Final Voyage

by Peter Nichols

  SEPTEMBER 10 TH.

  It is quite rugged today, and I have been quite sick; these 3 or 4 words I write in bed.

  SEPTEMBER 11 TH.

  It remains rugged and I remain Sea sick. I call it a gale, but my Husband laughs at me, and tells me that I have not seen a gale yet.

  When better weather returned, Eliza got up and began to explore. Her first impressions of the activities aboard ship were strange and baffling, as the coopers, carpenters, blacksmiths worked away and the officers bawled orders to the men, who tried to obey them.

  More quiet days followed, helping Eliza to get her sea legs, with several “beutiful moonshiny evenings” during which “one of the boat steerers, a colored Man, has a violin, and we have some musick occationaly which makes it pleasant these nice evenings. There is a splendid comet to be seen.”

  On another clement day, she did some sewing, helping Thomas make a new sail for his whaleboat.

  On Sundays, unless whales were spotted and chased, all work was laid aside and Eliza was surprised, after the bellowed orders that accompanied every heave of the ship, at the solemn peace aboard the ship. Many of the men read their Bibles, or worked at some piece of carving or scrimshaw. “It is the Sabbath, and all is orderly and quiet on board; much more so than I expected among so many Men between 30 and 40 . . . nothing done on Sunday but what is necessary.”

  Three weeks after leaving New Bedford, when the ship was close to the mid-Atlantic islands of the Azores, sperm whales were spotted. Though it was late in the day, boats were lowered, including the captain’s, and rowed off into the twilight that was deepening across the ocean. It was night when the second and third mates’ boats returned, without whales, and Eliza grew worried about Thomas, who, like the first mate, was still out on the water, fighting whales in the dark. “My anxiety increases with the darkness. . . . The Men have put lanterns in the rigging to help them see the Ship.” The mates’ and Thomas’s boats eventually returned with a catch. “All is confution now to get the whale fast alongside. . . . I am quite anxious to see how [the] fish looks, but it is too dark.”

  She got her first look at a sperm whale the next morning. The mate’s whale was a calf, but it looked enormous to Eliza. She groped to describe it:

  SEPTEMBER 29 TH.

  My Husband has called me on deck to see the whale. . . . It is a queer looking fish. . . . There is not much form, but a mass of flesh. . . . They are about a mouse color. . . . [The men] first take the blubber off with spades with verry long handles; they are quite sharp, and they cut places and peel it off in great strips. It looks like very thick fat pork, it is quite white.

  Eliza was still seasick when she recorded that first sight of a whale. As she got her sea legs and the men caught more whales, her interest in the endeavor—the primary focus of all activity aboard the Florida—and her ability to describe what she saw quickly sharpened:

  NOVEMBER 8TH.

  ... The welcome cry of “There blows” came from aloft before breakfast this morning; then all was bustle. . . . Two boats were lowered and pulled lustily for them. The movements of the boats were watched from the Ship with great interest. . . . Some of the time [the whales] went a good ways off. It also takes a good while to wait for them to come up after they go down. Then they come up in quite a different place. On board the Ship, they place signals to mast head in different places, and different shaped ones, made from blue and white cloth, to let those in the boats know in what direction the whales are and whether they are up or down, as it is difficult sometimes for the Men in the boats to tell, they are so low on the water and the whales change their position so often. . . .

  The Mate finally got fast to one. . . . It looked queer to me to see those three little boats, attached together with ropes, towing the whale along. . . .

  [Finally, the whale is alongside the hull.] There are ridges all over the back, which I should think must be from age. . . . There were a great many marks on the back, caused, my Husband said, from fighting. They are a much handsomer fish than I had an idea they were. . . .

  It must be quite an art, as well as a good deal of work to cut in the whale. . . . The Men . . . seem to know exactly where to cut. They begin to cut a great strip. The hook is put through a hole that is cut in the end of this piece . . . then it is drawn up by the tackle as they cut. They do not stop till the piece goes clear round. Then it comes clear up and is let down into the blubber room where it is afterward cut in pieces suitable for the mincing machine. . . . The head they cut off and take on board in the same way. . . . It was singular to me to see how well they could part the head from the body and find the joint so nicely. When it came on deck, it was such a large head, it swung against the side of the Ship till it seemed to me to shake with the weight of it.

