth exploring. Moreover, every newly-discovered observation on topics ranging from natural history to foreign cultures to the marine environment adds to a growing knowledge base. Bailey deserves all the credit for discovering and bringing this unknown account to light. But this reader longs for ‘what might have been’ had this particular source been in more capable hands.