Hello, first time poster here. I did ask the mods before I posted this as I wasn’t sure if this would be the correct subreddit.

I have recently been really into old tall ships, and doing a lot of research on them. I’ve been reading the book “Two Years Before the Mast” by Richard Henry Dana. I saw mention of a whaling ship by the name of “New England” and noticed she was from an area I grew up close to.

I made attempts to search google, but came up with nothing.

According to the book, her captain was a Job Terry, or at least he was the captain when the two ships met.

My hope is to learn enough about her to potentially build a model of her. Any and all information would be of great help. Also, if you have any ideas on how I can more easily obtain information on ships in the future, that would be of great help as well.

Thank you for your time.

This is a fascinating question. I must admit that I cannot answer it in full, but may provide some information I have been able to uncover and perhaps some direction for further personal research.

About half-past seven their whale-boat came alongside, and Captain Job Terry sprang on board, a man known in every port and by every vessel in the Pacific ocean ..... yet he had been forty years in the whale trade, and, as he said himself, had owned ships, built ships, and sailed ships. -Two Years Before the Mast (ellipses in bold are my addition for brevity)

Richard Henry Dana is famous for this memoir of time at sea, praised for a raw, realistic, yet artistic representation of the hard labor of merchant seaman. In his brief depiction of Job Terry, it appears he continues to be accurate.

What I've found on Job Terry is his prior service. He appears on logbooks for the whaling vessel Good Return, which can be freely viewed here. The record appears to place his captaincy from July 1828 until March of 1833. The records available span the South Atlantic and Pacific, fertile whaling grounds in the early/mid 19th Century, and so he would certainly have been a known name among whaling captains in the area. The next recorded voyage I can find of Good Return would begin in May of that same year, yet under a new Master Warren Howland. Job Terry and the New England are met in November of 1834 by Dana's vessel Pilgrim. The dates add up.

As an interesting aside, a reference is made to the final logbook of Job Terry's voyage:

After a whale caught Henry Howland (the ship's log keeper) in its jaw and carried him underwater, Benjamin Starbuck took over as keeper (Bolded additions my own)

We see two names referenced that are rather famous in Yankee whaling history. The Howland and Starbuck names are common in the 19th Century whaling fleets, they are prominent New England families that outfitted, financed, and participated in many whaling expeditions. I digress.

A final note I can find on Job Terry is his named inclusion (Job Terry, Jr., Poughkeepsie, New York) in a collection of letters belonging to a Benjamin Rodman, a man involved in the whale oil and candle industry in America. His position would see interaction with whalers, whaling expedition outfitters, and financiers looking to profit off of their bounties. For a one-off character, Job Terry is pretty well attested to as a historical figure. Fascinating.

Now where does this leave New England? My sleuthing has failed to turn up anything as of now. Indeed, New England and Whaling are nearly synonymous in the context of 19th Century American maritime culture, so finding the vessel of that specific name has been, so far, fruitless.

You may be able to get your ship through the The New Beford Whaling Museum archives directly. NBWM is the center of Yankee whaling history, and, as I'm sure you can see, has been my source for the historical information provided. It appears that there are fees associated with archival research and findings (this is not surprising), and I am not associated with them in any way to verify if they would have anything on the whaling ship New England.

They do have a half scale model of whaling ship Lagoda, and Mystic Seaport has an actual floating whaler Charles W. Morgan that my be of use as reference for your own models.