I’m sometimes asked if I’ve ever come across any gay, bisexual, or trans whalers in my journal reading. Short answer, not explicitly. But that’s so often the way of things regarding lgbtq+ history. The burden of proof that some demand in making such an assessment, the different language of identity in the past and how someone may have regarded themselves compared to our modern perceptions, and the coded way that many individuals had to speak about their experience in their lifetimes makes it difficult to often concretely say as such. Instead, this history requires a reading between the lines that is rarely conclusive, but still keeps the door open for possibility. Laying that path of possibility, rather than making an assertion about the identities of anyone shared here, is what I aim to do in this post.
Of the most famous of whalemen, much has already been written about the possible queerness of Herman Melville’s work. The descriptions of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship in Moby Dick, another chapter in the same text that was largely a mutual masturbation pun begetting an overwhelming love of one’s fellow man, the the tense dynamic between Billy and Claggart in the novella Billy Budd, the intensely passionate letters Melville wrote to fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Moby Dick was dedicated. As such, I won’t spend time on that here. But if one is looking for a whaler who loved men, Melville could have been one of them and he has a wealth of writings to explore.
When turning to the historical record, the only (very scant) records I’ve seen explicitly regarding same sex activity on whaleships have been non-consensual instances in which there was documented disciplinary action taken. How consensual same sex relations may have been regarded and navigated is a bit of an unknown. But as with any same-sex space (especially something as lengthy and isolating as whaling, where one would maybe get liberty ashore every 6ish months) there were undoubtedly going to be same sex acts and partnerships. To say otherwise would be silly. The absence of their mention gives me the sense that it was something people tended to look the other way with (or circumstantially accepted) if parties were consenting, rather than that they just didn’t happen at all.
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One of my favorite primary sources is the journal of William Abbe, a greenhand on the Atkins Adams in 1859. He focused on writing about the social world of the ship and the interactions he had with others aboard, which is naturally what I care most about too.
Sometimes he would devote a fair amount of attention to describing the physical appearance of some of his shipmates. Conversely, for all his close engagement with the captain’s wife, he never once mentioned what she looked like. His interactions with her seemed to be more out of interest of leveraging her status and the favors she gave him. But of his comrades, it’s a bit of a different story. In one such condensed example (where I’m leaving out a rather wordy description of the fellow’s chest hair, tattoos, open shirt collars, and legs because I can’t let this get TOO long),
“Jack’s rugged weather-beaten tanned face with round eyes full of a comical sly light + a mouth always in a grin disclosing tobacco stained ivories + a porthole he calls it where one his teeth has been knocked out + through which as a convenient porthole he spits his tobacco juice […] But for all this, Jack is not an unhandsome fellow — with a blue shirt + light pants he looks a neat, tight sailor + if from his own accounts he has done no little damage among the girls he left behind him.”
Of this same fellow, William also mentioned that:
“Nothing gives him so much pleasure as to know that I write about him in my journal […] Johnny can’t read or write, but he says he means to overhaul my journal someday + get someone to read to him all I have written about him. I read it to him and he understands with a grin of delight.”
Or, more uncharitably, of one of his shipmates whom William considered less intelligent than himself, he described as “a fine looking man if he had any ‘speculation in his eye’.”
On two different occasions, William also described himself as taking on the role of another man’s ‘lady’ at a dance held on deck. This happened once among his own crew, when “I was called on deck to help make up a set for a cotillion — being honored as the lady of Curly” as well as during a gam (a whaler social function at sea) with another vessel in which “I was lady to a stout negro—who laughed til he was hoarse & we all laughed and sang,”
With these examples, they mostly bring up questions and plausible deniability. When William described his fellow whalers as fine/good-looking or handsome, was he attracted to them, or simply using complimentary language? Did saying that he played another man’s “lady” at a dance during a gam mean anything regarding his identity in relation to other men, or was it simply the language he used to say he danced as the opposite partner in an all-male space? Who knows! Maybe, maybe not.
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Others were a bit more passionate in their writing. In her book Rites and Passages, scholar Margaret Creighton highlighted one whaler, Elias Trotter, as someone who forged–if not romantic–very close emotional relationships with other men. This included both men he met briefly on gams as well as men aboard his ship.
