At the dawn of the age of oil, whale blubber illuminated the homes and streets of America and lubricated the early machinery of the industrial revolution. The United States was once the most important whaling nation. By one estimate we accounted for 70% of the world’s catch. Now Boston Journalist Marc Songini has written a poignant and thought provoking account of the decline of whaling and the people associated with it.
His book, The Lost Fleet, is centered on the fortunes of New Bedford, Massachusetts which was once one the wealthiest cities in 19th century America. The town motto was Lucem Diffundo, “We Light the World”. By 1850 of the 700 or so whalers in the American fleet 80% sailed from the port of New Bedford. As Herman Melville himself wrote:
The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.
Within a few short years political, economic, and ecology changes had destroyed the fleet and delivered a blow to New Bedford which it has never recovered from.
One punch came with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. After two ill advised efforts to block Charleston Harbor using New England stone laden whalers, the fleet became a special political target of the Confederate Navy. New Bedford’s fleet was decimated first by the CSS Alabama and later by the CSS Shenandoah.
Ecology also played a major role in ending New Bedford’s prominence. As the over-hunted whales retreated further and further north to escape the fleet’s harpoons, whalers where forced to sail further and further to capture them – in some cases to the waters off Alaska. Two unusually early winters in 1871 and 1876 trapped and wrecked many New Bedford ships in the ice around Point Barrow.
Still, the biggest blow to whaling may have been the least dramatic, when in 1859 the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. This shifted the economics of oil, whittling whaling further and further away from profitability.
Yet whaling has cast a very large shadow on the United States in form of the acquisition of Hawaii and Alaska into the Union, one of the greatest American novels Moby Dick, many of its best folk songs, and tattoos. New Bedford was also a hotbed of abolitionism and gave refuge to Frederick Douglass after he escaped from slavery.
With entertaining turns of phrases and memorable characters, Songini captures not only the facts but the sense of the era.
Whaling was a hard, cruel business for men and especially for whales. Today the United States has no whaling industry and it is the national champion of the effort to save them. As we approach the end of the oil age there are many parallels that are worth appreciating and The Lost Fleet is a great book to start considering them.
The recent $900,000,000,000 government bail out of financial institutions raises the question here in United States are we now living in a kleptocracy? A kleptocracy is government that extends the personal wealth of the few at the expense of the many. (The word is loaned to us from the Greek with klepto meaning theft (as in kleptomaniac) and cracy meaning governining body (as in bureaucracy)) It does not seem to me that laws get passed anymore unless there is a strong, well funded effort behind them which means someone economic interest is at stake.
This morning I had a chance to peruse a promotional brochure from the University of Nebraska. The piece was created to encourage high schoolers to apply to the flagship intuition in the NU system, the University at Lincoln. Even though students there are called Cornhuskers, the brochure was so effective it made me want to attend the University. From it I was able to gather:
