Beef for Sailors: Maritime History Meets Food History

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident.

This from a nice blog post over at The Historical Society by Heather Cox Richardson.  It’s framed as a plea for maritime history but it’s equally relevant to food history.  She continues.

The crisis over the pigs illuminates an ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries.

If you’ve ever wondered how all those eighteenth and nineteenth century navigators and whalers were able to keep going in the deep oceans, particularly the south Atlantic and the Pacific, one of the keys is that they took with them European domestic animals, dropping them off whenever they made landfall.  Here’s my description in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage of the process.  Pigs had been brought to Hawaii centuries before by the orginal settlers. Cattle, horses, sheep and goats had not.

Taking a steer ( Hereford not longhorn) out to ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver sailed H.M.S Discovery into Kawaihae harbor on the Big Island and altered forever the diet of the Hawaiians, for with him he brought six cows, a bull, four ewes, and two rams. It was a tense time. Just 14 years earlier, Vancouver had been with Captain Cook when he was clubbed to death under the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay a few miles to the south. . .

The animals were in sorry shape, having had little water for days and no green forage for weeks as the little vessel plowed its way across the vast Pacific Ocean.   . . . Kamehameha [the chief who using British firearms had captured all the islands except Kauai] oversaw landing the animals. Vanouver’s account does not elaborate, but hoisting cattle, ewes and rams, even in weakened condition, into canoes lined with paddlers must have been quite a game.  The cattle, after all, were longhorns.

Vancouver made Kamehameha promise that the animals woud be taboo (except for the king’s table) for a decade so that they could multiply. He made him promise that women as well as men would then be able to eat the meat as long as it was not from the same animal (a big concession as women were subject to a fierce set of taboos and most appealing food was off limits).

The animals multiplied.

Mexican cowboys (paniolos from espanoles) and their horses  were imported to manage them from California, then still part of Mexico. Native Hawaiians also became fine cowboys.  Hawaiian cowboys compete on equal or more than equal terms with mainland cowboys in rodeos.

On horseback in front of Hawaii's Iolani Palace, 1980s. Rachel Laudan

Whalers over-wintered in the islands. Beef appealed more than fish and taro.

The biggest cattle ranch in the US in the twentieth century was on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded by one of those  New England whalers, John Parker Palmer, who jumped ship in the islands in 1809 at the age of 19.

Winching steer into ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930s. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

Hawaiians became aficionados of cecina (jerky), called pipikaula (pipi apparently their pronunciation of beef). Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers who stayed in the islands became enthusiastic beef eaters, enjoying Chinese oxtail soup and Japanese sukiyaki (and I believe in the latter case encouraging its popularity in Japan via back migration).

In short, I concur with Heather Cox Richardson about the importance of maritime history.  And there’s always a food story to accompany it.

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