Glenn Gordinier, Co-Director of the Frank G. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies and the Robert G. Albion Historian at Mystic Seaport, came to Log Lunch on February 13 to speak about whaling history. He has taught for a quarter of a century and worked for an additional decade at the Seaport, written five books and numerous articles, and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Connecticut. Gordinier’s expertise is in part due to the Charles W. Morgan, the sole surviving wooden whaling ship of more than 27,000 ships that once sailed the seven seas. After her thirty-seven voyages amounting to eighty years at sea, the Morgan was purchased for the Mystic Seaport, and around her the museum has flourished and thrived. With millions of visitors walking her deck, she is one of the few old boats that manages to bring in enough revenue to cover the cost of her maintenance and care!
Gordinier’s presentation touched on the different whaling periods beginning as early as the 1500s in the Bay of Biscay. Between 1530 and 1610 over forty thousand whales were killed to harvest their oil, whalebone, and meat. In relatively tiny whaleboats (also called dories)—weighing one ton and thirty feet in length—a crew of six men would hunt whales weighing around thirty tons. In 1859 the use of petroleum brought three years of relief to the whale population until 1864 when Sven Foya invented a mechanized harpoon using steam engine technology. Again, in the early 1940s the whale population rested while the human population plummeted by seventeen million during World War II. Perceptions of whales began to change, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 reflected the warm sentiment elicited in the general population by humanizing campaigns such as National Geographic’s widely popular vinyl record of whale songs.
Gordinier then spoke on the journey Mystic Seaport chose to embark on by raising the twelve million dollars necessary to rebuild the Charles W. Morgan—to pull out her ribs and replace the timbers of her frames exactly as she had been designed hundreds of years before—and make her sea-ready once again. In the summer of 2014, she set sail across New England on her thirty-eigth voyage. During this time she housed and inspired eighty-five artistic individuals and their subsequent projects to call attention to conservation, sustainability, and America’s maritime history. The Morgan’s time with the Mystic Seaport Museum has proven that a tool once used for industrial ecological and environmental destruction can effectively be repurposed for causes to save the environment and keep history alive.
Thanks Glenn for the phenomenal talk!
By Melissa Martinez ’15, Mystic Alum S’13
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