The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress

On June 8, 1892, almost three thousand spectators gathered on New Bedford's waterfront to watch the whaling bark Progress depart for exhibition at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Proud that their city had been the globe's whaling capital, the crowd could have little imagined the bark's sad fate after it traversed the Great Lakes to its open-air display at Chicago's World's Fair. Progress ended, ironically, as a failed exhibit and a wreck on the Calumet River. Daniel Gifford, an affiliated professor at the University of Louisville, began his book as a family history of his eponymous great-great-grandfather who captained Progress in its earlier days and on its trip to Chicago. But it ballooned into a microhistory, he says, on the topics of memorialization, commemoration, and the beginning of whaling mythology. Claiming that the story has relevance today, he suggests that “the sentiments of the whaling industry in the 1890s

Archaeology · Art history · Environmental ethics · Exhibition · Globe · Memorialization · Mythology · Political science · Whaling · American Environmental and Regional History · Classics · History · Law