Through a mix of lively archival treatment, animated sequences, and contemporary footage shot in far-flung locations, The Whalers revisits the untold history of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous men who worked alongside imporevished white peers in the dangerous whaling industry, once a key player in a rapidly modernizing world. Often free men—even as the Atlantic slave trade was still ongoing—they were culitural conveyors and part of a multicultural and multiracial society thriving on whaling ships, and established outposts across the seas. Through self-reflexive collective auto-biography, and through reimagined historiography, this film reclaims these lost stories, tracing cultural heritage to whaling ports across three oceans and bringing this powerful narrative back into collective consciousness.