From Witches to Whales; or, The Prescient Professor and the Unlikely Undergraduate

In 1861, an American whaleman penned a scathing indictment of his captain’s lack of integrity and dereliction of duty.  In particular, the sailor decried Captain John Simmons’s bigamous relationship with a young “Esquermor lady,” begun in October 1859 on the Siberian coast just south of the Bering Strait.  Simmons made “preasants to [the young woman’s] Farther and Mother” and brought her onboard ship “whare she took up...quarters for the next 10 months [and] was a Mother in the spring of a little girl.” For centuries, European and Euro-American sailors have been characterized as notably profligate, profane, and promiscuous, traits amply documented in historical sources such as this sailor’s account. But scholars have only begun to look beyond the mythologizing to examine critically the variety and functions of sailors’ sexual practices on land and at sea. I begin with Captain Simmons’s Arctic liaison to suggest that geographically determined, rank-specific, and contingent sexual regimes both formed a core element of sailors’ occupational identity and reinforced the exploitative deployment of shipboard authority. 

My long-running fascination with the history of whaling actually began thirty years ago, with the famous witches in Salem, Massachusetts, as encountered in Mary Beth Norton’s undergraduate course on American women’s history. In a semester filled with multiple “aha!” moments, I learned the power of gender analysis and began to see the past in more meaningful and often surprising ways. My research paper (which would morph into honors thesis, dissertation, and monograph) investigated how New England whalemen’s wives encountered the 19^th-century “cult of domesticity.” I did not find in the archives what I expected but, under Mary Beth’s careful guidance, I learned to follow the sources where they took me and along the way make much more interesting and significant discoveries – a path I have taken ever since.