Remembering past distance
whales and whalers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59391/6c45h990Keywords:
coastal studies, history, whaling, memory, oceanAbstract
Coastal zones are places of permanent bleed and shift, whether sudden and swift or slow and shallow. This experimental paper takes the coast — broadly conceived — as a site for a reflection on historical writing and historical memory, following the history of whales and whaling. Its three sections, one on the sun-stricken waters and hidden whaling stations of Adventure Bay in Tasmania (“time and the tryworks”), one on the ice-thick Arctic and the wreck of the whaleship Helen Mar (“holding ocean”), and the last on the oil-dripping skeleton of a blue whale held in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (“scent of undried bones”), make the at once impossible and inescapable attempt to touch the past through writing through touch; what makes itself known; what is only a seeming; and that each of these things is inevitably the other.
References
Barron, William. Old Whaling Days. Hull: William Andrews & Co., The Hull Press, 1895.
“Crushed in the Arctic ice: thirty-five of the crew of the whaler Helen Mac lost.” New York Times, November 7, 1892.
Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan: The history of whaling in America. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Johnson, Mark. “Experts unravel mystery of blue whale’s death.” South Coast Today, December 6, 1998.
Lindgren, James M. “ ‘Let us idealize old types of manhood’: The New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1903-1941.” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 1999): 163.
Nash, Michael. The Bay Whalers: Tasmania’s shore-based whaling industry. Woden, A.C.T.: Navarine Pub., 2003.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Brooke Grasberger
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