Indians at Sea and on the Beach: New England Indians and Oceania in the Nineteenth Century

Americans who ventured into the Pacific in the nineteenth century brought with them a racial template that framed the peoples of Oceania as “Indians.” They lived in wigwams, paddled canoes, and carried around tomahawks. My paper examines the resilience and consequences of this racial template by focusing on New England Indian whalemen. About one out of five whaling vessels leaving New England in the nineteenth century had at least one American Indian crew member aboard. They stood at the crossroads of this domestically constructed racial template and its transportation and transmogrification abroad to encompass new peoples. I look at how the racial template played out in three different settings. (1) On the whaling vessel, an informal racial hierarchy conjoined and competed with the formal hierarchy of rank to position American-born men of color below whites but above “Kanakas” (“Sandwich Islanders” aka native Hawaiians) and other foreign laborers. (2) In the Pacific, nationality similarly trumped race, as New England Indians identified with and were claimed by the United States and their American workmates as one of them, an American citizen, a formulation that deepened American conceptions of Pacific Islanders as racial others. (3) However, back in New England, race trumped nationality. Foreign men of color were men of color first, and they formed close connections with native New Englanders, as the “Kanaka” and other foreign crewmates from an Indian man's whaling voyage married into Indian communities and helped give birth to the next generation of New England Indian whalemen.