Whaling has been a trope in American culture since its heyday in the nineteenth century, represented in the popular engravings of Currier & Ives and depicted in the scrimshaw carvings of whale men themselves, reported in the jottings of Owen Chase and imagined in the literature of Herman Melville. More recently, the history of whaling has emerged as an area of investigation for scholars of maritime and global history. Following excellent studies by Lisa Norling, Eric Jay Dolan and Nathaniel Philbrick, and a documentary film by Ric Burns, Nancy Shoemaker has entered the arena with an important book that uses whaling to explore the “contingency of race” as experienced by the Native American people of southeast Massachusetts during the nineteenth century. Native American Whalemen and the World contributes, as well, to the growing interest in early American globalism and, especially, in the Pacific Ocean and beyond, seen in such titles as So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (2010), True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (2014) and With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (2014).

As her title makes plain, Shoemaker wants to use the experiences of Native American whalers to explore the protean forms of racism in the modern era, examining the complexities of how Native Americans fared at home and abroad. Her objective is clear: To challenge the “[s]tudies of race [that] often treat it as a fixed and singular idea”, and to offer an alternative interpretation that documents how race “fluctuated in a more fleeting way by the situation” (4). As she tells it, “This book explores the variable configurations of race that nineteenth-century New England whalemen encountered, the uneven and often contradictory application of racial assertions in different settings, and the consequent disjunctures between racial ideas and lived experience” (6). To this end, she delivers some unexpected findings. Native whale men travelled across the globe, mastered ocean navigation, held positions of responsibility and acquired a remarkable breadth of knowledge, contradicting conventional stereotypes. Yet, their “lives at home contrasted completely with their experiences abroad” (8).

Shoemaker’s extensive research has turned up a trove of materials that take the reader beyond the designs of merchants, captains and missionaries, and into the cares and concerns of ordinary, indeed marginal, mariners and their families. Pouring through the correspondence and private journals, official logbooks and memoirs recorded by Native American whale men, she reveals how race was a much more complicated construct than we might imagine. Shoemaker organizes her study in four parts: “The Ship”, “The Beach”, “Islands” and “The Reservation”. These distinct venues provide metaphors for illustrating racial constructs and contingencies. She finds that different sets of rules governed interaction in each setting and that “those settings continually reconfigured the content of racial ideas and how race impinged on social relations” (6).

Part 1, “The Ship”, explains how Native American men became incorporated into a global workforce that facilitated Western colonization of the Pacific. For Shoemaker, whaling provided a vital economic opportunity as powerful white interests appropriated Native lands at home: Native American communities “survived, in part because whaling offered young men a livelihood and a sense of self-respect that sustained families and communities in hard times” (14). And, beyond the financial outlet, whaling exerted social and cultural resonance within Native communities. Even as whaling fell into decline and the numbers of Native Americans at sea dropped, whaling’s influence on Native communities at home continued. Shoemaker does a nice job of explaining the advantages of whaling as a career and also the particular obstacles that Native Americans faced in trying to break into the industry. The majority of Native men went on at least one whaling voyage in their lifetimes, yet only five rose to the rank of captain during the nineteenth century. Even so, it was possible for Native Americans to achieve significant gains in the industry. Indeed, the whale ship provided better opportunities than other occupations available to minority peoples, such as farming, day labour, domestic service, or handicrafts. As Shoemaker observes, a voyage might mean years away from home and family, but “provided income for native whalemen and their families while also offering them occasions to exercise authority and earn respect in ways that small-scale farming and farm labor never could” (34).

In Part 2, “The Beach”, Shoemaker describes the landfalls where Western crews encountered indigenous peoples, sites at which constructions of race were again contingent. From its beginnings, Western intrusion into the Pacific has been founded on dichotomies of civilized and primitive ideals, employing these stereotypes to denigrate indigenous peoples and to appropriate their resources. She asserts that, although these categories “did not trickle down to ordinary sailors”, they engaged in their own approximate distinctions to characterize kanaka and Westerners. Significantly, even Native American voyagers “did not recognize commonality” between themselves and indigenous Hawai’ians or Tahitians, underscoring the power of racial stereotypes (87 and 89).

Part 3 explores “Islands”, sites in which a range of racial constructions would be forged, shaped by forces such as the indigenous culture, geography and locality, and the expectations held by outsiders who sought to insert themselves into indigenous sites and cultures. Shoemaker parses the intruders into a first wave of beachcombers, “runaway sailors or convicts who chose to live on a Pacific island and often married native women with whom they had children”, followed by a second wave of missionaries and finally, Western immigrants whose objective was removal of native institutions (and at times the people themselves) to impose versions of their own domestic institutions onto these conquered lands (7).

“The Reservation”, examined in Part 4, represents the domestic homeland from whence whale men departed as parochial landsmen and to which they returned as experienced citizens of the world. Shoemaker frames the site as a colonized place, posits Native Americans as its legitimate inhabitants and indicts occupying Europeans as foreigners who “successfully acquired control over land and governance; claimed cultural supremacy in print culture, schools and churches; and relegated native people to the economic and social margins” (8). As in the latter stages of island occupation, the “settler colonialism” that transformed early Massachusetts aimed at the marginalization and even the ultimate removal of the indigenous peoples there. Shoemaker carries the idea of contingency into the late nineteenth century, which saw both the degradation of Native Americans and the decline of the whaling industry.

Readers might find some problems with the book. Situating this story within a broader context of maritime print culture, comparing her sources to the writing of merchant mariners such as Amasa Delano and Edmund Fanning, and grounding constructions of the “Indian” against earlier formulations of the “infidel Algerines” and “wretched Turks” would broaden the picture. Yet, these omissions are minor, outweighed by Shoemaker’s penetrating tracing of the ways in which mainstream Americans conjured their distorted representations of Native Americans and then imposed these on the peoples of the South Seas. This is an important book, astutely connecting seemingly discrete domains—Native American, global and whaling—and adeptly demonstrating how these shaped the development of Native Massachusetts coastal communities.