Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Whaling was, in fact, a global industry. From production to consumption, people around the world encountered Pacific whaling in some way. Herman Melville had his narrator Ishmael, in the novel Moby-Dick, exclaim on behalf of Pacific whalemen that “almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!” Whale oil indeed illuminated the world, and Pacific-based labor was essential for that oil’s extraction and distribution although few beyond Pacific waters would ever recognize that fact. Hawaiian men did not labor in the American whaling industry because they knew the usefulness of whale oil, as Ishmael did. What they knew, and labored for, was the oil’s exchange-value: the value of a “lay” [Hawaiian: le], a percentage of total profits that each worker would receive at the conclusion of a successful voyage. Whales were wild animals, but when killed they became commodities. In distant ports, in California, in New York, and in Massachusetts, whale oil and other whale products sold in an increasingly globalized marketplace. Stripped of their oceanic and ecological relationships, and alienated from the labor that hunted and hacked and boiled them down, what remained of whales’ bodies in the marketplace were mere semblances of their former selves. The incentive for Hawaiian workers to hunt these whales was simply, then, to see some value returned from the systematic disassembly of these once-mighty creatures. Whales connected the world, but they were experienced radically differently across the commodity chain from production to consumption.5

  And so, even upon death, the work of whales’ bodies was not yet done. Sperm oil, the cranial liquid extracted from sperm whales’ heads, was fashioned into bright-burning candles, and whale oil, the product of boiled (“tried”) whale blubber—from any type of whale—flickered in every lamp in every home in great American cities. Whales did not just provide illumination. Whale oil was also smeared onto the iron gears that turned the machinery of the United States’ Industrial Revolution. Indeed, New England’s nineteenth-century economy was a surf-and-turf industrial system: liquefied whale blubber maintained the smooth operation of machine parts while California cattle skins provided the leather belting that ran along blubber-smeared gears. Extractive industries all across the Pacific World made the United States’ Industrial Revolution possible, providing the necessary resources to complement nature-poor New England’s monopolization of capital and labor.6

  Extreme distances between sites of production and sites of consumption in the whaling industry inevitably led to the alienation of whale products as commodities from the nature and labor that made them. Only one who had experienced whaling himself, like the young Herman Melville, who sailed on the Acushnet in 1841–1842, could recognize in the flickering illumination of a whale oil lamp the sacrifice of men who risked their lives to slaughter these animals. “For God’s sake,” exclaimed Ishmael, “be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”7

  Melville reserved his greatest condemnation, however, for the female consumers of whale products, women who, according to the fashions of the day, actually wore pieces of whale on their bodies. Sperm whales provided Americans with the best oil for illumination, but bowhead and right whales provided something else: baleen. Often called whalebone, baleen covers the whale’s mouth and filters ocean water of delicious whale food—namely the tiny zooplankton that these whales eat in prodigious quantities. But to entrepreneurial Americans, baleen was the plastic of the nineteenth century. It was an essential component in a most unusual array of products: chair springs, buggy whips, fish rods, bustle supports, corset stays—you name it. It was in this last form, in women’s corsets, where baleen took on its most famous role. It must have been hard for Hawaiian male laborers on American ships to imagine they labored so hard just so that American white women could achieve visibly skinny waists and perky breasts. Over time, Hawaiian whalemen certainly would have learned of these fashions, and seen them among haole in Honolulu or during visits to American ports.8

