“For I Conceive So Large a Commerce”: American Whalers, the Hawaiian Islands, and the United States’ Expansion to the Pacific, 1819–43

This paper examines how the American whaling industry contributed to nineteenth-century American expansion to the Hawaiian Islands. Scholarship on American whaling is robust, but this literature does not sufficiently show how whaling aided the republic’s imperial expansion overseas. It was the expansion of the whaling industry, along with a “crisis” of sailor unrest, that prompted U.S. officials to assert American influence in the Hawaiian Islands. Initially, U.S. expansion took the form of naval squadron surveillance of the Hawaiian Islands. Later it manifested in naval exploration and the chartering of Pacific whale fisheries. Finally, this impulse culminated in 1842 with the Tyler Doctrine, which expanded the scope of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine to include the Hawaiian Islands. By 1842, American whaling in the Pacific had become so lucrative, and the problem of sailor desertion so dire, that the U.S. government was willing to formally project a territorial claim to the Hawaiian Islands. By approaching U.S. imperial expansion from the perspectives of participants in the American whaling industry, this paper draws our attention to the commercial and maritime character of American imperial expansion during the first half of the nineteenth century.