In Pursuit of Leviathan examines the forces that led to the creation and enormous success of the American whaling industry and to its precipitous decline. The authors sue detailed and comprehensive data to describe more than four thousand individual whaling voyages from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the leading nineteenth-century whaling port. They analyze the institutions that were developed to deal with whaling's peculiar problems, and they consider the changing economic and natural environments in which whaling seamen, masters, agents, and owners were obliged to operate.
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