[HN Gopher] The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks ... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-13 23:00 UTC)