Historians of whaling often focus either on its boom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or its resurgence and the attendant environmentalist backlash in the late twentieth. The industry’s lull at the turn of the twentieth century, however, beckons greater attention. In The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress: New Bedford, Chicago and the Twilight of an Industry, Daniel Gifford offers just that by exploring how the once-prominent industry and its erstwhile boosters adapted to the economic changes of the Gilded Age. Gifford tracks the story of the whaler Progress from its heyday plying the waters of the South Pacific to its conversion into a museum dedicated to the fading industry at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

The central question Gifford grapples with concerns how a community—whalers in New Bedford, Massachusetts—attempted to fashion a particular narrative about itself for a national audience. When the Progress left its New England berth for the Chicago fairgrounds, supporters hoped “she would tell American visitors … a story about New Bedford’s whaling heritage and history, and she would remind the world how New Bedford had once lit the globe and lubricated the industrial revolution with whale oil” (7). The task of commemoration and memorialization was made all the more difficult by the fact that even though the industry was in its twilight years, it was still very much alive. Americans from New Bedford to San Francisco continued to rely on whaling even as the Progress articulated a story about the whaling industry that either obscured the contribution of its laborers or consigned them to some mythic past.

As Gifford observes, the story of the Progress bridges two important trends in late nineteenth-century America: whaling and world’s fairs. Whaling in the nineteenth century was big business. The valuable oil rendered from these marine mammals lubricated the machinery that made industrialization possible. The 1893 World’s Fair would, meanwhile, “announce America’s arrival as an international powerhouse to the rest of the world” (11). If whaling indeed created the bounty the fair celebrated, irony abounds. By the fair’s opening, petroleum had supplanted whale oil as the fuel and lubrication of choice, dooming the whaling industry.

Gifford’s story begins far away from the gleaming White City of the world’s fair. In antebellum America, the whaling industry centered on New Bedford, but whaling ships like the Progress sailed the world over in search of bowheads, right whales, and sperm whales. Gifford offers readers a thorough retelling of the work of whaling. During the 1860s and 1870s, the industry faced a pair of challenges that, along with the growing popularity of petroleum, portended the industry’s decline. First, the Civil War saw New Bedford’s whaling fleet devastated by Confederate commerce raiders. Then, in 1871, dozens of whaling ships were stranded in icy Arctic waters (the Progress escaped that fate and was enlisted to rescue survivors). These disasters hastened the decline of whaling. Proof of that decline was found in prominent New Bedford families’ choice to invest in cotton mills at the expense of whaling. For whalers who remained in the industry, Gifford asserts, “their decision necessarily became much more conscious, much more deliberate, and ultimately, much more rooted in identity” (50).

That identity, its creation, and its representation were central aspects of the Progress’s transformation into a museum ship for the Chicago fair, the focus of much of the second half of Gifford’s book. Fair organizers in Chicago and elites in New Bedford supported showcasing the whaling industry even as its importance continued to decline. From the beginning, the project was drawn in two directions, with some advocating for a “didactic recreation of whaling with an emphasis on authenticity,” and others supporting “a theatrical recounting of the dramatic events of 1871” (92). In the end the ship became an exhibit with little coherence, at once an authentic whaler and also a symbol of a romanticized and mythic past. Gifford’s retelling of the Progress’s freshwater voyage from New Bedford to Chicago is particularly interesting. The ship was installed in a pond on the fairgrounds where it remained for the duration of the celebration. But, as Gifford tells it, the attraction proved to be a dud. “It was perhaps foolish,” he concludes, “to assume that people cared about an industry that was parochial, insulated, and complex …. [and] that almost everyone saw as obsolete and relegated to the past” (152).

While in the second half of the book Gifford focuses on the Progress’s transformation into a museum piece and the problems and issues that followed, the first half leaves readers assuming much about the vessel’s life as an actual whaleship. In describing the workings of the whaling industry, the challenges of the Civil War, and the 1871 Arctic disaster, the Progress itself makes few appearances. I was left wondering why Gifford mines sources from the whaleship Florida to explain whaling in the South Pacific, rather than tracing the Progress’s own earlier history.

The book also leaves the role of the environment underdeveloped. Much of the Progress’s importance comes from its role in the Arctic disaster, yet Gifford inadequately explains why, by the 1870s, so many whalers resorted to Arctic waters in the first place. Greater attention to the environmental implications of nineteenth-century whaling could have helped explain the industry’s Gilded Age decline. Dwindling whale stocks as a result of overfishing forced whalers like the Progress to expand into previously unexploited waters, such as those in the Arctic. As the century wore on, it became more and more difficult to make whaling profitable given the industry’s history of unchecked environmental exploitation.

Gifford fills a neglected historical niche by demonstrating how the whaling industry contended with its nadir between the booms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there is little new here about the operation of the industry or the larger economic forces at work on it, Gifford rightly turns our attention to the tricky work of memorializing and remembering an industry and a way of life. As Gifford reminds us, this is not a story unique to Gilded Age whalers, but one shared by all laborers caught up in industrial transitions.