  For Melville, the association between manly labor and women’s undergarments was just too much. That wealthy women actually wore the disembodied labor of an underpaid, motley crew of whalemen half a world away was a laughable if not condemnable consequence of American imperialism and capitalism. Melville contrasted these women with his romantic imaginings of Pacific Islander women. He believed that Pacific women were free of the foolish material attachments that plagued overcivilized Americans. Melville wrote of the ʻEnata (the Native people) of the Marquesas Islands, a people that he himself encountered after deserting the whaleship Acushnet in 1842: “There [on Nuku Hiva] you might have seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other’s charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor yet moving in whale-bone corsets, like so many automatons, but free, inartificially happy, and unconstrained.” Like most of his literary pals in mid-nineteenth century America, Melville was a romantic. Responding in part to the industrialization that was turning social and ecological relationships topsy-turvy in the United States, Melville saw Pacific Islands and Islanders as unspoiled “Edens” and “noble savages,” not yet conquered by the “ridiculous affectations of gentility” that led women to do things as crazy as wear whalebones on their bodies, constrained “like so many automatons,” like the very machines, in fact, that fueled America’s great industrial transformation.9

  Native Hawaiian women did not wear whalebone corsets, nor did Hawaiian families illuminate dark nights with whale oil. In fact, whales played a comparatively minor role in Hawaiian history, at least until the nineteenth century. When whalers began visiting Hawaiʻi in the 1820s, many Hawaiians must have thought it strange that men would travel half a world away to find a source of illumination, for Hawaiians had an ample source of their own plant-based illumination at home, courtesy of the kukui, or candlenut, tree. Archibald Campbell described in the early nineteenth century how Hawaiians used kukui nuts for illumination: “When used as candles, they string twenty or thirty up on a slit of bamboo, each of which will burn five or six minutes; but they require constant trimming, and it is necessary to reverse the torch whenever a nut is consumed that the one under it may catch fire.” It may have been a crude apparatus, but kukui lamps provided light, and the prospect of chasing down whales for illumination must have seemed absurd.10

  There existed a closer affinity between Hawaiian and American consumption in the realm of fashion. For although Hawaiian women did not traditionally wear whalebone corsets, parts of whales’ bodies did nonetheless hold great value when worn on the body. Aliʻi men and women both sometimes wore lei palaoa, necklaces made of woven human hair attached to a whale-tooth pendant. The whale-tooth embodied mana (divine power), and when worn, the object bestowed this power upon its wearer. American and European trans-Pacific traders, in fact, knew that whale’s teeth were valuable and that they should obtain these whale parts to trade to Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in exchange for items such as sandalwood. Hawaiians and Americans both wanted whale parts to wear on their bodies, but there was a world of difference in the meanings ascribed to these objects and the modes of production necessary to obtain them.11

  BENEATH THE WAVES

  Between the local and the global—between Honolulu and Boston—lies a vast ocean. Historian Ryan Tucker Jones has eloquently argued that the history of the world’s oceans must be told from the bottom up. Literally, we must approach the history of the ocean from the bottom of the sea floor looking upward, understanding how ocean currents, marine flora and fauna, and other agents below the surface shape and alter the human narratives that dance upon the waves. Not only do oceans represent seven-tenths of the world’s surface, but much of what goes on in the history of oceans takes place beneath the waves. To understand the space-time experiences of Hawaiian whale workers riding on the ocean, we must first understand the space-time parameters of what goes on below. I approach these many interfaces between human and nonhuman natures from
the perspective of the “workscape,” the idea that the work environment of nineteenth-century whaling was a co-construction of both human and cetacean labors. Whales, scientists, and Hawaiian workers all experienced the nineteenth-century Pacific in different ways, even as they were all chasing each other (or being chased) in the same spaces at the same times.12

  Nineteenth-century Hawaiian whale workers encountered a variety of cetaceans in the Pacific Ocean. They hunted sperm, bowhead, and right whales, and in lesser frequency, humpbacks and grays. Each of these species inhabited different parts of the ocean at different times of the year. For example, sperm whales rarely left the Pacific Ocean’s tropical and temperate waters. Sperm “bulls,” the adult males, sometimes ventured further north (or further south in the southern hemisphere) in small groups on explorations apart from the female cows and their young calves. It remains unclear why the male sperm whales venture off in this way—normally this exodus occurs in the northern and southern summers when ocean temperatures warm—but they return to warmer waters once they are ready to breed. Many nineteenth-century humans believed that there were specific whale “grounds,” or gathering areas, in the ocean—such as the offshore grounds west of Peru and the Japan grounds—but it is not clear how this concept of grounds came into being. Some sperm whales migrated beyond grounds, or between grounds, complicating the fixed quality of these places.

  One way to understand whale grounds is to focus on why whales congregated, or at least appeared to congregate, in these spaces. Sperm whales feed mainly on squid, and squid enjoy deep, cold ocean habitat, thus drawing sperm whales downward into ocean depths in search of prey. For whale hunters to locate the whales, however, it is necessary that they be present at the surface of the ocean. One explanation for why sperm whales congregated near the surface of the ocean, say, at the Japan grounds, was the presence of numerous underwater seamounts. Steep underwater slopes and shelves tend to cause upwelling, a process whereby deep, cold ocean water is pushed to the surface, along with cold water squids and other marine species that normally inhabit deep ocean waters. But sperm whales often dove deep for their meals, and other whale grounds have been associated with downwelling, the downward movement of ocean waters. That said, after deep dives the sperm whale must come up for air. These explanations also do not explain the significance of other grounds, such as the offshore grounds west of the Galapagos Islands. These are located on top of a surprisingly flat sea floor. And yet this ground sits along the path of the famous Humboldt Current which regularly (except during El Niño years) brings cold Southern Ocean waters north to the equator, providing rich food sources for seabirds and Humboldt penguins. It may be that the Humboldt Current feeds the offshore grounds with squid that, in turn, attract sperm whales.13

  The feeding practices of right and bowhead whales, on the other hand, were and are completely different. These baleen whales lack teeth and therefore lack the ability to chomp down on squids and fish. Instead, the baleen in both right and bowhead whales’ mouths functions to filter ocean water of its smallest animal species: shrimp, krill, and other crustaceans. In general, baleen whales live on zooplankton, the small drifting animals at the bottom of the food chain that likely comprise the largest percentage of total biomass of all living things on Earth. The hairy bristles within whales’ baleen capture zooplankton for digestion; the whales then discharge the remaining water from their mouths. Baleen whales depend on areas of high zooplankton productivity to survive, and thus baleen hunters of the nineteenth century necessarily had to go where the zooplankton was. Today we know that the Bering Strait region—a major hub of whaling activity in the second half of the nineteenth century—is perhaps Earth’s most productive zooplankton hot spot. No wonder that a whaling boom ensued in the decades following the discovery of this whaling ground in 1848. Corset-wearing upper-class women of the nineteenth-century United States might not have known it, but maintaining their fashionable figure depended on the geography of zooplankton production in the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Similarly, Hawaiian migrant workers might not have fully known what forces brought them through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean, but behind the economic explanations were also ecological ones: without zooplankton there was no baleen, without baleen there were no corsets, and without whalebone products on the market there were no jobs for Hawaiian men.14

  Whalers interested in exploiting the seas were helped along the way by scientists interested in synthesizing knowledge about the world’s oceans and fixing cetacean mobilities onto maps. Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Navy is credited with producing the first modern whale map. His Whale Chart, published in 1851 by the National Observatory for the United States, was easy to read and utilize by ships’ captains. Maury used basic colors to indicate whale species distribution: sperm whale grounds were colored in pink; right whale grounds in blue. Where there existed a mix of the two, Maury applied the color green. He drew these colors within the lines of a grid consisting of five-degree-by-five-degree quadrants (“squares”) breaking down the world’s oceans into mathematical, quantifiable portions. To demonstrate differences in whale density, Maury drew images of tiny whales into most squares. One whale figure denoted the square was satisfactory for fishing; two marked “that square to be much frequented by that species.” In addition, the letters w, v, s, and a were placed in squares to denote the season when fishing was best: winter, spring (vernal), summer, or autumn. Maury’s map represented something of a scavenger hunt for extractive commodities, with pink squares pointing toward sperm oil and blue squares to baleen. To maximize efficiency, a ship’s owner might consult Maury’s chart to determine exactly where a ship should be at any given time in order to extract a particular whale product. This is more of an economical map than an ecological one.15

