In the hands of one nineteenth-century whaling cooper: Finding ourselves at sea

Abstract

The cooper, or barrel maker, on an American nineteenth-century commercial whaling voyage occupied such a valuable position that his life was not risked hunting whales. The cooper was both part of the action and distanced from it, enabling him to create, through his collection of casks of whale oil, the archive of the whaling voyage. A close reading of one cooper’s logbook from the 1850s allows us to consider the process of whaling from his standpoint, as well as to theorize how the cooper was like the archivist, the chronicler, of the voyage. The cooper gave the ocean a history by creating its archive with his barrels, bearing them safely to shore, and sharing them with the world. The single cooper discussed here presents readers with two archives – his barrels of whale oil and his private logbook – which expose two different temporalities in which the potential archives of scholars exist.