"I just begin to find out that whaling will never do for me and have determined to leave the ship here if possible." That sentiment, expressed by a foremast hand aboard the ship Caroline in 1843, is one shared by many of the whalemen in this fascinating book. Interest in Herman Melville's Moby Dick has contributed to a substantial literature on the history and lore of the industry. But not until now has the vast body of surviving whaleship logs and journals been used to paint an encompassing picture of the difficult but colorful life aboard nineteenth-century American whaling vessels. Briton Cooper Busch, author of a definitive history of the American sealing industry, in this book only incidentally discusses the actual chase for whales. His focus instead is the life of whalemen at sea, and particularly the harsh discipline that kept men aboard through long and often dispiriting years. Busch depicts the complex social world aboard ship, defining and detailing such issues as crime and punishment, competing racial elements, the social distance between officers and men, sexual behavior, and the role of women aboard ships. For oppressed, discouraged, or simply bored whalemen, several escapes existed, from the rarest of all mutiny through labor protests of various types, to individual desertion or appeal to an American consul abroad. To each of these topics Busch devotes a chapter. He also provides glimpses of those occasional moments of relief such as a Fourth of July celebration and such somber moments as a death at sea. Fascinating details and original quotations from individual whalemen make this book more than a study of general trends. For anyone with even a casual interest in whaling, it is indispensable.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

From time immemorial man has pursued the whale. Follow the Whale, which was first published in 1956, tells the story of the people who have engaged in that pursuit—its historical, cultural and economic consequences. In narrative never less thrilling for sticking close to the known facts, biologist Ivan Sanderson has recreated the whole fabulous saga of whaling through the ages—not only from the beginning of recorded history but long before. “The story that follows is an attempt to display this fascinating facet of human endeavor in some semblance of its entirety and in proper perspective by a process of corralling the forgotten and more neglected aspects of whaling history and the new discoveries about the whales themselves, and weaving them into a continuous web of narrative. It is primarily natural history, in both senses of that term. It is the history of man’s conquest of the sea, a saga with a theme so inexorable that it can only be described as natural, and it is a natural history of a group of animals than which there are none more mysterious or romantic in the world. To follow the whale is to follow the whole course of one of the most important and significant aspects of our own history. It is virtually the story of the conquest of our planet.”