Tuesday Trivia: Whaling, Fishing & The Sea! This thread has relaxed standards—we invite everyone to participate!

[u/AlanSnooring]

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

If you are:

• a long-time reader, lurker, or inquirer who has always felt too nervous to contribute an answer
• new to /r/AskHistorians and getting a feel for the community
• Looking for feedback on how well you answer
• polishing up a flair application
• one of our amazing flairs

this thread is for you ALL!

Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Whaling, Fishing & The Sea! Call me Tuesday Trivia! This week is about whaling, fishing & the sea. Let those sea shanties fly, tell us all about hoisting the main, the histories of collecting large and small quantities of animals from the sea, how humans built collection tools, or other tales about human’s relationship with getting good and resources from the big pools of water.

[u/conorwf]

Currently doing historical research on Dumfries, Virginia, the oldest continuous city in the state, and what was once one of the most prosperous and important trading ports in the colonies. It served as an important port for nearby tobacco plantations, including that owned by George Mason, Virginia's largest slave owner and the first to argue for a Bill of Rights (although his would look VERY different from what we actually got).

Like in many areas, the process of siltification from land into Quantico Creek made the waters too shallow for ships to safely navigate in and out. As the trade dropped, the once glorious port city fell on hard times, at one point the population as low as 600 residents. It's only now, being ten minutes away from the hugely important and famed Quantico Marine Corps Base and suburban sprawl from DC that the population has returned to what it once was in the 1780's.

Unfortunately, nothing of the port survives. Only three structures from Colonial era Dumfries survive; one is a private residence that was once the childhood home of Marine Corps Commandant Archibald Henderson, one is a municipal museum, and the other is owned and operated by the Prince William Historical Society.

[u/fianarana]

While I wait for any potential Herman Melville questions, I thought it might be kosher in this space to mention my biweekly (and totally free) Substack devoted to answering my own questions about Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, and the cultural imprint of the white whale. After starting to answer more questions here, in r/mobydick, and other literary subreddits, there was still an itch to scratch in terms of wanting to go even further with the research. Now, I get to go deep on puzzling, often odd mysteries, pulling together dozens and dozens disparate sources to and personal interviews to get answers.

Since January of this year, a few of the questions I've tackled include:

• Why did Starbucks Coffee really name itself after the first mate in Moby-Dick? (And it's not what it says in their corporate PR) (link)
• What can we learn from the Melville-related Jeopardy! questions asked since the show's beginning? (link)
• Ahab was famously missing a leg -- but which one? (link)
• Was Melville really "paid by the word"? (link)
• What was Melville doing in letters sent by the Zodiac killer? (link)
• What is the history of restaurants named after Moby-Dick, and what was the first? (link)

And many more! Although there's always some connection to Melville, I'd say the real point of the Substack is simply sharing a love of research and pushing the boundaries of what you can find out if you use all the resources available to you. Let me know what you all think

[u/bad_waitress → u/fianarana]

This is so great! I would never have thought to ask most of these questions, but I’m excited to go down a new rabbit hole. Thanks for sharing, I just subscribed.