He described one man, Charles Wheeler, on a gam saying that he ‘drew my attention on account of his manly beauty, activity, and intelligence’, and spent the entire gam speaking with him alone for hours, lamenting at the end the inevitable parting when both ships went on their way. He also developed a close relationship with someone on his ship named Longworth.
Daniel Everton is a graduate student researching Trotter, and at a talk some years back highlighted an excerpt of Trotter’s description of Longworth. I found it very poignant and it gives a little bit of insight to one man’s perception of another, as well as the specificity of life at sea:
“During the night watches Longworth and myself will paint a pleasing future and will count and cipher out the many days to elapse before we tread our native soil. Will build many castles in the air and then with sober thought will crush them. How truly does sympathy entwine around the heart and produce friendship in its purest, fondest state. How such interchange of thought foments affection? I flatter myself tis even so with us, for, when after these interchanges of thought, of hope, of sympathy I know and feel that the friendship between us grows stronger and more lasting. At sea, there is no formality. Man acts himself and tis here that none has an opportunity of seeing his fellow in all his impurities as well as in all his goodness. I take pride in writing that, in every circumstance and in all duties, Longworth during the last twelve months has shown himself to be one of nature’s noblemen, so kind, so good, so free.”
Since Trotter’s journal hasn’t been digitized I haven’t been able to read it myself since I don’t have physical access to the collection it lives in at the moment! I’m really hoping that it will be digitized (or fully transcribed) one day though.
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Many journal keepers were mum about describing sex acts between any gender, though they absolutely took place both on and off the ship. Some captains were lenient with women being on board who were not their own wives, at least for short periods of time (though it’s not something they ever wanted the ship owners to find out about). A sex trade directly connected to the presence of whaleships grew within the various places whalers frequently stopped, both in major ports as well as remote islands. In some cases women were permitted on board of ships at anchor, particularly when the captain didn’t want his crew to go ashore for whatever reason. One account of such an instance came from two Japanese castaways, Denzo and Goemon, who were rescued by American whalers in 1841. They were much more explicit than many American journal-keepers in their description of what they saw in the forecastle of the whaleship Florida.
“The ship’s crew took naked women to the bunks in return for tobacco and rings. Some shameless, vigorous men had sexual intercourse openly. Naked men stood by and watched, smoking. Penises were erect and glandes were jumping. Though some pointed to others and laughed, the crew paid no attention.”
While saying nothing about the specific orientations of the men present, this gives a window into some of the sexual attitudes that were held aboard. Through this brief account, those attitudes range from a potentially homoerotic group dynamic, to an indifference or turning a blind eye intentionally when it came to how others conducted themselves sexually, all of which was heightened by the unavoidable closeness of the forecastle. Whether or not that same indifference would have been expressed towards men having sex with men is, of course, another matter that to my knowledge is still unanswered.
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Whaler Marshall Keith on board the Brewster, 1864, often dwelt upon a relationship he left at home rather than anything playing out in the forecastle. The recipient of his thoughts and enduring affection aboard was one Sarah Pope Taber, whom he also frequently referred to as James/Jimmy Pope Taber (there is no record of any James Pope Taber in this period within Sarah’s family or otherwise). While at sea on Sarah/Jimmy’s birthday, he wrote:
“Tuesday February the 9th 1864
To Jimmy Pope
Well Sarah heare is your birth day come again? How fast the time passes over us and how little work of goodness is done by us, but such are the human race. This is the 9 of February the month that the greatest man that earth ever knew was born and that was George Washington. It is a very hot day and I can not sleep so I have taken my pencil to scratch a few lines lines but at some future day they might come at your hands and by perusing over these hideous forms you might see you were not forgotten of by me although twenty five thousand miles from you. And were it as far again it would be just the same, for you are the pole to which the wealth of my affection ever turn. This day opened your cake and nocked one of them higher than a kite it was in good order so ends February the 9th on the birth day of jimmy.”
He also dreamed about favorite foods in the margins of his log, made by Jimmie/James.
