The Saga of South Seas Whaling
Gladiator one minute, galley slave the next. 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 it to boot.
This book 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. The book describes that world and its unique pressures.
The good, the mad and the ugly. They are all here to tell their stories and describe a way of life so strange that Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale will seem like a minor eccentricity.
