High in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 300 miles south of the permanent polar ice pack (only 1,200 miles south of the North Pole itself), these “Arctic grounds” opened only for a few months every summer. They comprised a narrow channel that ran along the Alaskan coast from the Bering Strait to Point Barrow, Alaska’s northernmost tip of land, in the shallow water between the shore and the temporarily retreating ice pack. Then, as now, a powerful ocean current pumped northward through the Bering Strait out of the North Pacific, rising from abyssal depths and sweeping over the undersea continental shelf, stirring up and carrying a rich sediment of nitrates, phosphates, and other minerals into the Arctic Ocean. In spring, as the days lengthened toward twenty-four hours of chlorophyll-producing sunlight, this earthy undersea stream mixed with the oxygen-rich surface water at the edge of the melting ice pack to produce a dense, unparalleled efflorescence of plankton in the shallow water off the Alaskan shore. And as the ice melted, the arctic bowhead whales, whose diet consisted of plankton (filtered out of the water by the fronds of baleen that filled their great mouths), came here to feed on this rich soup. And the whalemen came for the whales.
As more ships gathered and nosed through the retreating edge of the ice pack in the strait, captains and crews went visiting. They rowed about in their small whaleboats for “gams”—social visits—aboard other vessels. Barker and first mate Irving accompanied Captain Dean, of the Wells, and often remained for several days as guests of other captains, telling again the story of the Japan and her crew’s long winter in the Arctic.
One of these ships was the Monticello, of New London, Connecticut. Her captain, Thomas William Williams, was one of a number of whaling ship masters who sailed with his wife and children aboard his ship.
Captain Williams’s youngest son, William Fish Williams, was twelve years old when Captain Barker came aboard for a meal in the Monticello’s saloon in June 1871. The food served to visitors was always the ship’s finest, yet it was plain. Sailors were not adventurous eaters. Despite the monotony of scanning the horizons for whale spouts for years at a stretch, they wanted dependability in their shipboard diet. Beef, pork, codfish, cheese, bread, and coffee they consumed daily with a relish undiminished by repetition. They were not bold experimenters when it came to the exotic foodstuffs to be found ashore—except for fruit, which, like children, they prized most for its color and sweetness. (One youthful seaman, who had never in his life seen or tasted tomatoes, bought a bag in Japan. Their “sourness” was so surprising that he threw the bag away.)
What young Willie Williams remembered most from his meeting with Barker was the captain’s revolting account of going hungry and eating tallow candles salvaged from his ship’s wreckage before succumbing to the natives’ diet of raw and rotting walrus blubber and meat with the hair still on it.
This also made the profoundest impression upon the captains of the other whaleships: the threat of starvation, the unsustainability of life ashore along this coast in the event of a shipwreck. A scenario that would determine the fate of every man, woman, and child in the fleet at the end of this summer.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY SHIPOWNERS, whale-oil refiners and dealers, whale-product merchants, ship captains, harpooners, whaleboat crews, coopers, and the common seamen who sailed aboard whaleships, their families, and the communities they returned home to, felt little of the Melvillean romance, of the environmental concerns, and nothing of the abhorrence that have since attached themselves to the enterprise of whaling. True, museums are full of scrimshaw carvings made by common seamen who were affected in an aesthetic way by the elemental, primordial struggle they experienced and witnessed in their work; some were genuinely enthralled by what they saw, though most of this work was occupational therapy, to stave off the stultifying boredom of life aboard a whaleship. Herman Melville’s dark, rapturous vision did not resonate with the readers of his day. His greatest book was a critical and commercial flop on publication, marking the end of his career as a popular novelist. There weren’t many fanciful types who held romantic notions about life aboard whaling ships. A shelf or two of memoirists of small or no literary merit tried (usually many years later, after the quotidian normalcy of shipboard life had given way to marveling at what they had once done in their heedless youth in the pursuit of a very few dollars) to express the astonishing, unquestioning audacity of pursuing a great whale in a small rowboat, to catch it with a hand-thrown hook, stab it to death, haul it back to a small, rolling ship, and there chop it up and melt it down for its oil. Why, what an idea.
For most of its practitioners, at every level, whaling was a rational, workaday endeavor, no more romantic than house carpentry, and far more dangerous and unpleasant. For the businessmen at the top of the trade it could mean phenomenal wealth; for the seaman in the cramped fo’c’sle, whose pay would often amount to no more than pennies a day, it was employment where none existed ashore, a path off the farm, or out of the slum, an opportunity of last resort. Very few young men, mainly delusional misfits, would have seen it as a tempting way of driving off the spleen, addressing a damp, drizzly November of the soul—Melville’s existential getaway. Life aboard a whaleship was too brutal and too dull for sensitive souls. Even Melville jumped ship, deserting the whaler Acushnet after only eighteen months—his only experience of whaling.
