At the Mattapoisett Museum, 5 Church St, Mattapoisett, MA 02739; director@ mattapoisettmuseum.org; 508-758-2844
February 16, 6:30 pm – via Zoom with Helen Frink, author of Oil, Ice & Bone: Arctic Whaler Nathanial Ransom. In 1860 fourteen-year-old Nathaniel Ransom followed his five older brothers into the dank foc’sle of a whaling vessel. For fifteen years he hunted seventy-ton bowheads in Arctic waters, for the many uses of “bone”, blades of flexible baleen from the leviathan’s enormous jaw, raised its value, even as petroleum replaced whale oil as a source of lighting. In 1871 Ransom survived the loss of thirty-two whaling vessels in the frigid waters off Alaska’s Icy Cape.
With him, he carried a journal – and kept it, as he and his shipmates jettisoned weapons and warm clothing to save their very lives. His eyewitness account of whaling’s brutal slaughter and sudden losses is enriched by the author’s affection for an ancestor she discovered through his journals a century after his death.
Helen Frink is the author of two town histories: These Acworth Hills (1989) and Alstead Through the Years (1992). Her book Women after Communism; the East German Experience (University Press of America, 2001) examines the effects on women of the transition from socialism to capitalism.
Her exploration of family history brought her to the journals of great-grandfather Nathaniel Ransom. She delights in using original letters, newspapers, journals, and documents to bring to life social and material history centered in New England. She lives too far from the sea in Acworth, New Hampshire.
Register at www.mattapoisettmuseum.org/events
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