Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  The precise timing of the Basque arrival is of less interest, however, than the simple fact that with it—just as with Christopher Columbus’s arrival on San Salvador; or with John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland; and most especially Vespucci’s realization that the Americas was a separate and discrete continent and the Atlantic was a separate and discrete ocean—an entirely new phenomenon could finally be allowed to develop: from now on, voyages—whether taken for curiosity or commerce, for God or war or a host of other reasons—could be made transatlantic. Sea journeys could at last be undertaken between coasts that provably existed on opposite sides of the sea. Voyages no longer needed to be limited merely to coastwise wanderings and confined and limited to certain quadrants of the sea.

  Basque fishing vessels, for example, now no longer needed to venture westward into a fog-shrouded, unknown sea, with their purpose only to catch cod, with their success questionable, their safe return more a matter of chance than certainty. No, they could now and for the first time travel to a destination. The captains of Basque fishing vessels were now aware, as they pushed off from home into the confused waters of the Bay of Biscay, that there was a far side to their journey, with harbors and victuals and shelter and repair—and in time, settlements of their fellow countrymen—that were all available to them. But this was true for others as well; in short order Spanish galleons and Portuguese carracks and English ships of the line also understood that there was a far side to their journeying—and by the early decades of the sixteenth century, transoceanic passages were being made, trades were being conducted, and the bounty of the sea was being exploited.

  And while the Europeans involved themselves in this voyaging, the new Americans did so as well. Whether they were sailing as settlers or as colonials or whether, as after 1776, they did so as citizens of a newly independent nation, Americans were particularly quick off the mark in exploiting all manner of transatlantic venturings.

  They first got their sea legs by chasing whales.

  Yet once again it was the Basques who showed the way—since they, for the previous six hundred years, had been hunting for these warm-blooded oceanic mammals with the same determination and ruthlessness they had displayed toward the much smaller and nonmammalian codfish. Instead of the unsophisticated methods used by others in the past, of waiting for the whales to land near the beach, the Basques took their boats out into the deep Atlantic, hunting the whales well offshore just as they might hunt for any other sea creatures.

  Their principal target, first in Biscay and then in the waters south of Iceland and beyond, was the great baleen type60 known as the Atlantic right whale—a mammal eventually so named by its American pursuers because it was self-evidently the “right” whale to hunt. The Atlantic right—an all-black creature, weighing about a hundred tons, and with a fatal liking for swimming in leisurely fashion dangerously close to shore—and its rather bigger Arctic cousin the bowhead were animals all too easy to hunt down. The Basque technique for snaring them was so devilishly simple it soon became the world technique: it involved tying floating drogues to a harpoon line, such that a harpooned whale found it nearly impossible to dive and so in time would weary of swimming endlessly on the surface; it would slow and allow his pursuers to kill him.

  Right whales generally float when dead, and they could be towed home or to a nearby island base, there to be flensed and the blubber rendered to make a particularly fine kind of waxy oil, for heating or lighting, for lubrication or the manufacture of margarine;61 the flesh was cut up and salted for food; and the baleen—the large plates of keratin in the whale’s mouth that help the animal filter food from the seawater—was processed to make corset stays or buggy whips or the rods of parasols, or any of a thousand uses that pre-Edwardian man discovered for it.

  Multitudes of these magnificent, languorously moving, and tragically unsuspecting whales died each year at the hand of Europeans in hot pursuit of vast profits. Right whales and bowheads were especially numerous close to the coasts of Spitsbergen, the archipelago in the far northern reaches of the Atlantic—beyond both the remote fastnesses of Jan Mayan Island and Bjornoya, where whalers sought temporary sojourn during storms—and later in the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland. By the eighteenth century, the Basques’ technological monopoly had been broken, and French, Dutch, Danish, and Scandinavians hunters were also searching for the great mammals.

