Abstract & Historical Context
"Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." -- Moby Dick
At it's height, the whaling industry was the fifth largest sector of the US economy, and, according to one 1854 American newspaper, New Bedford, MA was the center of the whaling universe. Demand for whaling products was varied: baleen was used to line women's corsets, sperm oil lubricated the machines of the industrial revolution, and whale oil lit up homes across the country. Some 50 years later, New Bedford, once the richest city per capita in the United States, dried up as American energy preferences shifted to another source of oil: petroleum.
Although whaling history and research is oftentimes limited by the survival of maritime documents, information about New Bedford's whaling industry has survived in the form of archived crew manifests and voyage logs, as evidenced by my datasets. This collective information can be explored to learn more about the crew members who embarked on these voyages in search of greater fortune. Indeed, research efforts involving digital history have been undertaken in relation to a wide variety of topics related to New England whaling, a number of which can be found at the page Whaling History Project Gallery. However, none to my knowledge have used a digital history approach to studying the workers underpinning the American whaling industry. Accordingly, the primary objective of this project is to use tools from digital history, including quantitative data analysis and interactive visualizations, to give new perspective to the 10,000 seamen of the 19th century whaling industry. Preliminary hypothesis I am looking to test include (1) whether workers of white ethnicities were promoted faster and earned a greater share of profits than their counterparts and (2) whether it was cheaper to employ a non-white worker in the industry.