Extracts of a presentation given to the TransMare plenum in December 2023

On 11th December 2023, the TransMare Institute in Trier invited its members and research project to come together. With an evening programme, the institute presented ongoing research projects, new arriving researchers, and also invited the associated PhD researchers to briefly introduce their work within five minutes. With this blogpost, I share parts of my presentation with you.

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Hello everybody, thank you for giving me the opportunity to introduce my research project to you. Before I begin, I would like to add that I stammer occasionally.

The title of the presentation Kidnapped Whalers and Destroyed Taverns is based on a case study from my research. In August 1839, the two American and British ambassadors in New Zealand reported the destruction of a pub by several whaling captains and their crew. The reason for this attack were two Brazilian sailors who were being held by the owner of the pub or were hiding from the captain in order to escape the harsh conditions on board. However, as the captain did not want to give them up, they wanted to state an example of them.

Whaling ships suffered from a chronic shortage of skilled labour, which meant that the captains needed all the manpower they could get and often had a very diverse crew. Incidents such as these form an important facet of my work when it comes to reconstructing the interactions in the context of the whaling industry in the Pacific.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, whale oil was a coveted resource to light street lamps and maintain the machinery of early industrialisation. (3) During this period, Quaker family businesses in the small harbour towns of Nantucket and New Bedford in the British colony and later USA dominated this industry, sending their whaling ships first to the Atlantic and increasingly to the Pacific from the 19th century onwards. They hunted and processed whales on their multi-year transoceanic voyages and interacted with Pacific Islanders such as in Tahiti or Hawaii as well as the Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand during stopovers.

My focus is on the Bay of Islands, which became an important stopover in the early 19th century and ultimately laid the foundation for the colonisation of the country by the British with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. I argue here that whalers in the 19th century spent decades trying to transfer to the Pacific a socio-economic system that they had already successfully established in the Atlantic with the Native Americans and slaves in the 18th century.

In my research study, I want to analyze and reconstruct, if and how Maori seamen were integrated into the same working conditions in the whaling industry. In this regard, I also want to show the balance of power in the interaction spaces at the Bay of Islands and to show the transoceanic transfer process of the whalers. In this way, I combine maritime history with settler colonial studies.

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