Men’s experiences of the whale’s body became even more intimate upon return to the whaleship with their tethered corpse. It was the harpooner’s duty to flense and strip the dead body. To do this, the harpooner stood on the whale’s back while it floated precariously on the surface of the water beside the ship. “So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck,” explained Ishmael, “the poor harpooner flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.” The only thing protecting the harpooner from falling off the whale and into the ocean, and then being crushed between the whale’s body and the ship, was the monkey-rope, a cord attached to a canvas belt that he wore attached to the ship above, or in the case of Melville’s tale, attached to another man’s waist aboard the ship. On Melville’s Pequod, the monkey-rope was fastened between Queequeg’s and Ishmael’s bodies. It symbolized the precarious interdependence of these two men’s lives. Were either one to slip, both men would fall to their deaths.21
Whether from the perch of the lookout or from the perch of a whaleboat in the throes of the chase, Hawaiian men on American whaling cruises experienced the wind and salt water in their faces and upon their bodies. Harpooners had an even greater vantage—rowing into “death’s jaws”—to experience nature’s ultimate sublimity, its darkness and unsettling danger. The whale, however, became most real to Hawaiians and other whalemen when its body was finally brought onboard—in chunks and in pieces, in blood and in slime—over the course of multiple days as the deceased was boiled and drained of everything good that it had to offer to American commerce. At the center of this operation—the transformation of whale bodies into whale products—was the try-works. Located at the center of the ship, the try-works were the great fires that workers stoked and kept burning day and night. Huge iron cauldrons sat atop the flames. Whales, flensed and stripped, were cut into, and chunks of blubber removed and thrown into iron pots. The blubber was then tried. It went in as solid mass but under the pressure of heat whale bodies became part meat and part oil. The meat became crispy like it had been dipped into a deep-fryer. The resulting fritters were scooped out by members of the whaling crew with big ladles. These were by-products; their only usefulness was as fuel. Ladlers removed the fritters and often threw them back into the fire. As such, whale blubber was often tried by the heat of its own burning body.22
No wonder some have referred to the nineteenth-century whaleship as a floating factory. When the try-works were alight, the ship belched black smoke into the air, poisoning the area where whalemen worked and slept. The whale oil and its crispy fritters, bubbling wildly in the cauldrons as the ship rocked back and forth, led to splashing oil and flashes of fire. Men ladling and stirring this heinous mixture sometimes received burns or were otherwise injured. Ishmael referred to his vessel as the “fire-ship.” Describing one of the most dirty and dangerous industrial work environments of the nineteenth century, he stated that “[the whale’s] smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit!” In life and in death, cetacean bodies—their sight, texture, and smell—comprised Hawaiian men’s work environment.23
Hawaiian men died, too, in the Arctic whaling industry. Their bodies were not boiled down as whale blubber was, but the treatment of injured and dead workers’ bodies says even more about the corporeality of nineteenth-century whaling work. When a Hawaiian seaman died, his family was eligible to receive the income he had accrued while working at sea. This was just one more way that the Arctic came home to Hawaiʻi. For example, when a Hawaiian seaman named Kaiko expired aboard the ship La Manche, his employer was liable to pay all of the man’s earnings to his wife, Lilia. However, according to the records of the Honolulu Harbormaster, who oversaw “amounts received & Disbursed on a/c [account] of Deceased Natives,” 5 percent of Kaiko’s compensation was deducted for an “Agents fee” and even more went to the costs of “Advertising.” It seems that in order to connect Lilia with her husband’s employer, she necessarily had to hire an agent, and from the ship’s perspective, they had to run advertisements in order to find Lilia, so in the end Kaiko’s wife was liable for all the costs involved with receiving her husband’s compensation. Of Kaiko’s accrued $38.33, Lilia received $34.18.24
