whaling

Without Good Leadership, Valor Is Wasted

Quintus Curtius Thought , ,

One of the rules of the nineteenth-century whaling industry was that if a captured whale carcass were lost by its owner, it thereafter became the property of the first ship to recover it.  After being killed, a whale had to be secured to the side of the whale ship, or towed with ropes; and it occasionally happened that the prize would become untethered from its owner, and float away upon the open ocean.  In those cases, the first hand to plant a harpoon in the carcass could claim it as his own.

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Jumping Ship In The South Pacific

Quintus Curtius Literature, Travel & Exploration , , ,

In January of 1841 the twenty-two-year-old Herman Melville shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet for a multi-year cruise.  He had many motivations for doing this.  There was, in the first place, a desire to see the world and test himself against its challenges; then there was a need to escape the stultifying confines and restrictions of a nineteenth-century “proper” American household; and finally, a longing to cleanse himself of his father’s failures, disgrace, and early death.

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