The University of Exeter is holding a conference in September 2013 on Working lives between the deck and the dock.  This conference is part of a three year ERC funded project led by principal investigator Dr Maria Fusaro, and supported by associate research fellows Dr Bernard Allaire, Dr Richard Blakemore, and Dr Tijl Vanneste.

The MarineLives project team is delighted that its paper has been accepted by the conference organisers, and is now looking for two volunteer graduate research associates to assist it over the next few months in completing the paper.  All intellectual contributions to the paper will be recognised in the paper’s authorship.

The paper is titled: “Each according to his office”: Risk, rank, and labour in English whaling enterprise at Spitsbergen, 1656-7.  Its proposers and current principal authors are Philip Hnatkovich (Ph.D candidate, Pennsylvania State University) and Colin Greenstreet (Project Leader, Marine Lives).

Philip and Colin are forming a small research team to complete the research and writing of the paper. Two existing members of the MarineLives project team are joining the research team – Dr Janet Few, a community historian, and Karen Gunnell, a professional archivist with marine historical interests.

We would like to supplement the research team with two further volunteer graduate research associates.  Specifically we are looking for seventy hours of your research time, spread over the next four or five months.  We plan to complete research by the end of June and to submit the paper by the end of July 2013, in time for consideration for publication in a planned edition of conference papers.

At the core of the research is a social and economic reconstruction of the crew of the Owners Adventure and the Greyhound, the two whaling ships commanded by Thomas Damerell, and of their financiers.

If you join us in this work you will receive a rigorous training in collaborative research techniques, drawing on Colin Greenstreet’s training as a management consultant at McKinsey and Booz.Allen & Hamilton, and on Philip Hnatkovich’s and Colin’s training and practical experience of historical research.

You will be introduced to developing hypothesis based issue analysis, writing research and source evaluation plans, and meticulous demographic reconstruction.

You will also gain and contribute to an understanding of contract and incentive structures in English whaling in the 1650s, and to the economics and risk management of such ventures in the same period. Much of the detailed evidence will be drawn from High Court of Admiralty of England and Chancery Court litigation, and there will be a chance to explore how litigation was used by litigious financiers in an attempt to rewrite economic outcomes, and how ship owners and crew members responded and resisted such attempts.

If you would like to learn more about this opportunity, please contact us using this contact form.

ERC-Exeter Conference Paper Outline

“Each according to his office”: Risk, rank, and labour in English whaling enterprise at Spitsbergen, 1656-7

Authors: Philip Hnatkovich (Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University) & Colin Greenstreet (Project Leader, MarineLives[i])

This paper examines the environmental, financial, and social pressures upon and within seventeenth-century English arctic whaling enterprise through a microhistory of a botched English venture in southern “Greeneland” (Spitzbergen) in the summer of 1656. The role of rank and the specific “offices” of the men involved in the venture are explored in the context of the high physical and commercial risk of whaling as an enterprise, and the highly differentiated nature of labour to successfully find, catch, and process whales.

In this particular case, the failure of the Owners Adventure and its companion pinke, the Greyhound – put to sea by London merchant and experienced whaling entrepreneur Richard Batson – to return with their expected haul, resulted in multiple law suits and protracted litigation between the financiers, the ships’ officers and crew, and accompanying land men.  The litigation was centred upon the High Court of Admiralty of England (HCA), physically located at Doctors Commons in London, but extending to a suit brought before the Poultry Counter by an ordinary seaman, and a related suit in Chancery.

The crux of these cases was a dispute at sea between the young captain and commander Thomas Damerell and the more seasoned harpooners Edward Gosling, Richard Maundrie, and William Humfrey, who openly challenged Damerell’s decision to attempt landfall through an unusually thick and hazardous ice shelf.  Their standoff galvanized the crews, leading Damerell to accuse Gosling, Maundrie, and Humfrey of mutinous behaviour; Batson and his fellow merchants ultimately aligned with Damerell in the resulting litigation and refused to pay wages to the crews.