It was not only seamen’s wives that collected deceased men’s earnings. In Honolulu in the mid-1850s, as Hawaiian whalemen were dying in the Arctic Ocean, earnings were collected at times by fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, and even once by a brother-in-law “having charge of [the] deceased’s wife & child.” In one case, the death of a seamen named Paahao on the ship Oahu resulted in the division of his earnings between his wife ($27.12½) and his father ($27.25). These records eerily hint at the exchange-value of Hawaiian men’s bodies. The men’s use-value was in the work they performed aboard ships, but their bodily exchange-value was evidenced in this transformation of their labor power into wages, an extracorporeal remnant of their former selves that family members could collect even as their material bodies had sunk to the ocean floor.25
The hazards of whaling work were numerous, and the opportunities for injury and death manifold. Captains had little sympathy for sick workers because if they were too sick to work then they became a drain on the ship’s limited resources. Such was the case in 1857 when the ship Corinthian returned to Honolulu with Kaai, a Hawaiian seaman who had been sick for probably quite some time. As each man received his earnings, the Harbormaster recorded that “Captain Russell refused to pay anything [to Kaai] as Kaai had been ill with [illegible].” Sickness was seen by some employers as a breach of contract, meaning that a seaman’s lay was no longer guaranteed if his body became unable to perform the work. But as was common with most Hawaiian maritime workers, most ended up in debt to their employers. When the seaman Moluila “fell from aloft and was killed” on the bark Goswold, he was still listed as “in debt” by the Harbormaster upon the ship’s return to Honolulu. Even as his body may have sunk to the bottom of the sea, there was still this brutal reminder to his family that nothing would be coming home, not even a dollar in exchange for his bodily sacrifice.26
Employers refusing to pay a deceased worker’s earnings to his family was not uncommon. In the fall of 1861, the Harbormaster recorded next to the name of a Hawaiian seaman named Onomaoli: “(dead) 27.96 Captain kept his money.” Five days later, news of another deceased whaleman came to Honolulu: Kanaali was listed as “dead nothing coming to him.” Since the only record of whether a Hawaiian seaman was owed compensation was in the hands of his employer, it was probable that some employers sought to deceive family members out of their deceased loved one’s earnings.27
The other way to get rid of unwanted bodies—and to resist compensating the workers and their families—was to discharge them. Scores of Hawaiian whale workers were removed from whaling ships in the 1850s and 1860s. This was the case with two Hawaiian seamen on the ship Delaware in 1860 who were forced off the ship for being “sick.” In cases such as these, men not only lost their jobs but potentially had to find their way back to Hawaiʻi. There was the case of the seaman Nailiile who was removed from the ship Harrison in 1860 and “put on shore sick.” His comrade, Kailipololuua, fared little better. He was, according to the Harbormaster, “left behind through mistake on the part of Kailipololuua [himself].”28
All of these “mistakes,” including the gravest of all—getting sick—put Hawaiian whale workers on fragile footing in the Arctic whaling industry. They had to maintain the physical fitness of their bodies or else they might very well find themselves put ashore by impatient and unsympathetic captains. They also had to compete with other workers’ bodies. In Arctic whaling, this meant proving the suitability of their tropical kanaka bodies for work in the cold in contestation with Yankee bodies from New England
that most employers believed were better fit for the Arctic environment.
Ships’ captains paid attention to workers’ bodies, noting the differences among men from various regions of the world. Whalemen came in all shapes and sizes; they spoke various languages, and their skin was a rainbow of hues. Also, each whaleman came with a conditioned body. The Yankee seaman’s body had been conditioned by a childhood of recurrent cold winters and snow; the Hawaiian seaman’s body conditioned by an upbringing in a tropical land. Yet on top of these men’s actual bodies were also placed so many different ideas about their bodies. These were arguably more influential in shaping seamen’s experiences of work and environment than any actual physical differences among them. One commonly held idea regarding seamen’s bodies was that they were malleable and in danger of—or capable of—racial transformation. Seen this way, every man, not just Queequeg, was “neither caterpillar nor butterfly.” In liminal maritime spaces, white men could become not white, and thus nonwhite, through exposure to sea and sun. Hawaiian bodies, on the other hand, were largely seen as fixed and immutable, and thus not capable of the same racial metamorphoses as Yankee men. Ideas about seamen’s bodies in the nineteenth century thus contained an interesting double standard: while it was commonly understood that “white” men from New England were capable of becoming “brown” or “black,” the opposite—of Hawaiian men becoming “white”—was not possible. In other words, seamen’s bodies seemed to be capable of changing in only one direction: toward darkness, toward racial degeneracy. The sea apparently preferred (and made) dark-colored men. A dual discourse therefore developed regarding the dangers that white men faced from working in tropical climates—because their bodies could change—and the simultaneous dangers facing Hawaiian men in high latitudes—because their bodies could not change. This discourse shaped the employment opportunities available to different men, but also served as a site of resistance for workers—particularly Hawaiians—who challenged these assumptions about their bodies.29
Melville wrote of bodily changes at sea—of changes to white men’s bodies that left them looking no longer exactly “white.” Some Yankee seamen painted their bodies with ink. Euro-American sailors were fascinated by Polynesia’s tattoo culture. The word tātau (tattoo) is of Polynesian origin. In Hawaiian kākau means, in the most general sense, “writing.” Before 1820 and the arrival of foreign Christian missionaries to Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language did not have an alphabetic script, yet Hawaiians nevertheless “wrote”—in images rather than words—with tattoos upon their bodies and with images stamped onto kapa cloth. In America, however, tattooing was seen by many as corrupting the racial purity of white men. An arm that was half white skin and half dark ink was no longer “white.”30
More fundamentally, white seamen on long voyages had exposed their skin to the sun for years, and this, too, transformed their racial appearance. These bodily changes were Ishmael’s first introduction to the whaling industry as he bunked down at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford, Massachusetts, before signing up for work aboard the Pequod. There he met a soon-to-be shipmate who had just come back from a four-year whaling cruise. Ishmael remarked on the man’s racial transformation: “I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast.” At breakfast, Ishmael met yet more “brown” whalemen. One man’s “cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue,” Ishmael stated, guessing that he had probably come ashore only three days ago. Another man, “a few shades lighter,” had certainly returned to New Bedford earlier than the first whaleman. “You might say a touch of satin wood is in him.” Of a third worker, on his face “still lingers a tropic tawn,” Ishmael noted, “but slightly bleached withal.” He had returned many weeks earlier, Ishmael concluded. Overall, Melville’s perception of white men’s bodies was that they were malleable; they adapted to hot and cold weather equally well, as long as they were okay with being racially unstable for a time. Old salts like the first mate Starbuck—men who had spent their entire lives at sea—had bodies so altered by decades of maritime work that they appeared to Ishmael as if they belonged in a separate racial category. In describing Starbuck’s altered body, Ishmael remarked, “though born on an icy coast, [he] seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. . . . Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness . . . was merely the condensation of the man. . . . His pure tight skin was an excellent fit.”31
While bodily changes at sea had the potential to disrupt a man’s racial identity, the same changes could also potentially reinforce his gender identity. Margaret Creighton has argued that white men of New England sought out whaling work as an opportunity not just to prove their manliness but also to eradicate femininity from their bodies. Rough, physical work in harsh environments may have diminished a man’s whiteness, but some “white” men embraced this change as a corporeal expression of an invigorated masculinity. Creighton writes of one whaleman in 1855 who wrote in a letter to loved ones back home: “I am getting quite used to work now, and my hands can testify to that quite plainly—for they are as hard as horn inside—pulling and hauling on hard ropes—and the outsides have a most beautiful brandylike brown color . . . the handling of ropes & tar has a very visible effect on the hands.”32
Herman Melville had less to say about the malleability of nonwhite men’s bodies. Upon first meeting Queequeg, Ishmael was taken aback by the Pacific Islander’s strange appearance. Ishmael described the Polynesian man’s skin variously as “purple” and “purplish yellow,” a racial “type” entirely new and foreign to him. As Ishmael discreetly watched Queequeg undress for bed at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford, he soon recognized that the man’s body was covered head-to-toe with tattoos. It was tattoo ink that gave Queequeg his mottled purple appearance. Later, Ishmael noticed how sunburn and tattoo interacted upon Queequeg’s arm, “no two parts of which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade.” The islander was a handsome man, Ishmael admitted. It was his simultaneous attraction to, and repulsion from, Queequeg’s “savagery” that titillated Ishmael. So much so that Ishmael could not look away as Queequeg undressed. And to top it off there was Queequeg’s stately head, which, as Ishmael described it, was extremely impressive, something like that of “George Washington cannibalistically developed.”33
From the decimation of whale bodies to the disposal of workers’ bodies to the degeneration of white men’s bodies, nineteenth-century whaling was an industry based on bodily destruction. In the Arctic Ocean, bodies were put to yet a further test. The challenges facing Hawaiian whale workers in this environment were manifold: cold, snow, wind, and ice among them.
BODIES ON ICE
The Arctic whaling season of 1876 was a summer of misfortune. At least twelve ships were lost in sea ice that year; fifty-five workers lost their lives. One of the ships that did not make it was the Desmond. One of its crewmembers was Charles Edward Kealoha. He along with J. Polapola of the whaling brig William H. Allen are the only two Hawaiian whale workers known to have written down their experiences of the Arctic in the Hawaiian-language press. Their stories speak to the violence of this northern world where workers’ bodies faced danger from snow, ice, wind, and fellow humans.34
The Desmond left Honolulu in February 1876 and was wrecked in the sea ice near Point Tangent on the North Slope of Alaska on September 5, 1876. After the ships grounded, some of the Hawaiian workers mutinied. According to Kealoha, he himself did not participate in the mutiny, but he was forced at gunpoint to stay with the Desmond and its mutineers. Eventually he wandered off with a few fellow shipmates, a Tahitian crewmember named Kenela and two other Tahitian seamen, onto the ice and into Inupiat society. It was only after an entire year on land, in August 1877, that Kealoha and Kenela were finally re
scued by the brig William H. Allen. The two Tahitian men they had befriended did not survive, having succumbed near Point Barrow, Alaska, unable to accommodate their bodies to the unforgivingly harsh environment.35
During Kealoha and Kenela’s year on the North Slope of Alaska, they lived with the local indigenous people and learned about Inupiat society and culture. Moreover, they experienced a full year’s worth of changing seasons in the Arctic, experiencing all the effects of changing weather conditions upon their bodies. Kealoha, for example, quoted from the whaling song “Famous is the cold of the Arctic, overwhelming the entire body” to help orient land-bound readers in Hawaiʻi to the whaleman’s unique bodily experiences of Arctic cold. Rather than “body,” ka ʻili can be translated as “the skin,” making this line “completely overwhelming the skin.” Whereas the skin is a barrier between the inner body and the outside world, Kealoha’s song reflects on the penetrating force of cold upon his body and how the air got in and “overwhelmed” the skin’s efforts to keep it out.36
Kealoha, in his own words, had more to say about the relationships between the Arctic environment and his body. “Since this was my very first trip to this area,” he wrote, “I had never experienced a cold like this, my fingers had become numb, my feet could not feel the slightest bit of warmth, and because of the chill, my lips were quivering with the cold. The warm clothes that we consider thick and heavy were of no use in this place.”37 Like the “skin,” Kealoha mentions the specific body parts that were affected by the cold. This cold was unlike anything he had ever experienced before, he wrote. It affected his fingers, his feet, his skin, and his lips. He could no longer feel his fingers, his “feet could not feel the slightest bit of warmth,” and his “lips were quivering with the cold.” These descriptive statements helped readers back home in Hawaiʻi imagine what this kind of cold felt like and understand how the Arctic environment interacted with and upon workers’ bodies.
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 13