Module 05 · Case studies
Three voyages, read day by day
The fleet-wide maps aggregate half a million log entries. These three voyages show what a single logbook looks like up close — where the ship went, what the lookouts reported, and how each voyage fits the depletion argument. Together they run from the equatorial sperm grounds of the early 1840s to the Arctic ice of the 1850s.
- AThe literary voyage
Acushnet
1841–1845 · voyage AV00209Herman Melville's ship spends two years on the equatorial sperm grounds, then turns north to the right whales off Kodiak.
Read the case - BThe ship that survived
Charles W. Morgan
1841–1845 · voyage AV02712The maiden voyage of the last American wooden whaleship afloat: sperm whales struck on the Offshore Ground, then a summer among right whales in the Gulf of Alaska.
Read the case - CInto the ice
Fortune
1850–1854 · voyage AV05038Two seasons in the Bering Sea and Western Arctic, a captain lost in Kamchatka, and a final summer on the bowhead grounds of the Okhotsk Sea.
Read the case
Every figure on these pages is computed from the voyage's own daily records using the same rules as the rest of the platform: only daily-log sources count as search effort, and outcomes are reported encounters, not whale numbers. Historical context from outside the log is marked as such.