Baffin Bay to Corset Stay: Utilizing GIS to Visualize the Geography of Whalebone Labour, 1750-1850

Sam Huckerby, York University

The vast majority of whaling commodity scholarship has focused on oil, taken from blubber. In the South Atlantic and much of the Pacific, whale species targeted (the sperm whale, in particular) only offered oil. The North Atlantic, however, is home to baleen whales that provided both thick blubber and long, good quality baleen, otherwise known as whalebone. Whalebone was used in clothing, furniture, and dozens of other household items from the 16th to early 20th centuries in European nations, yet very little scholarship has treated it as a material of import in environmental and material history. Drawing from a variety of sources from 1750 to1850, including the Scottish Arctic Whaling and British North American Whaling datasets, Hudson’s Bay Company trade reports, and extant garments from the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this project will map instances of human labour applied to whalebone. This preliminary attempt at focusing on whalebone spatially, and connecting that data with material culture, will contribute to a larger project that aims to create a database of whalebone-related labour across the North Atlantic region.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 49. HGIS at Scale