“String Beans + Potato Bargain at Lydias
The latter made by Jimmie
Oh Potato Bargain how I love you + James
March the 12th 1864”
In the front of his logbook he kept a dream journal and Sarah/James/Jimmy was often at the center of his dreams. Some were erotic, some fond, some anxious. One particular entry includes a dream about ‘James P Pope’ getting a haircut:
“This day I got home and came up to Lydia’s house to see you. I thought you and she were ironing and I tryed to get to you so that you would not see me but you had just got through ironing that piece and was going to hang it on the horse when you saw me and you ran from me but I could see that you had your hair shingled and you did not want me to see you. After a while you came back with a Hankerchief over your head. I asked you to take it of and you said No. Then I took it and I thought I never saw you look so well before. Then you said I told you I looked best with my hair short but you would not let me cut it?”
How Marshall and Sarah saw their own identities and their relationship cannot be fully gleaned from these bits and pieces, especially with Sarah’s voice absent. But they still present the possibility of a gender expression and/or sexual identity that may have fallen outside the cisgender heteronormative.
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And lastly, one final whaler. Like many male spaces in history, whaling contains stories of women disguising themselves as men and sneaking aboard for a range of reasons. One such narrative is of a person named George/Ann Johnson. In 19th c sources as well as modern whaling history books, Johnson was often framed as a woman running off to sea either to make money or because she was jilted by a lover. Some historians claim that after her identity was discovered any information of her faded into obscurity. However, Jen Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History was able to trace Johnson’s life long after that voyage. Rather than a circumstantial donning of an identity to fit in on a ship, it seems Johnson continued to live as a man in the years that followed as well.
In 1849, Ann Johnson of Rochester New York signed on the whaleship the Christopher Mitchell under the name George Johnson. Well-liked on the ship, later newspapers characterized the seven months Johnson was a whaler:
“She performed her duty faithfully for the seven months previous to her discovery, never shrinking from going aloft, even in the worst weather or the darkest night. She also pulled her oar twice in pursuit of whales, but the boat in which she belonged had never been fast to one of the monsters, or perhaps her courage might have failed her. She was a general favorite on board, never mixing with the crew any more than was absolutely necessary. Her quiet inoffensive behavior has also very much prepossessed the Captain and his officers in her favor.“ —Emancipator & Republican, Boston Mass, Jan 31 1850
After the whaling voyage Johnson was shortly arrested in the Five Points neighborhood in New York under suspicions of larceny meaning…spending the hard-earned from that whaling trip and the police believed it was stolen.
Before the magistrate, Johnson related where it came from.
“Consequently to fulfill her designs, she proceeded to Nantucket, under the garb of a sailor, and took passage in a whaling ship for a three years’ cruise. In this disguise the young woman maintained her position among the other men in the forecastle for over seven months, until the 5th of July, after rounding Cape Horn, the ship put into Pico for water, and while the ship thus lay at anchor by a mere accident her sex was discovered. The fact was soon communicated to the captain who transferred his female sailor to the care of the American Consul.” The paper went on to characterize Johnson as having a “very good looking countenance, short stature and broad built; her hair was cut short; she both chewed and smoked tobacco, and talked sailor lingo very fluently, which is generally of a plain nature, embellished now and then in their own way.” —Boston Daily Mail, Jan 17 1850.
In the years that followed, Johnson moved to Pittsburg and worked in factories, on riverboats, and had a brief but unsuccessful stint trying to open a fruit and confectionary shop. During all those years, Johnson lived as a man. On returning to work at a whip factory, this time in Westfield Massachusetts, Johnson’s identity was yet again ‘discovered’ and opined on in the papers in 1856.
“A Male Girl — A Young Woman has been working in the factory of the American whip company at Westfield, Massachusetts during the last six months, attired in male clothes. She pretended to be a nice young man of 17, smoked strong cigars, was a successful beau among the young ladies, and acted her part as a modern gentlemen very well to all outside appearances”. —Brother Jonathan, June 14, 1856.
The New York Herald wrote on Johnson that summer too,
“The Pittsburg papers are full of the adventures of a young woman who for some years past has figured in that city as a dashing young man…in all her wanderings up to this time, her secret was never suspected, and it is to be regretted she was not able to remain undiscovered and earn an honest living under the protection of male attire.”
19th century newspapers are always operating under a specific societal angle, but through them one can piece together more information on this person’s life and identity, and to see that Johnson was striving to always live in accordance to that identity.
None of these whalers are around today to express how they truly perceived themselves, nor can the pages of a journal here and there capture the scope of someone’s sense of self. But queer possibility still lives in the words they left.