Article ID: CBB001212531

Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves (2013)

unapi

IN 1806, THE VERY SMALL SHIP Avos---Russian for maybe---was sailing the waters between Kamchatka and the Siberian coast. The ship's captain, John D'Wolf, reported that whales, fleeing the persecution of humans farther south, were constantly around the vessel.1 On May 13, his shipmate, the German natural historian Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, described a moment of sheer terror when in the middle of the night an especially large whale surfaced right under the ship: We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature setting up its back raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock: instead of this, we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.2 This strange encounter between species was in fact not an uncommon event in the nineteenth-century North Pacific.3 Humans were always running into whales and other animals, although the consequences were not always so benign for either party. Furthermore, the company Langsdorff was keeping while smacking into whales was eclectic, but not atypical. D'Wolf---who was Herman Melville's uncle---hailed from Boston; Langsdorff came from Middle Germany; several Russians, most of them women, were passengers on the ship; and at least three Aleuts provided navigation and manpower. The Avos was a small ark of humanity sailing upon a world thick with aqueous inhabitants. As part of the oft-told narratives of imperial conquest and commercial expansion in the Pacific, the Avos's close call merits little attention. However, historians' new attentiveness to marine environmental history offers the chance to rethink received wisdom about the North Pacific Ocean, and to take its history in some unexpected directions. Jeffrey Bolster has argued that historians are uniquely situated to reconstruct the inextricably tangled stories of people and the oceans, and Kären Wigen hopes that A fuller engagement with marine biology may one day allow … whales and otters and cod … to take their rightful place in maritime historical studies.4 Fulfilling these hopes requires the historian to dive beneath waves in order to examine the relationship between human and animal residents, and to uncover the implications of whale, sea otter, salmon, and fur seal histories for oceanic history. The Avos did not run over a stationary whale, after all, but one whose own movements and history helped produce the collision. While Bolster pointed out the ways in which the ocean must be accounted for in the well-established field of Atlantic history, marine environmental history also has the potential to help historians recover hitherto overlooked oceanic worlds---worlds that embrace both humans and animals. The North Pacific constituted a coherent world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in large part because of the actions of marine animals. Their migrations and their pursuit helped create diverse human societies such as that found on the Avos. Thinking about life beneath the waves---as Langsdorff and his shipmates were forced to do---transforms our view of events on the surface. It uncovers new historical actors, reshapes traditional geographies, and complicates older stories of the Pacific as a location for the projection of imperial and commercial power. In short, marine environmental history accomplishes for the North Pacific what oceanic histories do best

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Authors & Contributors
Bo Poulsen
Felix Lüttger
Arch, Jakobina
Campanella, Sara
Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez
Thomas A. Jefferson
Concepts
Oceans and seas
Environmental history
Marine ecology
Marine biology
Whales
Historiography
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
Early modern
17th century
16th century
Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868)
Places
Pacific Ocean
Northwest Passage
Fiji
Antarctica
Hawaii (U.S.)
Islands of the Pacific
Institutions
United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)
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