Download Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling, by Granville Allen Mawer
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Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling, by Granville Allen Mawer
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Gladiator one minute, galley slave the next. Danger, abuse, excitement and tedium, these were the lot of open boat whalemen in the South Seas for two centuries. The Nantucketers, the first and the best, taught the world how whaling should be done. Ahab's Trade tracks the rise and fall of this first global industry and tells the story of the men who made it. Although they whaled in American, British, French, Australian and New Zealand ships, their calling made them citizens of a closed and isolated world unlike that of other seamen. The good, the mad and the ugly: they are all here to tell their stories and describe a way of life so strange that its survival into our century is almost incomprehensible.
- Sales Rank: #2786853 in Books
- Published on: 2000-02-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.30" h x 6.34" w x 9.27" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 378 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Mawer provides an (at times overly) exhaustive account of South Sea whaling, a lucrative commercial enterprise that had its heyday in the early 19th century. Readers will learn everything they ever wanted to know about whaling: the tools of the trade; the techniques for tracking and hunting whales; the methods for extracting whale oil; the difficult relationships among shipowners, captains and crewmen; the fluctuating economics of the whaling trade and its long decline into the 20th century. Nantucket and New Bedford were the twin thrones of America's whaling fleet during the 19th century. As Mawer tells it, British trade restrictions and the depletion of local fisheries forced Yankee whalers south onto hunting grounds near Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Mawer's dispassionate economic analysis of whaling lends a dose of reality to an industry often romanticized. With the emergence of the petroleum industry after the Civil War, the glory days of whaling were over. But the allure of whaling remained, at least in the literary imagination. The author meticulously describes the epic battles of whale against man, citing the famous 1820 sinking of the Essex, which became a source for Melville's whaling masterpiece, Moby-Dick. What Mawer's account lacks, especially when compared with Melville's (an unfair comparison, but inescapable), is the human drama of whale hunting; there are no individuals or events to unify these disparate elements into a compelling whole. Mawer, while scrupulous in detail, fails to elevate readers above the tangled minutiae of a bygone craft, leaving them out to sea. Illus. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Mawer's (Most Perfectly Safe) latest work describes the details of the whaling trade and the life of the whalers in all its brutality and misery. The first offshore whalers, he writes, were probably Basques from northern Spain who began taking whales at sea approximately 1000 years ago. Whaling expanded throughout the centuries--so that by the 19th century, whales nearly had been eliminated in the Atlantic. American whalers from Nantucket and New Bedford were forced to sail the Pacific in search of prey. By then, whalers were little more than galley slaves, starved, abused, and swindled of their pay. By World War I, there was no market for whale oil or bone; whaling had come to an end. Except for Japan and Norway, no one hunts whales openly today. Suitable for libraries with a strong interest in the sea.
-Stanley Itkin, Hillside P.L., New Hyde Park, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“. . . well written and engaging to the end.” —Edward Duyker, author of Nature's Argonaut: The Life of Daniel Solander
“...a rousing, largely anecdotal and occasionally elegant 'saga' of what he calls South Seas whaling.” —New York Times Book Review
“But even in the blubber-logged regions of New England, it is an oddly informative read, which will stand along with other whaling histories published in the United States and Great Britain during the past twenty years.” —The New England Quarterly
“In his attempt to bring to light the history, color, sounds, tedium, ferocity, and language of a bygone industry and way of life, Mawer succeeds brilliantly.” —The Historian
...this saga of the South Seas will indeed be hard to put down once begun.
-The Historian, Andrew G. Wilson
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Great whaling history.
By A Customer
This is a really good piece of work. I'm a maritime history buff and I enjoyed it a lot. If you're at all interested in the early history of the New England states or especially interested in Nantucket and the way people there made their fortunes, I'd give this book a try. It's a good history that reads like a good novel in places. Highly recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Good account, choppy sailing.
By S. A. Cartwright
Probably unfair to have just come off reading Nathaniel Philbrick's IN THE HEART OF THE SEA and then Herman Melville's MOBY DICK. Mawer's history certainly adds to the picture, but in no way grabs the reader with a superlative sea-yarn as do these other novels. Mawer cannot escape recounting the tale of the Essex and the great white whale, or re-affirming much of what Melville taught us about whaling in the long drawn-out middle ground of Moby Dick.
But Mawer's history does provide a better top-down view of the scope of the whale oil industry. A maritime historian from Australia, Mawer lends perspective to the global trade, demonstrating that New Englanders were not alone in plying the world's seas for lucrative spermaceti. British and Scandinavian whalers had their moment as well. Indeed, it is the end-market in London that fuels the bulk of the trade. Mawer takes interested readers through much of the economics of whale fishing. A chapter devoted to Charles Enderby's founding of the Southern Whale Fishery Company reads like a business school case.
The 369 page book is replete with interesting diagrams of boats, fishing ground charts, maps and illustrations. Mawer's excellent glossary would do well to supplement to any whaling literature. All this helps bring the history to life, adding factual detail to the great sea yarns. In sum, study your Mawer before investing in a whale fishing operation. But "gam" with Melville and Philbrick.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Mikey
Extremely informative.
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