The Sea Wolf: Captain Alex MacLean, the North Pacific sealing conflict, and the making of a Cape Breton and North American folk hero, 1858--1914

Alex MacLean (1858--1914) was a product of a mid-nineteenth century rural community on Cape Breton Island composed almost exclusively of recently settled Gaels from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Going down to the sea at an early age, he acquired experience in fishing vessels and before the mast in deep-water ships based on the Atlantic Seaboard before sailing to the Pacific side of North America at the age of twenty-one. He operated out of those ports for the next thirty-five years.;MacLean's twentieth-century apotheosis as the basis of Wolf Larsen, the unforgettable character in lack London's best-selling novel The Sea Wolf, published to great acclaim in 1905, opens a different, equally interesting window. In his own lifetime, he had the uncanny experience of confronting, even when giving evidence in court, the fictional representations that many thought were drawn from the facts of his life. Emerging from a pre-modern community, MacLean thus exemplified the archetypically modern experience of becoming a hostage to a sensation- and myth-hungry publicity apparatus. In the dying days of sail, as the maritime frontier was disappearing, his reputation and continuing career on the sea was grist for the legend mill.;MacLean would remain active on the waterfront until his death in 1914, achieving considerable notoriety in newspapers and from government and legal officials throughout North America. This study assesses MacLean as a Cape Breton Gael, a controversial and elusive figure in the North Pacific sealing disputes, and an early twentieth-century example of the construction of folk heroes and legends in a fast-changing North America.;He was a skillful sailor and a colourful individual. His adventures, achievements, activities and escapades in the North Pacific and the Bering Sea during the high-flying days of the Victoria, British Columbia pelagic fleet in the 1880s laid the foundation for his folk hero status. Yet, over and above the fascination of this individual's biography, a study of his life opens a new window into the complex world of pelagic sealing in the North Pacific. The sealing question brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war, with Canadian sealing interests frequently enmeshed in complex webs of espionage, scientific debate, intricate diplomatic negotiations, and often convoluted legal processes, as major powers wrestled with new intensity with vexing questions of maritime and environmental law. A study of this one exceptional individual opens a new passage into this intricate and historically important area.