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George H, you wrote
"From the vast number that once existed, a museum collects the documents that 
have survived and can be preserved, the well-bound official logbooks with 
well-organised information that can be read and studied. Where, now, are the 
dog-eared scraps of paper on which the hardly-literate skippers of 
parish-rigged whalers kept their scanty records?"

You might be surprised by the "dog-eared" documents that have been preserved 
in New England. Hundreds and hundreds of battered old logbooks exist in 
museums. Don't forget that these were significant legal and commercial 
documents so they were stored even before they became historical artifacts. 
Few whaling captains were owners. Most were working for small corporations 
and partnerships of investors. Those backers expected a reasonably well-kept 
logbook. Of course, there is always bias in preservation. In particular, 
logbooks that have interesting illustrations and "whale stamps" are much more 
likely to be preserved today. Even so, the logbook from the Morgan's maiden 
voyage (which I have described elsewhere) was preserved despite the fact that 
it's really dull as dust. And there's a notebook of navigational calculations 
from a much later voyage that would qualify as a collection of scrap paper.

And you wrote:
"They've gone into the bin, over the years, not into a museum. So it's now 
impossible to judge, from what has been preserved in museums, what was the 
general standard of practice at sea. Frank doesn't know it, and neither do I. 
We just have to keep an open mind."

Oh come on now! The fact that we have imperfect evidence does not mean that we 
should ignore huge amounts of evidence. There are so many whaling logbooks 
that it's likely that no single person has ever read them all, but they are 
loaded with solid evidence of the history of whaling. Yes, you do need to 
bear in mind the biases introduced by selective preservation. For example, 
logbooks from small coastal whaling voyages are rare, but that's obvious 
enough. Logbooks from long-distance whaling voyages exist in large numbers 
and they provide tremendous "primary source" evidence. That evidence beats 
speculation any day.

You also wrote:
"Yes, of course. Who could deny that? There are many such concentrations of 
commercially-valuable whales, such as the Right (Bowhead) whales to be found 
in Arctic , and Blue Whales in the Antarctic, and many others between. Which 
was exactly why I restricted my comments to Sperm whales, which can be found 
literally anywhere, their distribution being so diffuse that a vessel hunting 
Sperm whales can and will simply wander over hundreds of thousands of square 
miles of open ocean."

In fact, in its career the Morgan mostly was engaged in hunting sperm whales. 
Although their concentrations are more diffuse than some other species and 
although they are found globally, sperm whales are still found more 
frequently in certain areas. If you look at the map of the maiden voyage of 
the Morgan which I posted recently, you can clearly see what grounds they 
hunted on that voyage. There's the huge equatorial belt to the west of the 
Galapagos, and there's also the whaling ground in the Gulf of Alaska. In 
other years, they would visit different areas. It's true that once the 
whalers were "on the grounds" they could wander about aimlessly over as much 
as "hundreds of thousands of square miles" but they made long, deliberate 
journeys involving some of the best navigational practices of the day to get 
there and get back. And even on the whaling grounds, the vessel's position 
was recorded regularly when weather permitted though clearly not as regularly 
as on the voyage to the grounds. Again, these logbooks were legal records of 
a commercial expedition. Navigating and recording the vessel's position was 
an important daily task.

-FER




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