Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race

Extract

A glance at the cover of Nancy Shoemaker's latest book evokes the recognizable history of early American encounters. We are no strangers to the scene: the hulking ship, resolute newcomers, diminutive canoes, and half-naked natives. We know how the story goes. But the pages within present a meticulously researched and skillfully structured study of lesser-known contacts that eventually impel us to revisit the cover and reimagine the dichotomies in American history of native and newcomer, colonized and colonizer.

Shoemaker argues that nineteenth-century native New England whalemen “lived, worked, and were imagined” oceans away from the race-based assumptions about Indians confronting their kin back home in the Northeast (p. 198). Occupying an array of positions aboard ship, from rank-and-file harpooners and foremast hands on up to privileged masters and first mates, Indians labored alongside and frequently above white and black workers in a Euro-American industry at the forefront of U.S. imperialism. Here, in the remote, dangerous, and unpredictable waters of Pacific whaling, captain and crew deemed profit and prejudice incompatible. Many natives consequently secured a modest prosperity from the business, becoming in the process accidental architects of colonialism and globalization. The racial caste of Indians in nineteenth-century New England, Shoemaker concludes, proved highly situational and deeply contingent.