Laws of Honour: The Laws and Customs of Anglo-American Whaling, 1780-1880
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a global industry. Ships from many nations with crews from ports all over the world hunted in waters from the Arctic Ocean to the Tasman Sea. Whale oil illuminated the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. Far from formal legal institutions, the international cast of whalemen created their own rules and methods for resolving disputes at sea over the possession of a valuable natural resource. These unwritten customs were remarkably effective in preventing violence between crews of competing ships. Whaling was intensely competitive, yet the dangers of hunting in often treacherous conditions fostered a close knit community that was able to fashion resolutions to disagreements that also maximized their catch. Legal scholars have cited whaling customs as evidence that property law is often created by participants and not imposed by legislatures and courts. Whaling law was, in fact, a creation of both whalemen and lawyers. At sea, whalemen often improvised and compromised in ways that had more to do with personal and communal ethics than with well understood customs. Lawyers and judges, looking for certainty and consistency, imagined whaling customs to be much more established and universally observed than was ever the case. The same loose whaling customs that prevented violence and litigation failed, however, to check practices that severely depleted the available supply of bowhead and sperm whales. As a close knit community capable of governing themselves, American whalemen should have been able to find a way out of the "tragedy of the commons" which predicts that commonly owned and competitively exploited resources are - without an external or group imposed system of restraint - fated for destruction. Prior to about 1850, whalemen, generally believing that whales as a species were impervious to extinction, saw no need to limit their catch. By the time whalemen recognized that whales stocks were seriously depleted other sources of energy - coal oil and petroleum - had swept the market. There was, at this point, no reason to preserve the prey of a soon to be obsolete endeavor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".