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Reporting from: https://exhibits.ucsd.edu/starlight/setting-sail-life-in-the-wooden-world/feature/whaling

Setting Sail: Life in the Wooden World

Whaling


Francis Gibbons. Whaling Journal kept on board the ships Abigail, Armata, and Statira (1844-1847)

Whaling Journal kept on board the ships Abigail, Armata, and Statira

Whaling vessels were akin to large, stench-filled floating factories that processed the whales caught at sea. The keeper of this logbook, Francis Gibbons, included an original watercolor of a sperm whale and whaling tools, as well as the ship’s tryworks. The tryworks was a huge furnace made of brick with two cast-iron pots on top that boiled the whale’s blubber into oil. This innovation allowed nineteenth-century whaling vessels to remain much longer at sea. He noted that the watercolor was: “Painted by my friend George A Colehamer off the coast of Colombia, in South America, in November 1845.”

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Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale

Author Herman Melville produced the most famous depiction of a nineteenth-century whaling voyage in American literature. You can compare Melville’s celebrated fictional depiction of whaling with our own original manuscript journals penned at sea. Here the author describes seamen employing the scalding try-works to render the whale’s oil after a successful capture.

The first edition of Moby Dick was published in 1851. However, this 1979 version, adhering to Melville’s exact text, included illustrations of many of the whaling events and processes described, such as the try-works. This edition of Moby Dick was designed by Arion Press, illustrated by Barry Moser, and published by the University of California Press in 1979.

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Reuben Russell. A Journal Kept Onboard the Ship Asia of Havre during a Whaling Voyage to the Coast of Patagonia and elsewhere (1829-1831)

Reuben Russell. A Journal Kept Onboard the Bark Pioneer (1834)

A Journal Kept Onboard the Bark Pioneer (1834)
A Journal Kept Onboard the Bark Pioneer (1834)
A Journal Kept Onboard the Ship Asia of Havre during a Whaling Voyage to the Coast of Patagonia and elsewhere
A Journal Kept Onboard the Ship Asia of Havre during a Whaling Voyage to the Coast of Patagonia and elsewhere

These two journals were kept by the same man, Reuben Russell, aboard two different whaling vessels. Russell was a member of a successful Nantucket, Massachusetts whaling family. While on the ship Asia, he recorded the harpooning of sixty-one whales and the successful killing of thirty-three. You can see here Russell’s depiction of a port as well as his reporting of whales caught (with a stamp of a whole whale) and the ones that got away (with a stamp of just the tale).

View A Journal Kept Onboard the Bark Pioneer in Digital Collections

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View A Journal Kept Onboard the Ship Asia of Havre... in Digital Collections

Catalog record for A Journal Kept Onboard the Ship Asia of Havre...