Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic by John R. Bockstoce, and: Whaling in the North Atlantic: From Earliest Times to the Mid-19th Century by Jean-Pierre Proulx

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 305 most mining areas of the 19th century. Their task was not an easy one, because the sources are few and scattered, but perseverance paid off handsomely. Dempsey, mining man and lawyer, and Fell, historian and writer, formed a partnership that brings admirable balance in their approach to the topic. The mountain-surrounded valley that constitutes the Ten Mile Dis­ trict in central Colorado was first prospected for gold in 1860. After a cycle ofboom, bust, and fitful recovery, it hit full stride as a sideshow to the more dramatic silver discoveries in neighboring Leadville dur­ ing the late 1870s. The pattern of the earlier gold excitement was repeated, somewhat more successfully. Camps blossomed almost over­ night, promotion soared higher than the valley’s 10,000-foot eleva­ tion, the railroad came, and mining evolved from placers to hardrock mines. Mining the Summit recounts the history of it all with a vigor that would have made those earlier Coloradans proud. Mining men, pro­ moters, miners, camp boomers, townspeople, and a host of hangerson crowd into the story, giving it a life and spirit often lacking in historical writing. They represent a cross section of frontier America, with both its dreams and its crushing reality. In the long run, these pioneers failed to achieve permanence, but that does not signify fail­ ure or diminish their importance. The essence of this book is in its descriptions of the mundane experiences of western mining. For every Leadville, there boomed and busted four or five score Ten Miles. Mining the Summit concludes with the coming of molybdenum and the sharp decline of this district after 1893. The Climax story awaits another volume. Duane A. Smith Dr. Smith is professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic. By John R. Bockstoce. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Pp. 400; illustrations, maps, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $29.95. Whaling in the North Atlantic: From Earliest Times to the Mid-19th Century. By Jean-Pierre Proulx. Ottawa, Ontario: Parks Canada, 1986. Pp. 117; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography. $C6.50 (in Can­ ada); $C7.80 (outside Canada) (paper). Available from Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Supply and Services Canada, Hull, Québec K1A 0S9, Canada; cat. no. R61-2/9-30E (English)/cat. no. R61-2/9-30F (French). Whales, Ice, and Men is about the pursuit of the bowhead whale, commencing with the mid-19th-century penetration of the Bering Sea 306 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE by venturesome Yankee whaleships and ending two generations later, with America’s whaling business in ruins, the once vast stocks of west­ ern arctic bowheads reduced to near extinction, and the region forever changed by relentless commercial exploitation. It is a superb book. John Bockstoce has several volumes to his credit on the whales and men of the western arctic and knows that region firsthand. His doc­ umentary research, which has acquainted him with hundreds of manuscript sources on the western arctic whale fishery, gives him unrivaled command of his subject. Noting in his introduction that “modern writers have tended to portray both the [whaling] industry and its men in crude polarities,” Bockstoce chooses to duck today’s issues of conservation and sociology in favor of economic history. He treats whaling as an American business—in its heyday a gigantic busi­ ness. Rising demand for its products in a rapidly industrializing society generated phenomenal growth, inevitably prompting whalemen to scour the remotest seas for their quarry. Whalemen, Bockstoce main­ tains, possessed no special occupational virtue or villainy. The re­ lentlessness of their hunt in the arctic and elsewhere was consistent with Western society’s prevailing attitudes about resource extraction. Exploitation of the whale stocks of the western arctic provided the last glory days of American whaling, and included most of the meager technological innovations by which the Yankees coped with whopping overhead and risk, until price sensitivity, competitive foreign tech­ nology, overfishing, and overpowering climatic conditions did them in. Bockstoce covers all these aspects of the fishery, relating them to their larger historical context with commanding ease. Although it is a scholarly work, Whales, Ice...