PreIndustrial Whaling in the South Shetlands Islands, Antarctica

SENATORE, MARIA XIMENA; SALERNO, MELISA; ZARANKIN, ANDRES

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXXI SCAR Open Science Conference; 2010

Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research

We have studied the most widely spread versions of the Antarctic History that is: recurrences, emphases and silences. Our analyses suggest there is a conceptualization of Antarctic History in terms of exploration vs exploitation. Stories associated with exploration play the leading role whereas those related to the exploitation of sea resources are subdued or simply omitted. Therefore, the widely spread history of Antarctica appears as a sequence of events related to well-known characters at precise dates. Such events do not appear within the frame of any process but as isolated self- contained facts. This approach to history gives no opportunity to the insertion of those other stories in which there are no well-known characters, no precise dates or no memorable events: that is to say the stories of sealers and whalers which form part of the process of incorporating this region to the modern world. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how far back whale-hunting activities stretch -prior to the development of industrial whaling in the South Shetland Islands. The systematic analyses of unpublished written documental sources belonging to New England Historic Archives are presented. The analyses are based on specific documents related to the activity of whaling and sealing ships in the early and mid nineteenth century. Archaeological information is also considered. The results of these analyses contribute in setting much earlier dates for whaling incursions in the South Shetland Islands. We hope the contributions of this paper will help to pluralize the agents of Antarctic History.