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By admin

I was struck by the visual representation of international whaling in the 1850s that we examined in class last week. For one, the extent to which international sea trade had developed is a bit shocking. I had not expected Pacific sea routes to be so well established. I was also surprised by the ports trafficked in South America. The Galapagos for instance seemed an unlikely candidate for a major 19th century port as I had assumed that they were largely self-sustaining fishing and agrarian economies. I was also surprised to see that ships tended to stop at several locations along the eastern coast of South America. This observation led me to believe that South American countries had not developed any railroad infrastructure at the time. I came to this realization through comparative analysis with the North American ports. In the US, it appeared that ships only really stopped in New York or another New England port. They also stopped at a Canadian port. This led me to believe that the US was able to get all the goods it needed from the one port, then ship them throughout the country from there. Doing so would have obviously required the use of the railroad infrastructure developed around that time. Therefore, more stops in South America could mean that they were unable to efficiently ship imported goods otherwise.

I was also intrigued by two of the choices Ben Schmidt made in his analysis. The first was to center the map on the Pacific Ocean. While doing so made my above observation about robust Pacific shipping connections more apparent, it did not seem to specifically focus on the trade with which the US was directly involved. Given his title in which he focuses on ‘America’ I expected a US-centric analysis, which would have likely zeroed in on the triangular trade in the Atlantic Ocean. His choice to end the analysis in the early 1860s did not really make sense to me either. I would have expected him to continue the analysis through the early 1870s in order to effectively examine the ways in which the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 precluded an explosion in western port cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is just a theory. It is entirely possible that the whaling trade broke down or stayed its original course after the 1860s, leading Schmidt to ignore the impact of the transcontinental railroad.