“So Wide a Chase”: Melvillian Whaling in the Twenty-first Century Caribbean

MHS Event

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM.

During the nineteenth-century, the era of Moby-Dick, Massachusetts-based whalers began to exploit the waters of the Caribbean, hiring aboard their ships local islanders who learned the skills and traditions of the trade. When American whaling ceased in the Caribbean during the early twentieth century, this history of shared labor inspired the creation of locally-directed whaling operations throughout the islands that have long outlasted the American whaling industry from which they arose. This paper examines the tools, techniques, and traditions of present-day Caribbean whaling as a modern vestige of the whaling era described so eloquently by Melville more than 150 years ago.

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