  Another whale chart, produced nearly four decades later, has a different story to tell. A. Howard Clark’s map, published in The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, a government-sponsored scientific review of American fishery industries in the 1880s, did what Maury’s map failed to do: show change over time in whale demography. Clark’s map demonstrated that whaling grounds were not permanent or fixed sites for unbridled extractive exploitation, but rather volatile and dynamic loci of whale congregation, altered by countless contingencies such as the pressures of whale hunting and the behaviors of the whales themselves. Unlike Maury’s cheery pink, green, and blue colors, Clark’s map used only two shades: dark and light. Dark areas denote “Present [Whale] Grounds.” Light areas, “Abandoned Grounds.” Clark’s map is more about people than whales. It shows where whalers used to go and where they now go, and thus conveys not simply ecological data about whales, but economical data about changes in the whaling economy.16

  In depicting geographies informed by capitalist desires, Maury’s and Clark’s maps demonstrate the limits of human knowledge and understandings of mid-nineteenth-century whale worlds. Whaling may have linked Hawaiʻi to the larger Pacific World, but Hawaiians at this time only knew whales, and knew the ocean, along these geographies of economic interest and necessity, not the expansive, ecological space that whales knew beneath the waves. That Pacific whale populations were dynamic and responded to the pressures of the whale hunt—that whale grounds themselves were anything but grounded, that they shifted over space and time due to ecological disruptions and transformations—is a story that scientists struggled to grasp, and that workers only came close to understanding when a full season out on the ocean resulted in nothing brought up from beneath the waves.

  FIGURE 3. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Whale Chart, 1851. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

  FIGURE 4. A. Howard Clark, Map of the World on Mercator’s Projection showing the Extent and Distribution of the Present and Abandoned Whaling Grounds, 1887. Map reproduction courtesy of the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington Libraries.

  WHALE RIDERS

  Rounding
Cape Horn during the Southern Ocean summer, the whale ship Italy of Long Island, New York arrived at its destination of Lāhainā, Maui in April 1855. There, the ship paid a “Permit to ship Natives,” valued at six dollars, so that they could recruit Hawaiian men. They signed up three Hawaiian workers, Kahula, Kewau [Kuna], and Anakala [Anakalla]. Anakala and his comrades hunted whales in the northern Pacific Ocean from May through October. In November the Italy returned the men to Lāhainā.17

  Movements such as Anakala’s from Maui to the North Pacific and back again, all within the span of six months, are representative of the varied textures of Hawaiian whale riding. This dance—getting onto and off of foreign vessels, again and again—is representative of thousands of Hawaiian whale workers’ experiences. Both legal and illegal movements—signing contracts, breaking contracts, deserting ship—were common moves. These, in turn, were synchronized to the more macroscopic rhythms of fluctuations in ocean and air temperature, the favorability of the hunt, the seasonality of labor recruitment, and the volatility of global markets, all of which influenced the space-time experiences of Hawaiian whale workers.

  For the greater part of the nineteenth century the majority of Hawaiian migrant laborers did not migrate to any one place and stay there for very long. Rather, they were incessantly mobile, living on ships at sea. They did not establish long-term residency in places of work and sacrifice. Rather, their work environments were liminal, in-between spaces, yet also representative of integral nodes and pathways within the Hawaiian migrant labor experience. The story of the American whale ship Italy, and its Hawaiian crewmembers, shows how men like Anakala got caught in, and sometimes had to fight their way out of, a merry-go-round of recruitment, work, broken contracts, and seasonal disruptions, all of which evidenced new ways of calculating time and measuring space in the capitalist ocean.18