The Charles W. Morgan: The World’s Last Wooden Whaleship

As America’s oldest merchant ship still afloat and the only wooden survivor of the once-vital whaling industry, the Charles W. Morgan has a complex story to tell.

Elaborating on earlier volumes on the ship’s history at Mystic Seaport Museum, this new book offers an expanded account, chronicling the ship’s construction and launch in 1841 through its Thirty-Eighth Voyage in 2014--the first time the Morgan had been sailed in more than ninety years--and its continuing role today as an historic icon and the Museum’s flagship vessel. Chapters paint a picture of how whaling developed in Europe and the ways New England colonists adopted it as a profitable venture, and then, through the ship’s own story, proceed to sketch the evolution of America’s relationship with nature--and the whale, specifically--and with the many peoples of the world who were encountered by, or served aboard, a whaleship.

This is the story of a National Historic Landmark--one that reflects our changing relationship with the natural world and with the diverse populations of the globe through two centuries of American history.

Mystic Seaport Museum is the nation’s leading maritime museum. Founded in 1929 to gather and preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of America’s seafaring past, the Museum has grown to become a national center for research and education with the mission to ＂inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.＂

Andrew W. German is former director of Mystic Seaport Museum’s Publications Department and coauthor of multiple Mystic/whaling-related books, including America and the Sea: A Maritime History and The Charles W. Morgan: A Picture History of an American Icon. He lives in Mystic, Connecticut.

Mary K. Bercaw Edwards is Professor of English and Director of Maritime Studies, University of Connecticut.