But for many, particularly those from New Bedford, there was a central tenet of whaling behind the economic rationale, an imperative that grew the industry from a part-time fishery to a holy calling, a belief that Melville nailed with bravura satire in chapter 9 of Moby-Dick, “The Sermon”:
“Beloved Shipmates,” cries Father Mapple, from the lofty prow of his pulpit, fashioned to resemble the bow of a whaleship,
“clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’ Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea weed and all the slime of the sea is about us!”
Melville cleverly appropriated Jonah, perfect for his story, but one may wonder what other tales from the mighty cable of the Scriptures Father Mapple would have read from on the remaining fifty-one Sundays of the year. He would soon have turned to the Book of Isaiah, which proclaimed, with less of a fish story, a truth that everyone in New Bedford held sacred: they were doing the Lord’s work. The slaying of whales was a holy directive, unambiguously ordered by God Himself in Isaiah 27:1-6:
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. . . . He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.
The message was clear: slay whales and prosper. Every man, woman, and child in New Bedford knew that the whale was a divinely created oil reserve, placed floating in the sea by God so that His Children might secure it for themselves. And in so doing, whaling had anointed its practitioners with unmistakable signs of the Lord’s blessings. The merchants who controlled the whaling industry in New Bedford in the mid-nineteenth century had grown wealthy to the point of embarrassment, beyond what appeared seemly. The only possible conclusion they could draw was that they were doing the Lord’s work, His pleasure evinced by the otherworldly scale of their rewards, which they struggled to accept with modesty and disperse with responsibility. And the sailors who etched scenes, on sperm whales’ teeth, of men battling the leviathan in small boats, were responding to the same urge that led early man to draw scenes of the hunt on cave walls: they believed they had experienced a partnership with the divine. God had given them dominion over the earth a
nd all it contained. Father Mapple and all New Bedford knew the truth in Psalms 107:23-24: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”
WHILE HERMAN MELVILLE’S TALE was too gothic and obscure for his contemporaries, the popular imagination of his day was thoroughly hooked by the money to be made in what was universally known as the “whale fishery.” This first industrialized oil business found its most successful form as a paradigm evolved by a tightly knit cult of religious fundamentalists on Quaker Nantucket. It realized its apotheosis of worldly reward when this paradigm was enlarged in Quaker New Bedford, which became the world’s first oil hegemony, the Houston and finally the Saudi Arabia of its day. Yet so fanatically and narrowly held—by some—was the religious faith that powered this great design, that it could not countenance or accommodate change, diversification, reappraisal, or compromise. The oil business of the second half of the nineteenth century was overtaken so swiftly by new paradigms created in the petroleum industry that New Bedford’s most hidebound merchant tycoons, and the world they had created, were swept away like sand castles in a hurricane. They vanished as fast as the new oil barons appeared to replace them. And New Bedford lost its preeminence as God’s Little Acre for merchant princes, though it would rediscover itself in the less exalted role of a Massachusetts mill town where the flotsam and jetsam of the whaling business—Azorean and Hawaiian seamen, freed and runaway black harpooners and their families, and poor young men and women from all over New England who had come to New Bedford to find a place aboard its ships and in its ropewalks and oil refineries—found steadier and far safer employment as cotton mill workers.
The rise and fall of the American whale fishery in New Bedford is a classic Darwinian story of the fitness of a group for a specific environment; of the failure by some of that group to adapt when their world changed, and how they withered and disappeared from the world, while others evolved and lived on.
That change was most abrupt for the 1,219 men, women, and children aboard the fleet of whaleships in the Arctic that summer of 1871. For them it would be a season of unparalleled catastrophe.
For the oil merchants and shipowners back in New Bedford, the change that overtook their lives would be more profound and longer-lasting.
Two
“The Dearest Place in All New England”
Seven years earlier, on September 14, 1864, New Bedford’s preeminent whaling merchant, George Howland, Jr., then fifty-eight years old, gave a speech to an assembly of citizens and merchants on the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, of which New Bedford had once been a part. The whaling business was still suffering the depredations of the Civil War, which had seen the loss of many whaleships and severely affected the town’s economy; quantities of whale oil brought home by whaling voyages had fallen in recent years, and the market price of whale oil was softening. Yet Howland’s message was unequivocally optimistic:
When I look over our city, and see the improvements which have taken place within my time, and over the territory represented by you, my fellow citizens and neighbors, and then go further, and embrace the whole country, I sometimes ask myself the question, “Can these improvements continue? And will science and art make the same rapid strides for the next fifty or one hundred years?” The only answer I can make is the real Yankee one: why not?