  Later they were joined by Britons of the Muscovy Company, who believed (wrongly, as it happened) that they had discovered Spitsbergen and so laid claim to being the only country allowed to take whales from the coastal waters. For a while English port cities like Hull and Yarmouth were sending scores of vessels north—where they engaged in ugly skirmishes with their Dutch and Danish rivals, who tried to chase them away. The quarreling led the Dutch in particular to refine their hunting techniques—performing the kill from small pinnaces or lug-sailed shallops, hauling the carcasses back on board to be laid across the stern for flensing, and only then bringing the blubber back to land for rendering. Most of the whaling process was being carried out at sea—a more secure means, especially when rivals were circling, hoping to make an intercept as a whaler crept into port with its newly killed victim.

  When the Americans entered the business in the early part of the eighteenth century, they were well aware of these new developments; and although the first American whaling ventures established in the late seventeenth century on Nantucket and in New Bedford and in the littler ports ranged along the southern coast of Long Island still saw much of the heavy work performed onshore, within fifty years the New England whale ships were being made large and sturdy enough and so self-sufficient that their owners could dispatch them and their crews on journeys of many thousands of miles. Rather than heading north to mix it up with the Europeans who were so bitterly and busily fighting among themselves, the Americans decided early on that their crews would head into virgin Atlantic territory—they would let the Danes, the Dutchmen, and the English have the rights and bowheads of the north, while they would concentrate on the largely untouched stocks of baleens—the fins, seis, minkes, grays, humpbacks, southern rights, and the gigantic and unforgettably grand blue whales—as well as the sperm whale, renowned for its superior oil, and which lived in what came to be called the Southern Whale Fishery.

  The sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus, is a creature well woven into the fabric of American literary life, in no small part due to Herman Melville and Moby-Dick. Melville had written in 1851 of the titanic struggle for revenge between the Pequod’s Captain Ahab and the ferocious great white sperm whale that in a previous encounter had so cruelly and humiliatingly savaged his leg. At the time he wrote the book, the whale fishery was at its peak, with whaling ships sailing from New Bedford, Mystic, Sag Harbor, and Nantucket bringing in as many as four hundred giant beasts each year.62

  But the animal had been known in New England for at least a century and a half before this: Nantucket historians like to say that a pod of sperm whales had been encountered during a right-whale hunt as early as 1715, piquing the interest of all—for who could fail to be impressed and puzzled by so bizarre and vast a creature, with a great blunt head fully a third as long as its body, with a single blowhole through which it could throw fire-jets of water scores of feet into the air, with a pair of crescent-shaped flukes that created a devastating boom as they crashed down onto the sea, with an ability to dive two miles down into the ocean like a starfighter and stay there, without breathing, for an hour and more—this animal was bigger, heavier, noisier (emitting clicks and clacks that could be heard for miles), and more ferocious than it was possible for most seamen to imagine. Then there were later discoveries of its total utility: that its blubber could be rendered into an exceedingly fine oil for lighting and the easing of delicate metal machines, that its meat was even more nutritious than normal dark red whalesteak, that the head of this gigantic creature held a pair of pods filled with several tons—tons!—of spermaceti, a rose pi
nk, waxy, spermlike substance that could be used to make, among other items, the purest of white candles, and that men dug holes in a whale’s skull and had themselves lowered inside the huge head in barrels, the better to scoop it out; and there was the knowledge that a male sperm whale had a penis six feet long, and that as Melville recounted, a man of discernment or bravery in public or both could have an Inverness cape, with a hole for his head, made simply from the skin that covered one; and there was the discovery, wedged deep in the whale intestine, of great lumps of the famously found, floating gray greasy substance known as ambergris—whose origins had long been a mystery: it was sea bitumen, they said; it came from the roots of a marine gum tree, it was spittle exhaled by sea dragons, it was a fungus, it was man-made, the compressed livers of fishes—all of these delights gave man even more reasons to hunt down the sperm whale above all other cetacean competitors.

