America, Whaling, and the World

FAIN: TR-50085-09

City Lore: NY Center for Urban Folk Culture (New York, NY 10003-9345)
Eric Burns (Project Director: February 2009 to February 2023)

Production of a two-hour documentary exploring the history, culture, and significance of the American whaling industry from 1620 to 1924.

INTO THE DEEP: America, Whaling & the World: a two-hour documentary film for national broadcast on PBS in 2010, directed by Ric Burns and co-produced by Steeplechase Films, American Experience, and WGBH/Boston, explores the history, culture and significance of the American whaling industry from its 17th century origins in drift and shore-whaling, through the golden age of deep ocean whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries, and on to the industry's demise in the decades following the American Civil War. Combining stunning archival material with powerful on-camera interviews, evocative live cinematography, dramatic reenactments, and underwater footage of whales at sea, the film will bring alive the complex reality and extraordinary experience of American whaling as the nation rose to the threshold of global power, all the while registering the larger forces, economic, social, cultural, technological and environmental, that shaped and propelled American Whaling from start to finish.

Associated Products

American Experience: Into the Deep: Whaling and America (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: American Experience: Into the Deep: Whaling and America
Writer: Ric Burns
Director: Ric Burns
Producer: Ric Burns
Producer: Bonnie Lafave
Producer: Mary Recine
Producer: Robin Espinola
Abstract: From the dawn of the seventeenth-century, when the first sea-weary pilgrims looked on in wonder as teeming pods of rights whales breached the waters off Cape Cod to the eve of the Civil War, when more than 700 of the 900 ships in the worldwide whaling fleet hailed from American ports and American whalemen dominated the globe, the epic story of the commercial pursuit of the largest creature on earth would be intimately bound up with the story of America: as a parable of American capitalism on the rise, as a case study in maritime culture at its most extreme, and as an allegory for the American, and the human experience—long before a restless sometime whaleman and would-be writer named Herman Melville ever went to sea. At once a sea adventure, a cautionary economic and environmental tale, and a mythic saga of man and nature, the film tells the saga of three centuries of American whaling—interweaving the riveting tale of the doomed whaleship Essex, which set sail from Nantucket in the summer of 1819 and the deeply moving story of a young whaleman named Herman Melville—whose own life and imaginative voyage into the deep would give rise to one of the greatest works of literature ever created by an American.
Year: 2010
Format: Film
Format: DVD

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