Howland’s boosterism was genetic. His father, George Howland, had made a fortune in the whale fishery. When he died, in 1852, he left an estate including: $615,000 in cash; a fleet of nine whaling vessels; a wharf with a countinghouse sitting on it; a candle factory; property and acreage in New Bedford, Maine, western New York, Michigan, and Illinois; an island in Pacific; and charitable bequests of $70,000. This was great wealth in the mid-nineteenth century, the highest tier of any Fortune 500 equivalency of the day. Yet Howland’s success had been duplicated forty or fifty times over by other New Bedford whaling merchants during his lifetime. Half of these successes had been forged by men named Howland, descendants of Henry Howland, brother of John Howland, who had arrived in America aboard the Mayflower. There were at least twenty Howland millionaires in New Bedford during George Howland’s lifetime, close and distant cousins. Most of them, like George, were devout Quakers.
His sons, George Howland, Jr., and George Jr.’s half brother Matthew, inherited their father’s ships, wharf, countinghouse, candle factory, and whaling business. In 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, two of their ships, the Corinthian and the George Howland, returned to their wharf in New Bedford with a total of 930 barrels of sperm oil (from the head “case,” or reservoir, of sperm whales) and 8,100 barrels of whale oil (the lesser quality made from boiling down blubber). The gross return from these two voyages was $383,433, from which George Jr. and Matthew first paid themselves back the $50,000 invested in outfitting the ships. Half of the remaining $333,433 went to the captains and crews as their share of the profits; $166,716 was the two Howland brothers’ net profit on these two voyages alone. They received additional income from their candle-making and oil-refining factories and other related businesses. Undoubtedly most of it went back into the business, for as Quakers the Howlands lived simply and modestly, but at a time when a common workingman’s annual earnings might be between $50 and $300, when a federal district judge in the East earned between $2,000 and $3,700 per year, and the president of the United States earned $25,000, the Howland brothers were netting annually around $100,000 each—with no income tax to pay.
It’s understandable if George Howland, Jr., looking back over the improvements made to his city during his own and his father’s lifetimes, could not—or would not—see beyond the incontrovertible facts of his own circumstances. During the previous one hundred years, the town had grown from a scattering of smallholdings along a riverbank to arguably the richest town in America. His father had ridden that growth to unprecedented wealth and passed it on to him and his brother, and at any time before the summer of 1871, George Jr. and Matthew could point only to the continued improvement of their personal wealth and business.
George Jr.’s walk home from anywhere in New Bedford, climbing the gentle hill that rose from the harbor, would have underscored this steadfast belief, for down the hill and as far as he could see in any direction, in tangible brick, wood, iron, and seething human endeavor, lay the whole of reality as he had always known it. Below him spread the waterfront, lined with warehouses, ship chandlers, thousands of barrels of oil, and the countinghouses of merchants whose names had been well known a century earlier. Every foot of wharf up and down both river-banks was jammed with moored whaling ships; others lay at anchor in the river waiting for dock space to unload their cargoes, or to refit and load supplies for another voyage. By any route home, Howland passed the substantial houses of other merchants and ships’ captains who had grown rich on whaling. The town was “perhaps the dearest place in all New England,” Melville had written in Moby-Dick. “Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent than in New Bedford. Whence came they? All these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”
George Jr.’s own four-story brick mansion and carriage house on Sixth Street, occupying an entire east-west block, and half a block north-south between Bush and Walnut streets (where it still stands today), was the most solid, unassailable measure of his substance, and of the permanence of his business. He had designed the house himself, had it built in 1834, and had lived in it for more than thirty years. Barrels of whale oil and bricks and mortar were equally solid to George Howland, Jr., and his sense of security about his business and the business of New Bedford was unshakably strong. How could he not think so?
The smart money agreed with him. R. G. Dun & Co., the early credit-reporting and business-information agency,
described and rated George Jr. and Matthew Howland in 1856 as being: “of the middle age both of them, men of good character and habits, and of business capacity; each with several hundred thousand dollars—ship owners, dealers and oil manufacturers. Good and safe.”
George Howland, Jr., married Sylvia Allen, a distant cousin, the grandchild of another Howland. They had three sons, but two died in infancy, and the third at the age of twenty-eight. Perhaps grief propelled him out of his house to lose himself in service to his community. A family biographer writing in 1885, when George Jr. was seventy-nine years old, noted that “he has been frequently sought for to fill public positions of trust.” He was a member of the town’s school committee; he represented New Bedford at the General Court of Massachusetts; he was twice the city’s mayor; a member of the State Senate; a trustee of the New Bedford Institution for Savings and of the Five Cent Savings Bank; a trustee of the State Lunatic Hospital; a trustee of Brown University; a trustee of the New Bedford Public Library, to which he donated his first two years’ salary as mayor ($1,600); and in 1870 he was one of the commissioners appointed by President Grant to visit the Osage Indians in Oklahoma, where he spent a few weeks living in a tepee. In New Bedford, George Howland, Jr.’s, pronouncements were as good as the Delphic Oracle’s. If he said business was good, it must be so.
Final Voyage Page 2
