Synopsis

Traditional accounts of whaling celebrate exotic locales and dangerous exploits but shed little light on the lives of the men who went to sea. Rites and Passages places sailors at the center of a social history of whaling and explores the ways in which the history of the sea and the history of the shore have intersected. Drawing on the evidence of ship logs and sailors' letters and journals, Margaret S. Creighton examines American whalemen during the industry's peak—the mid-nineteenth century—and argues that whaling life and culture were shaped by both the American mainland and by the exigencies of ocean life. Unlike other accounts of seafaring, this work brings gender into the maritime equation, not only with a discussion of the ways that women figured in this male-dominated world, but also with an examination of the ways that seafaring served as a rite of passage into manhood. Professor of History at Bates College, Margaret Creighton is the author of Dogwatch and Liberty Days: Seafaring Life in the 19th Century and co-editor of Iron Men and Wooden Women: Gender and Maritime History. She has been guest curator at The Peabody Museum of Salem and the U.S.S. Constitution Museum of Boston.

Publishers Weekly

In her informative, engaging book, Creighton, a history professor and author of Dogwatch and Liberty Days: Seafaring Life in the 19th Century, offers valuable insight into the existence of real-life Ishmaels and Ahabs at the height of the American whaling industry. Her underlying investigation fits into current scholarly interests in ``otherness'' as she weighs two campsone insisting sailors were misfits, alien to landbound norms; the other claiming that they were simply ``working men who got wet.'' But Creighton's study isn't sunk by theoretical jargon; it's an accessible reconstruction of shipboard life and the feelings of sailors towards officers, each other and those left behind. Part of her research is based on newspaper accounts and other terra-firma evidence, but more is from the diaries and logbooks of some 200 sailors. What becomes clear is that embarking on a years-long whaling voyage wasn't farming the sea. Everything was different: law, earnings, food, rituals, power structure, social interaction, even gender roles (one sailor notes: ``started the sewing society again... stitch on stitch, patch on patch is all the rage.''). It was also deeply boring (one record reads: ``something was done this day but i dont know what it was now, anyhow it began at 7 A.M. and finished at 2 P.M. what it was i cant remember.'') and hugely dirty (another sailor describes rendering the blubber, saying ``Everything [is] beshit.''). But for all that, when the sailors detail their fear of the journey's dangers, anger at officers, their anxiety that hometown girls may betray them or may reject them altogether as ``filthy whalemen,'' they show themselves to be profoundly, universally human. (Aug.)