The William Wirt

Built in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1833, the William Wirt was a whaling ship active from 1833-1860. Sailing out of Fairhaven and New Bedford, Massachusetts, the William Wirt made seven whaling voyages to the Pacific Ocean before it was sold in New York in 1862 amidst the American Civil War. The ship's notoriety comes predominantly from its 1838-1842 voyage, in which the Wirt had multiple encounters with another whaler, the Acushnet, itself on a whaling cruise in the South Pacific. Aboard the Acushnet and observing the Wirtin 1841 was Herman Melville, soon-to-be author of the famed 1851 whaling novel Moby Dick; or, The Whale. These seemingly inconsequential meetings between the Acushnet and the William Wirt have taken on greater significance. Some have used the Wirt's logbooks to better understand Melville's experience at sea in the South Pacific during the early 1840s. Melville himself later noted a memory of encountering the William Wirt at sea in 1841, although he had confused the Wirt with another ship and subsequently edited his comments.[1]

Chasing the Wirt uses the ship William Wirt as a case study of American Whaling in the nineteenth-century. The project has focused foremost upon the ship's 1850-1853 voyage due to the unusual amount of documentation that exists for this journey, including two logbooks and the ship's account book. Radford University’s Archives & Special Collections has held one of the logbooks for this 1850-1853 voyage since the 1940s. This unique archival holding for a University in Southwest Virginia inspired Chasing the Wirt. Sponsored by the Radford University History Department’s Center for Archives and Digital History and in close cooperation with the Radford University Archives & Special Collections, Chasing the Wirt allows students and scholars to explore American Whaling through the lens of one particularly well-documented voyage.