WHALING IN ANTARCTICA IN MID 19TH CENTURY. CONNECTING NEW PEOPLE, NEW PLACES AND CAPITALISM ON A GLOBAL SCALE

MARIA XIMENA SENATORE

Fort Collins, Colorado

Encuentro; SCAR History, Humanities and Social Sciences Meeting; 2015

University of Colorado

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the global context in which Antarctica was incorporated to the modern world as part of the expansion of capitalism. In this paper I explore the relationship between Antarctica and the expansive movement of the New England whaling industry in the mid 19th century. I am particularly interested in the moment when the growth of the industry was not due to the introduction of any technological changes but just to the addition of new people and new spaces. The increasing demand for whale oil forced whaling companies to search for and exploit new whaling grounds, which were unknown and farther away. In order to achieve this, they increased the number of ?greenhands? in the crews (men with no whaling or on-board previous experience). Antarctica was a remote unknown place at the beginning of the 19th century. I explore to what an extent the trips reaching Antarctic waters had certain particularities as regards the composition of their crews, their itineraries, the duration of the trips or the degrees of productivity achieved. I organize the analysis on 3 questions a) How much experience did the crew have?, for which I consider the percentage of ?greenhands? on board, b) How long were the trips and which itineraries did they follow?, for which I draw maps of the itineraries and analyze the place Antarctica presents in them, and c) How productive were they?, for which I analyze both the relationship between the number and species of whales sighted and caught and the type of strategy followed in the hunt: whether it was selective or opportunistic. In order to develop a first approach to this task I make a comparative study of 10 whaling trips -some of which reached Antarctic waters- departing from New England between 1850 and 1860, through the analysis of two types of official documents: the logbooks and the crew lists kept from each trip.