Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling

Danger and abuse, excitement and tedium, these were the lot of open boat whalemen in the South Seas for more than two centuries. By the end of those centuries of struggle and adversity they had explored and exploited every corner of the world's oceans in the hunt for the spermaceti whale, and charted much of them to boot. The Nantucketers, first and best, taught the world. Then manifest destiny beckoned over the oceans as well as across a continent and the Americans made the Savage South their other frontier, as open and lawless as the Wild West. Ahab's Trade tracks the rise and fall of this first truly global industry and tells the stories of the men who made it. Although they whaled in American, British, French, Australian and New Zealand ships, their calling made them citizens of a separate, closed and isolated world quite unlike that even of other seamen.