Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring's Impact on Community Development

Abstract

How southern New England Indians fared in the business of whaling in the early nineteenth century and the long-term consequences of whaling for Native American communities are subjects that deserve closer examination.' This essay is primarily a study of the post-American Revolution Mashpee Wampanoag community of Cape Cod and focuses on the group's ties to the whalefishery. It makes two interrelated arguments: Wampanoags from the Cape, like other men from southern New England, were an important source of whaling labor into the early nineteenth century; and early American whaling transformed the lives of Mashpee whalers and their families. Examining Mashpee's intimate relationship with the whaling business, this work reconsiders the roles played by Indians in the maritime world and the influence of wage labor on one Native American group. Nantucket accounting papers pertaining to the Mashpees permits for analysis of these Indians as whalers. Historians have already learned from colonial whaling contracts, court records, and merchant accounts that for the Native men of southern New England, America's whaling trade was an exploitative arm of colonial labor relations. The primary route into whaling in the eighteenth century, which was the practice of indenturing, threatened Native ways as Indians remained caught in cycles of labor exchange for credit, goods, and money. New research in Nantucket merchant house account papers dated to the early republic period reveals that white trading networks between the island and the mainland maintained control over Mashpee whaling labor.2 The first section of this essay tracks the development of whaling as a labor system in which, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, stateappointed guardians and local merchants maintained authority over the lays (earnings in fractions of the total catch of a whaling voyage) and the accounts of Mashpee whalers. The Massachusetts government dissolved the guardianship system in 1763 with the creation of the district of Mashpee but reversed this decision in 1788 by reinstating three guardians. In 1789 the legislature re-