[HN Gopher] The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks ...
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       The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket
       Whaleships
        
       Author : vo2maxer
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2021-01-13 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
        
       | benzible wrote:
       | Was this posted because of the current TikTok sea shanty trend?
       | https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/sea-shanties-are-g...
       | 
       | Great examples:
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/therealhoarse/status/1348995617889132545
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/jennyrae/status/1347717112912097282
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | Whalers were a 'sweet spot' for creativity. Lots of resources
       | (whalebone, teeth, baleen, rope etc), a reasonable number of
       | sailors, and stretches of free time. This is where various art
       | forms were perfected including scrimshaw, macrame(!) and
       | knotting. In fact almost all knots (and there are around 5000 of
       | them) were invented on whalers.
       | 
       | Merchant marine and Navy had too many sailors and not a lot of
       | free time. Resources and time were scarce.
        
       | opwieurposiu wrote:
       | The article's price of PS10/bbl for whale oil in 1730 would be
       | PS2,165 or $2,952 today. WTI crude (rock oil) was trading at
       | $53/bbl today. 40-50 bbl could be squeezed out of a good sized
       | whale, making them worth $118k+ each.
       | 
       | Some more concrete numbers are here, not quite as profitable by
       | the 1830s. Multiply by 29 for inflation.
       | https://research.mysticseaport.org/info/ib69-3/
        
         | neaden wrote:
         | I would note that trying to do inflation across these time
         | period is tricky. An agricultural worker in England at this
         | time would have made only about 18 pounds per year.
        
       | randlet wrote:
       | I heartily recommend "In The Heart Of The Sea: The Tragedy of the
       | Whaleship Essex" if anyone is interested in learning more about
       | Nantucket whaling. It is a captivating true story that talks
       | about the characters and culture involved in the whaling
       | community. It is also apparently the story that inspired Melville
       | to write Moby Dick.
        
         | oh_hello wrote:
         | Yes, great book. The story is completely fascinating and in
         | addition great detail into the culture and process of whaling
         | is given.
        
         | Exmoor wrote:
         | Also throwing out the suggestion of _Leviathan: The History of
         | Whaling in America_. I listened to the audio book on Audible
         | and found it pretty interesting.
        
         | nthacker wrote:
         | Came here to say that this is one gripping book
        
       | anarbadalov wrote:
       | These illustrations are gorgeous; i could look at them all day.
       | Luckily there are hundreds of additional journals at archive.org
       | to keep me from doing actual work this morning. It's interesting
       | that the cruelty and brutality of the hunts isn't recorded in
       | these journals. Hard to believe that wouldn't have weighed
       | heavily on these Nantucket Quakers if they were so committed to
       | nonviolence and pacifism, as the author writes.
        
         | zwieback wrote:
         | Your comment about the Quakers sent me googling:
         | 
         | https://chasingflukes.com/reading_guide-overview/glossary-co...
         | 
         | The Whaling-Quaker style of cursing is now very popular on the
         | "Talk like a Pirate Day", especially here in Oregon
        
       | firefoxd wrote:
       | Maybe I'm a few years too late but I highly recommend reading
       | Moby Dick. The shear amount of information in the book in
       | parallel to the story makes believe Melville had access to
       | Wikipedia in the 1800s.
        
         | opwieurposiu wrote:
         | This is a free audiobook of Moby Dick I listen to in the car
         | when NPR is too gloomy. I have listened to it a lot lately.
         | https://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/
        
         | tgarv wrote:
         | Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series is also rich with
         | detail about sailing in the Age of Sail more generally (with
         | some in-depth details about whaling in many of the books). I've
         | been slowly working my way through them for the past year, and
         | I feel like I've learned so much about what it took to sail a
         | ship in those days.
        
         | bloodorange wrote:
         | Among the classics I read, this was the only one I did _not_
         | like. It's an interesting read if one enjoys the setting of a
         | whaling ship of that period. The story itself, I didn't find
         | engaging at all.
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | I must say reading with modern perspective the at points
         | gleeful descriptions of whaling was harrowing in a way that I
         | don't think was intentional. 19th century really was quite a
         | dark period in human history, I'd say far more so than the so
         | called dark ages.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-13 23:00 UTC)