Toward an understanding of nineteenth-century whaling practices: A risk sensitivity model for whaling agents and masters.

摘要

This is a longitudinal study of the factors affecting the decision-making processes of key participants within the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. Two sets of actors, whaling agents and whaling masters, are identified and examined using contemporaneous data from whaling voyages and business records. This information identifies measurable behavioral variation within and across the two sets that lead to hypotheses on the methods used by these groups to increase the likelihood of success for any given whaling voyage. In particular, this research offers an explanation for the understanding and assessment of risk sensitivity among the individuals involved with whaling during this era, and discusses these strategies within a preliminary evolutionary framework.;Completing this study was a two-step process. For the first the evidence from the whaling industry was categorized and a model was devised to look at the levels of risk sensitivity in each group, agents and masters, and how these levels might be measured within these categories. The categories were identified from a list of voyages generated using key secondary sources and the archival information collected in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a total of 4,127 voyages spanning the entire century, 1800-1899. The categories chosen based on this assessment relate to temporal, spatial, and material variations within the whaling industry. Information about the size and type of vessels used, whaling grounds and voyage duration, and the amount of catch, or oil and bone, returned from the voyages were analyzed for each group.;For the second step, the agents and masters were broken into groups, based primarily on inferred levels of experience, and a series of hypotheses were generated to assess the value of each category and the results. The results support the conclusion that agent and master behavior varied according to the amount of experience with whaling, with more experienced individuals exhibiting less risk averse behavior than those with less experience. They also show that this type of risk sensitivity model can be used to generate substantive comparisons, which in turn offer new insights into the behavior of these decision makers.