On Sept. 12, Pomona College’s Asian Studies Department hosted a lecture titled “Animals, Race, and the ‘Gospel of Kindness’: The American Whaling Fleet of the Pacific World.” The lecture, the first in a series led by the department’s alumni, shed light on how race relations aboard mixed-race whaling ships impacted sailors’ treatment of whales during the 19th century.
Lissa Wadewitz PO ’95, a history professor at the University of Oregon, led the talk. According to Samuel Yamashita, the event organizer and a history professor at Pomona, Wadewitz’s current research centers around the intersections of race, sexuality, labor and the environment in the 19th-century U.S. Pacific whaling fleet.
Yamashita said that he invited Wadewitz to speak in the hopes of inspiring current students with the work that Pomona alumni have produced. He also highlighted her transnational approach to history, which he said is important to have in any discipline.
Wadewitz opened her lecture by describing the vast dominance and profitability of the American whaling industry in the 19th century. She said that the industry, which employed over 70,000 people, carried out the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of whales, fur seals, walruses and other marine life.
The whaling process involved spiking a harpoon into the back of a whale and letting it drag the hunter’s boat until it tired out. However, whalers’ attitudes towards their prey revealed a conflicting nuance, Wadewitz explained.
“Many seafarers of this era express a level of wonder and sentimentality towards whales at odds with the violence and horror that’s usually associated with this industry,” she said.
Wadewitz remarked that the intelligence, sociability and maternal behaviors of whales were often discerned and recounted by sailors with amazement. This awareness of the familial relations among animals, Wadewitz said, might be a repercussion of the nascent American animal welfare movement in the mid-19th century.
“Children’s literature and Sunday school curricula were already presenting glorified stories of animals with humanized feelings and animal families that showcase maternal love,” she said.
Nevertheless, the rising culture of empathy towards animals didn’t stop hunting activities. Wadewitz explained the financial, practical and social motivations that forced seafarers to suppress their sentimentalities.
“[A] less obvious motivation likely emanated from the class tensions that pervaded most whaling ships in this period,” she said. “Whalers, like most marine vessels, were organized according to a strict hierarchy based on status and skill.”
In addition to the often oppressive relationships between officers and underclass sailors, racial differences heightened conflicts on many ships, Wadewitz said. Many whaling crews had large numbers of African American and Native American men on board.
Despite records of abuse and racial segregation, Wadewitz said that the extreme conditions at sea established a level of equality among crew members and created opportunities for men of color to advance.
Native Americans, Wadewitz added, ironically benefited from stereotypes about their skills as “hunters.” Oftentimes, this stereotype helped them become officers of ships.
“‘Rank trumps race,’” Wadewitz quoted Nancy Shoemaker, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, as saying about the ramifications of this reality. “‘That a man of color as an officer had special privileges could have fueled white, poor, masculine resentment.’”
This reversal of everyday hierarchy, Wadewitz said, might have pushed lower-class Euro-American whalers to channel their frustration at the whales — although they were not alone in their actions. Under severe interracial conflicts, whalers of color also sought to prove themselves through expressions of masculinity against their common prey.
Wadewitz wrapped up the lecture by explaining that these intersecting tensions contributed to whalers’ seemingly paradoxical attitudes until the advent of petroleum and the drop of whale populations in the late 19th century led to the industry’s own demise.
“Human differences have profound meaning in this watery world,” Wadewitz said. “How people understood these differences was affected by both their multifaceted identities and their grasp of the shifting location of the line between human and animal.”
In an interview with TSL, audience member Alex Scott PO ‘25 commented on the urgency of the event’s subject matter.
“We’ve lost so many really important species,” she said. “We have already lost a lot of the whales, and [the lecture is] trying to remind us that this can happen with any sort of animal population too.”
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