American and International Whaling in the South Atlantic, c. 1770-1820: Toward and Ocean History

Abstract

This chapter outlines an international environmental history of whaling in the South Seas (an area covering the Southern Atlantic, the Indian and the Pacific Oceans). Evidence from three archives largely un-consulted in international whaling history — the Saint Helena Archive, the Cape Town Archive Repository, and the Brazilian Arquivo Nacional is presented. Published primary sources and various national whaling historiographies are re-interpreted as well. The extent of whaling in the South Atlantic has been underestimated due to a focus on U.S. data which has not accounted for non-US whaling. In making that accounting, this chapter argues that turn-of-the-nineteenth-century deep-sea whaling was not discretely national. “American” whaling, as traditionally understood, did not exist in isolation but was part of a broader ecological and economic phenomenon that included whalers flying other flags in the same processes. Past application of national labels to an oceanic process that by its very nature crossed national boundaries has occluded whaling’s transnational nature. Here oceanic archives reveal the intimately interlinked nature of American and global whaling.