  And so by the middle of the eighteenth century the whalers, now equipped with bigger ships, thicker sails, more capacious oil barrels, stronger harpoons, more enduring rope, and more lasting ironware, swept out from the American east into what they called ye deep.

  Until now their voyages lasted only a matter of days, perhaps a week or two. But the more enterprising whaling men, most of them of stout Quaker stock and not given to excitement or fear, began to sail their ships as far as Brazil, or the Guinea coast, or even the Falkland Islands or South Georgia, and were away for months; there was much terror but they also spent many hours drifting idly, good for the crafting of scrimshaw. In time the more adventurous took their vessels to the south of Isla de Los Estados, and doubled Cape Horn against the vast winds and storms of those lethal latitudes known as the Roaring Forties, and with luck and good seamanship they emerged whole and passed into the whale-rich emptiness of the Pacific.

  But their long sojourns in the Atlantic gave American sailors a confidence and a profound knowledge of the deep sea that was shared by few others. Whalers ranged to the farther ends of the ocean and discovered as many of its secrets as did the navigators and surveyors sent out by the maritime states: their legacy—and especially the legacy of New England whalers in the Atlantic—is profound.

  4. THE PASSAGE OF GOODS

  So it is scarcely surprising that when regular cargo crossings of the ocean emerged as a new means of performing transatlantic business, the Americans, long-distance specialists in this particular sea, rose to the occasion and pioneered a form of shipping that has dominated the Atlantic ever since. The development occurred in the first cold days of January 1818—and it involved the sailing, eastbound from New York, of what came to be known as a packet ship.

  The Atlantic was thick with cargo ships already—carrying toward Europe immense tonnages of New World cargoes, most especially sugar from the various plantations of the Americas, Brazil, and the Caribbean islands, and carrying back toward the Americas the trade goods and construction supplies and items of up-to-date technology and fashion that the merchants of the colonies demanded. But these ships generally sailed only when their holds were filled up with cargoes—there was nothing regular or reliable about departures or arrivals, nor any certainty about the routes a vessel might ply: a last-minute arrival of freight bound for a hitherto unspecified port, once accepted by the supercargo, meant the ship had to divert to ensure making the delivery.

  The one oceanic shipping service that did attempt to have a schedule, and even tried to keep to it, had been organized by the fledgling British Post Office almost ever since Charles II first established a mail service in 1660. It was recognized very early on that important foreign mails—official letters to embassies and colonial governors, as well as dispatches to the leading citizens of faraway places—needed to be accommodated as well as those bound for domestic destinations. Accordingly a number of postal packet ports were created in the early 1680s—at Harwich and Dover for ships carrying mails to northern Europe, at Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey for the Irish mails, and, after its formal selection in 1688, at the remote seaside town of Falmouth in southern Cornwall.

  Fast and regular sailing ships were dispatched from Falmouth to all corners of the Western world—at first with a service every two weeks to Corunna in Spain (using small vessels known as advice boats, the first of which were called the Postboy and the Messenger), and which then went through the Strait of Gibraltar for onward transmission to the rest of south and central Europe and Asia.63 Then at the turn of the century, the navy’s surveyor general, Edmund Dummer, proposed to the Post Office its first transatlantic service, and by 1702 he was running, as an early kind of franchise, a quartet of oceangoing sloops and brigs between Falmouth and the British-run sugar islands of Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and Jamaica. From the Caribbean it was but a short step to running a service to the American mainland, and in particular New York City—this service was inaugurated in 1755, with initially two vessels, the HMP Earl of Halifax and the HMP General Wall. Once this route was in full swing, with supposedly one boat a month (though there were only four voyages in the first two years), still more vessels were commissioned into service, eventually with British routes running from Falmouth to such southern ports as Pensacola, St. Augustine, Savannah, Charleston, and, most important of all in the early years, the major northeastern American garrison city (and spermaceti-candle-making city) of Halifax.