This personal and situational conflict, replayed in detail through depositions given by the principals, crew, and accompanying land men, to the judges of the High Court of Admiralty, serves as a cogent starting point for a discussion of the deeper, structural faultlines of whaling enterprise – and the conditions of English sea labour more generally – in the mid-seventeenth century.  As asserted by John Appleby, though Greenland whaling was an industry of increasing economic value in this period, its unique set of financing and working conditions remain poorly understood in maritime historiography.[ii]  Environmental conditions in the Arctic made whaling a particularly challenging and hazardous segment of English fisheries expansion in the early and mid-seventeenth century.  Its use of a labour-intensive, shore-processing industrial system, in contrast to the offshore processing of whales by the Dutch, required large numbers of men.  Greenland voyages included a novel mix of seafarers, routinely placing a number of novice landsmen alongside workers with specialized skills like harpooners, butchers, brewers, and coopers.  Furthermore, whaling was a highly competitive field which pitted vessels representing different companies – and different nations – against one another in a struggle for shore space and shrinking yields.  At mid-century, declining temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age fostered the partial collapse of Greenland whale stocks and shortened its fishing season, placing further pressures on enterprise and exacerbating competition.

Based on the account given in the HCA depositions, our essay first uses the shipboard challenge to Captain Damerell in order to dissect the mechanics of Greenland whaling, and highlights the tensions between the different specialised “offices” held by crew members. The technical skills of the harpoonists and their importance to the success of a whaling adventure enabled them to challenge the authority of the young captain Damerell.  We cross-reference these depositions with further legal records from the Chancery and Probate courts, and with a range of national, municipal, and parish records, including State Papers and hearth tax returns, to reconstruct the social backgrounds of the principal figures in the Owners Adventure-Greyhound litigation.[iii]  In doing so, we place the case within the broader commercial networks and regulatory conflicts affecting whaling in the Commonwealth period.

Our microanalysis is informed by the transcriptions and insights contributed by the members of the MarineLives project, a digital humanities initiative working toward a collaborative transcription and online database of the court materials contained in HCA volume 13/71, from which many of the depositions derive.[iv]  In total, an examination of the conflicts at the heart of the failed Spitsbergen enterprise of 1656 suggests the potential contributions that the continued digitization and enrichment of HCA materials can make toward a greater social history of sea labor in the early modern age.

MarineLives is now actively seeking PhD students in History and associated fields like English, Geography, Historical Linguistics, Sociology and Anthropology to participate in four online SKYPE forums to be held beginning in the last week of November, 2012.

The PhD Forum will consider the potential relevance of High Court Of Admiralty records, as revealed by the substance of HCA 13/71 (1656-1657) to four broad research areas and to the specific research interests of participants. The research areas of interest are: (1) Material & Cultural (2) Commercial & Legal (3) Geography & Trade (4) Language with a separate SKYPE forum held for each area.

These forums will assist us in understanding the research questions relevant to forum members that can be addressed using tools such as semantic markup, data mining, and data linking. This input will influence the second phase of our project between January and March, 2013.

We will gain an understanding of how forum members would like to interact with the data, on completion of transcription and markup, influencing the specification and implementation of our production server and software, as well as the data formats to be utilised in further phases of the project.

In addition, we hope that the forums will establish linkages between the project team and the wider research community while at the same time raising awareness of the rich research potential of HCA materials.

As part of these forums, we will provide the participants with advance access to our project resources such as the digitised images of HCA 13/71 (1656-1657), the first cut transcriptions as they go up and are then edited, the MarineLives project dictionaries and the project manual.

In return, participants in the forum will commit to one 90 minute online SKYPE conference call. Each PhD Forum member will participate in only one forum.

Briefing notes will be distributed to each participant in advance and prior reading of this document and assessment of the project resources would also be required to contribute meaningfully to the forum. Notes taken of the discussion will be distributed to participants after the event, with the opportunity to respond further to the points raised in writing.

This is a terrific opportunity for PhD students to participate in an exciting digital project and we would welcome your involvement to help shape the future direction of MarineLives. If you are interested in participating, you can sign up by emailing phdforum@marinelives.org with details of your areas of study and interest.

There are limited places available in the forum so please note that the deadline for confirming participation is Friday, November 2, 2012.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Richard Blakemore, Associate Research Fellow, Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, University of Exeter

Dr. Liam D. Haydon, University of Manchester

Philip J Hnatkovich, PhD Student, Pennsylvania State University

Gordon O’Sullivan, M.Phil Student, Digital Humanities and Culture, Trinity College Dublin

Laura Seymour, PhD student, Birkbeck College, University of London

PhD Forum Convenors MarineLives