Following SEA: In the Wake of Whalemen

Whalemen IN THE WAKE OF

SEA Semester students follow track of 19th century Falmouth ship

By Doug Karlson

S

tudents aboard SEA Semester vessels help keep the ships’ charts up to date to mark hazards to navigation. But a chart that helped guide students of class S-283, The Global Ocean, through the seas around New Zealand was almost 200 years old.

It’s a chart that visiting professor of maritime studies Dr. Richard King found at Mystic Seaport’s G.W. Blunt White Library while researching an upcoming book.

“The library director happened to pull out a chart of the South Pacific from the 1820s. We saw all these little whale tails marked on the chart, which I had never seen before,” recalled King.

King connected the chart to a whaling ship, the Commodore Morris, out of Falmouth, Massachusetts. Then he discovered that the Falmouth Historical Society had two of the ship’s logbooks in its collection – one from 1845 to 1849, the other from 1849 to 1853. King reached out to Meg Costello, research manager at the society, who sent him scans of the books. As luck would have it, they matched references on the chart. They were from the same whaling expedition!

“That was cool. It’s not very often that you have a logbook and the working chart from the same voyage,” said King.

Of particular interest to King was that the captain of the Commodore Morris on the 1849 to 1853 voyage, Lewis Lawrence, kept detailed records of whale sightings.

Lawrence was primarily hunting sperm whales, and his chart and logbooks provide insight into their population and locations.

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“Captain Lawrence’s logbook was more quantitative than the other logbooks I’ve seen,” said King.

King, who was scheduled to be a visiting faculty member for class S-283, saw an opportunity for his SEA Semester students, as many of the whale sightings recorded on the chart were near the Kermadec Islands, where the SSV Robert C. Seamans would be sailing.

The crews of the two ships wouldn’t be that different, either, as whaling ships were largely crewed by younger people in their late teens to early twenties.

“Whalemen were doing the closest thing to what we’re doing on our tall ship,” he said, observing that whaleships were pelagic, open-ocean vessels that spent much of their time “lollygagging” and taking observations.

“They were looking at the marine environment in a very careful way, out at sea, which is basically what we’re doing.

But obviously the cultural shift is enormous in terms of how we think about whales,” said King.

King realized the logbooks, which documented early environmental history, could be an excellent teaching tool, allowing students to engage directly with primary research. Toward that end, King asked the students to transcribe one of the handwritten logbooks.

“I thought, this would be a fun project where the whole class could work together.”

The class embraced the idea. Each of King’s students transcribed a portion of the log – painstaking work given the difficult-to-decipher handwriting and archaic language. Olivia Vasquez, an undergraduate at Oberlin College, then compiled the transcriptions into a single document that was then edited by Sal Cosmedy (Mount Holyoke College) and Tom Davies (Reed College).

Olivia and classmate Jennifer Crandall, of Middlebury College, volunteered to take the data culled by their classmates to create a GIS chart showing the locations of the Commodore Morris’ whale sightings, a project that tied in well with the students’ Data Visualization and Communication class. Associate Professor Dr. Deb Goodwin, who

happened to be in the office between trips, volunteered her time and expertise to help Crandall and Vasquez make the map.

“The work we’ve done makes the data contained in the log accessible to other students and scholars,” Crandall observed, adding that there are many layers to consider, both scientific and historical.

For the transcription, students worked off a scan of the logbook, but later were thrilled to visit the Falmouth Historical Society to view the original. It’s been a win for the historical society as well. Very few of the logbooks in its collection, which are otherwise difficult to read and difficult to search, have been transcribed.

Due to the season and relatively short duration of their voyage – as compared with the months at sea spent by the crew of the Commodore Morris – as well as the reduced abundance of whales in this region, the crew of the Seamans didn’t see any sperm whales, but they did see a humpback whale and pilot whales. They compared the historic observations of marine mammals with their own, and then overlaid that with their own measurements of zooplankton and phytoplankton concentrations.

MORE ABOUT CAPTAIN LAWRENCE The men and women of the Lawrence family played an important role in Falmouth’s seafaring past, and their stories provide valuable insight into the history of whaling. As part of their SEA Semester curriculum, students of class C-151 in 1997 studied the Lawrence family, with the help of former science coordinator Dr. Erik Zettler, and their research contributed to “Whaling Brides and Whaling Brothers: The Lawrences of Falmouth” (The Falmouth Historical Society, 1997, 27 pages), by Dr. Mary Malloy, former professor of maritime history at SEA.

Throughout the voyage, students consulted a full-sized copy of the original chart, which they rolled out on the tables of the main salon, as well as their new GIS chart.

King said it was fascinating for the students to read Captain Lawrence’s log entries for the places they visited (“hey, this is where they flogged the cook!”) as well as his detailed descriptions of the people and animals of the Kermadec Islands, which the Seamans visited.

Copies of this publication are available at the SEA library as well as the Falmouth Historical Society.

Looking back, Vasquez and Crandall say it was a massive undertaking, requiring many hours of work. They were sometimes concerned about asking their fellow students to help with both the transcription and compiling the data, given their already heavy workload. “But people were really receptive. It says a lot about SEA Semester students,” said Vasquez.

“It’s not very often that you have a logbook and the working chart from the same voyage.” Dr. Richard King

“It was so exciting to come together as a group, to make our mark at SEA,” added Crandall.

Previous page: Chart used by Capt. Lawrence.

Opposite page: GIS chart of Commodore Morris voyages; Global Ocean S-283 students examine the original Commodore Morris logbook at the Falmouth Historical Society (left to right: Elena Beckhaus, Maddie Oerth, Matt Birhle, Sarah Patulak, and Katie Shambaugh); a page from Capt. Lawrence’s logbook; Capt. Lewis Lawrence (photo courtesy of Falmouth Historical Society) .

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