American whalers and Africa

Abstract

Abstract taken from Dissertation Abstracts International?, vol and year unknown, but circa 1967, p. 2159-A:

The first two appendices are pertinent excerpts from logbooks and journals of vessels that visited West and East Africa respectively. These will give the reader some idea of the type of information to be found in the literature left by the whalemen. The final appendices list the important logbooks and private journals respectively kept aboard vessels going to Africa, along with the present location of these records

The whalemen first called at African ports in 1763, when they stopped at the "Gulf of Guinea. " They moved both north and south, and the Cape Verde and Azores Islands became favorite ports for obtaining men and fresh provisions. Some whalers also worked along the coast of Angola and stopped at Mossamedes or Little Fish Bay, Cabinda, and Annobon Island. In the southern Atlantic the bays of southern Africa became favorite calling places. The Cape of Good Hope had been rounded by whalers as early as the 1790's, and various ports in the western Indian Ocean became known to them. The most famous of these ports were St. Augustine Bay (Madagascar), Anjouan (Comoro Islands), and Mahe (Seychelles Islands). Zanzibar was visited less frequently

A port, to be useful to the whalemen, had to provide three things: it had to have good facilities for capturing any deserters; it had to have fresh supplies such as food and wood and water; and it had to be sufficiently remote that organized government in the area could not extract high port or duty charges and the whalemen could deal, preferably by barter, directly with the Africans

This dissertation describes the activities of the whalemen at the ports of Africa which met these qualifications. It thereby shows the relationships which Africans and Americans, so culturally different, were able to establish in the nineteenth century