Went to the Devil: A Yankee Whaler in the Slave Trade

Abstract

In the fall of 1861, while cruising the mid-Atlantic region, Capt. Edward Davoll spotted a sperm whale large enough to render one hundred barrels of the precious oil that had fueled the economic ascent of New Bedford, Massachusetts, over the preceding two decades. After an hour's chase, however, his exhausted crew was forced to cut the line and watch the leviathan escape into the darkness below. In his logbook, the thirty-nine-year-old whaling captain recorded the encounter by pressing a whale-shaped stamp onto the page, next to which he scrawled, “Went to the Devil.” But Davoll himself, the historian Anthony J. Connors argues, sank to unfathomable depths and cleared a private path to hell in allowing two whaling vessels under his command to provide cover for contraband slave trading on the eve of the Civil War. Published by Bright Leaf, an imprint of the University of Massachusetts Press that offers “New Englanders and tourists … books that deepen their understanding of what makes this region wonderful,” Went to the Devil is a slim, accessible work that is, nonetheless, an important contribution to the growing field of scholarship on the Northeast's decidedly not-so-wonderful involvement in the business of slavery (John Maher, “UMass Press Introduces Bright Leaf Imprint,” Publishers Weekly, Aug. 22, 2017).