  A sporadic service, run mainly for the carriage of military mails, had already been operating between Falmouth and Halifax since 1754. Not surprisingly it had run into logistical difficulties during the War of Independence. But once that dust had settled and America had her freedom, a formal and regular service was put into operation, in 1788—with both Halifax and New York receiving mails from Falmouth—and in the case of the latter, all organized under the supervision of the presiding genius of Benjamin Franklin, colonial America’s deputy postmaster general, and after independence, the new nation’s postmaster general in chief.64

  All of sophisticated London became swiftly familiar with the routines: on the first Wednesday of every month, mails would be made up at the General Post Office in central London for New York, Halifax, and Quebec City. A letter for Manhattan cost four pennyweight of silver. The leather packets of collected mails—from which packet boats got their name—were then put on the mail coach on the post road to Falmouth, and arrived on Saturday evening, as regular as clockwork, and were transferred to the waiting boat, which promptly made her way out of the Falmouth roads and into the swells of the Atlantic. It took on average fifty days to beat across the ocean, uphill,65 especially if the Post Office added stops at Bermuda and Nova Scotia en route. A Londoner who posted a letter on the first of January could expect it to be read in New York City during the third week of February.

  And it was not only the mails, of course: the comptroller of the Post Office, a Mr. Potts, let it be known that newspapers and magazines could be sent across the Atlantic as well. Any one of the London daily papers, such as the General Advertiser, the Courant, or the Daily Advertiser, set the reader back five pence a copy. The Spectator—still in print today—cost nine pence, and the official London Gazette—the most venerable of London papers, and still going strong, offering up the government’s official pronouncements—was available in New York at nine pence a sheet, “to be delivered by the commanders of the several packet boats, free of all other charges.”

  It seems more than a little strange that it took as long as 130 years, from 1688 until 1818, for the notion of sending regularly scheduled packets of mail to be extended to the shipping of general cargoes. And in a sign, perhaps, of things to come, it was not a British institution that first came up with the notion of doing so, despite all the experience the British had accumulated. The invention of regular transatlantic cargo shipping came from a company headquartered in America.

  In fact, both of the brains behind what turned out to be a truly game-changing venture were Britons, living in America. Both were Yorkshiremen, both from Leeds, and they had each come to seek their for
tunes in America at the very end of the eighteenth century. By coincidence they occupied offices next door to each other on Beekman Street in lower Manhattan. By 1812, when the idea of the venture was first born, Jeremiah Thompson was a young cotton broker and owner of a small number of ships in the American coastal trade, and Benjamin Marshall—who, like Thompson, was a Quaker, as were most of the merchants in this small saga—a textile manufacturer and importer.

  Both men soon found they had developed parallel interests in buying raw cotton direct from the plantation markets in the southern American states. To be sure, they had different plans for the cotton: Thompson wanted to buy his so he could market it in exchange for the fine woolen goods his father was making back in Leeds and was trying to export to America. Marshall, on the other hand, found that he needed large quantities of cotton to send back to his family’s mills in Lancashire, where they would be made into textiles that he would then ship back to New York and sell on to retailers. The two men, not entirely competitors, then decided to work in concert, and they set up offices in Atlanta, with agents in New Orleans: absent any other internal freight system,66 they used their small vessels to ship cotton from the southeastern ports up to New York and then, by whatever vessels happened to be available, across the Atlantic to Liverpool.

  A flotilla of dories, each carrying the pennant of their mother ship in the event of being lost in heavy seas, bears away to harpoon a pod of right whales basking in an unusual high-latitude calm.

  And herein lay both a problem and, from Marshall and Thompson’s point of view, a tremendous business opportunity.

  The problem was one that became hugely amplified by the sudden jump in trade that followed the ending of the War of 1812 and the lifting of the Royal Navy’s fitful blockade of American ports. For there were simply not enough ships leaving New York that offered cargo space across the ocean—and, moreover, no one knew when those ships would leave New York, or when they might arrive at the other side of the Atlantic.