In 1954, Aristotle Onassis—Greek shipping magnate, playboy, and millionaire—sent a whaling fleet, known as the Olympic Challenger, to Antarctica. What followed was the most well-documented illegal catch in modern history, preserved through correspondence, catch ledgers, and eye-witness accounts. Like most histories of whaling, however, this is a story told only by humans. Recent advances in whale science, combined with novel theories of animal intelligence, suggest this history was documented by whales too. This talk asks what it would look like to write the history of industrial whaling from the perspective of a whale? How can studies of sperm whale social structures, migrations, language, and environment, combined with artifacts and primary sources of industrial whaling, produce a new kind of social history for the non-human world?
Thomas Fleischman is an associate professor of German and environmental history at the University of Rochester. He is the author Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall, published in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series at the University of Washington Press. He is currently knee-deep in the research and writing of his next book, tentatively titled The Whaling Olympics: Aristotle Onassis and the Destruction and Survival of the World’s Last Great Whales.
