Whaling History Symposium

The 35th annual Whaling History Symposium is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, October 16 –17, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Since 1975, it is the world's only annual international forum for the presentation and discussion of new ideas, pioneering research, and fresh insights into the history, fine arts, humanities, and sciences of whales and whaling. Sessions run all day Saturday and on Sunday morning. A buffet lunch is included on Saturday with an informal dinner on Saturday evening, which will be followed by an entertaining program of sea songs, ballads, and chanteys. Registration fee: Before October 5: $125 for members and $150 for non-members. After October 5: $20 each additional. For reservations, call the Museum: (508) 997-0046, ext. 100.

This year's program is distinguished by ground-breaking research and new, original views harvested from primary sources — whalemen's shipboard journals, the account books and business ledgers of managing agents and merchant entrepreneurs (mostly from the Museum's own manuscript collection), and insightful field research.

Four sessions will present refreshing new perspectives on American whaling. In recent years, risk and risk management have emerged as incisive tools for the analysis of investment strategies and the study of business enterprises, but have not hitherto been satisfactorily applied to evaluating the whaling industry. Suzanne Finney, the president of a maritime archaeology foundation in Hawaii whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Hawaii was largely researched at the Whaling Museum, will present her original views in "An Anthropologist's View of Risk in American Whaling." Jamie L. Jones, a literary and cultural historian at Harvard and recent Fellow of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown, tackles the subject from another revolutionary point of view in "The Wake of History: American Whaling in Commerce, Culture, and Memory." New inroads in the demographics and diverse ethnology of the whaling trade will be revealed in "Overlooked But Not Forgotten: African-Americans in the Sag Harbor Whaling Trade," presented by Thomas Hardy, a recent Curatorial Intern at the Whaling Museum; and Professor Frank Sousa, director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, will introduce new publications, including So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927, by Donald Warrin of the University of California.

The whalemen's own firsthand testimony about songs, yarns, and after-hours pastimes at sea and in foreign ports-of-call provide intimate access to the mores, mindset, and shipboard culture of the whalemen themselves. J. Revell Carr III, who teaches folklore at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and has an abiding interest in American whaling history, will speak about the exchange of musical and theatrical entertainments among native Polynesians and American mariners in the Pacific in the 19th century, and how the two cultures influenced one another. April Grant of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will present "Terrible Polly: The Battle of the Sexes in Songs and Poems of the Whaling Era," including the performance of a few samples. And our own Stuart Frank, Senior Curator at the Whaling Museum, whose Ph.D. dissertation at Brown years ago was Ballads and Songs of the Whale-Hunters, will present "Jolly Sailors Bold: Demographics of Ballads and Songs Excavated from the Whaling Journals of the Kendall Collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum."

The Saturday afternoon sessions will be followed by book signings, showcasing three landmark new publications: Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor by Stuart Frank, an anthology of more than 200 ballads and songs harvested from whalemen's shipboard journals; So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927 by Donald Warrin; and American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667-1927, co-authored by Judith N. Lund, former Curator of the Whaling Museum, which updates and supersedes Whaling Masters and the classic shelf of whaling references by Alexander Starbuck, Reginald Hegarty, and Lund herself.

Symposium registration includes admission to all of the Museum's new galleries and exhibitions, including Treasures of Old Dartmouth, an assembly of the best of the Museum's American paintings in the newly Wattles Family Gallery; the new Azorean Whaleman Gallery, and a new installation of harpoons and rare whaling implements in the Bourne Building, which was just fully restored to its 1916 appearance. It is also a last chance to see Classic Whaling Prints, a once-in-a-lifetime array of the world's most significant whaling prints. Symposium programs are sponsored in part by the Helen B. Ellis Fund.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010

9:00am – REGISTRATION, Jacobs Family Gallery (morning coffee served)

10:00 am – Welcome & Opening Remarks

SESSION I

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON YANKEE WHALING — PART ONE

10:15am – An Anthropologist's View of Risk in American Whaling, Suzanne Finney, Ph.D., University of Hawaii; President, Maritime Archaeology and History of the Hawaiian Islands Foundation.

11:15am – The Wake of History: American Whaling in Commerce, Culture, and Memory,

Jamie L. Jones, Harvard University.

12:15pm – Luncheon

1:30pm – 26th Annual L. Byrne Waterman Award Presentation

SESSION II

WHALEMEN'S BALLADS AND SONGS

2:00pm – The Music and Dance of Hawaiian Whalers in the Nineteenth Century, J. Revell Carr III, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

3:00pm – Terrible Polly: The Battle of the Sexes in Songs and Poems of the Whaling Era, April Grant, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

3:45pm – Break

4:15pm – Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs Excavated from the Kendall Collection in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Stuart M. Frank, Ph.D. (author Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor).

SESSION III

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON YANKEE WHALING — PART TWO

5:15pm – Publications about Portuguese and Portuguese-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; and the New Book, So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927 by Donald Warrin.

Frank F. Sousa, Ph.D., Director, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

5:30pm – American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667-1927: A New Publication in Two Volumes, Judith Navas Lund, former Curator, New Bedford Whaling Museum; lead author, American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667-1927.

6:00pm – BOOK SIGNING: Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor by Stuart M. Frank; American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667-1927, 2 vols., by Judith N. Lund, et al.; So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927 by Donald S. Warrin.

7:00pm – DINNER

8:30pm – GALA CONCERT of Sea Songs, Ballads, and Chanteys, with Tom Goux, Jacek Sulanowski, and Dan Lanier; Ellen Cohn; and Stuart Frank, with his wife and partner Mary Malloy.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010

SESSION IV

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON YANKEE WHALING — PART THREE

10:30am – Overlooked But Not Forgotten: African-Americans in the Sag Harbor Whaling Trade, Thomas Hardy, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and New Bedford Whaling Museum.

11:30am – Gallery Tour of the new exhibitions in the Bourne Building, Azorean Whaleman Gallery, with Michael P. Dyer, Maritime Curator, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

12:30pm – Hosted visit of "Classic Whaling Prints," Rinehart Gallery, 2nd floor.

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