  It was all done and I was glad for the Men. . . . It made me tremble to see them stand there on that narow staging, with a rope passed around their bodies . . . to keep them from going over, while they leaned forward to cut. Every Man was at work, from the foremast hand to the Captain. The sharks were around the Ship and I saw one fellow, more bold than the rest, I suppose, venture almost to the whale to get a bit. The huge carcass floated away, and they had it all to themselves.

  The next day more whales were spotted, and boats lowered to give chase. Eliza stood at the ship’s rail and avidly followed the pursuit with everyone else aboard. “Though they were a good way off, we could tell when the iron was thrown, for the whale spouted blood and we could see it plain.” It was a “cow” that had been trying to protect its calf. “The poor little thing could not keep up with the rest, the mother would not leave it and lost her life. [ The mate] says they exhibit the most affection for their young of any dumb animal he ever saw.”

  By the next day, four dead sperm whales were lying alongside the Florida, making much work aboard. The first mate took Eliza down to the “reception room, as he termed it,” the “tween-decks” blubber room immediately beneath the main deck, in the middle of the ship, where the great peeled strips of blubber were chopped up for the “try-pots” (great cauldrons placed in the “tryworks”—brick fireplaces—in which the blubber was melted to oil). The men were waist-deep in “horse pieces” of blubber, coated with oil, but all of them “laughing and having a good deal of fun.” Intensive activity aboard a whaleship meant money for all hands. “Greasy work” always put the entire crew in a happy mood.

  Eliza became fascinated: “It is truly wonderful to me, the whole process, from the taking of the great, and truly wonderful monster of the deep till the oil is in the casks.” Several months later, after a night of watching the crew cutting in and trying out an enormous right whale, she wrote: “It is certainly the greatest sight I ever saw in my life.”

  Yet with the excitement came the frequent anxiety for the safety of the men, sometimes gone all night in the boats after whales, and, on more than one occasion, real fear for her husband’s life. This episode came in the foggy and ice-strewn (even in July) Sea of Okhotsk, off the Siberian coast:

  JULY 21ST.

  ... I have passed a very unhappy night. My Husband was away all night. . . . I was frightened when I heard them lower [his] boat, for I did not suppose he would go at all—or anyone go alone in such a foggy night. I worried all night long and did not sleep at all. The time seemed very, very long, every minute thinking, and hoping that he would come back, until I was very much afraid his boat had been stoven and no one to assist him. . . . The thought was awful to me and the night a long one. . . . The Officer said that he was sure he was fast to a whale and as he had no anchor in the boat, had to lay by him. It proved to be so. We had sent two boats off to look for him quite early. They found him and towed the Whale back to the Ship. I saw him coming about 8 o’clock. He had had good luck in taking the Whale, but the unpleasant job of laying by him all night. He will make about 60 bbls [barrels of oil].

  I was overjoyed to see my Husband coming. I was much afraid that something had happened to him.

&nb
sp; Her fears had been amply fueled by the news a few weeks earlier of “Capt. Palmer being killed by a Whale, or rather he got fast in the line and was taken down by the Whale and never seen again. His poor Wife and three Children are at Hilo, and will not hear about it till fall.”

  And death came to the Florida in the Sea of Okhotsk just three weeks later. Tim, the black boatsteerer who had a violin and made the “musick” Eliza liked, had, like Captain Palmer, been caught in a line attached to a whale and dragged out of the boat into the water. The whale was later caught and Tim’s body recovered, “bruised a good deal by being dragged on the bottom.”

  Though she wrote openly of her fears, Eliza was, with the sensibility of her time, conspicuously reticent about certain things. The lead in this entry is buried amid whaleship minutiae:

  [FEBRUARY 4, 1859.]

  It is now about a month since I have written any in my Journal and many things have transpired since then.

  The 10th of January we had a gale of wind that lasted till the 12th, the heaviest gale we have had since we left home. On the 11th, the fore sail was carried away. We spoke [to] the Whale Ship Rodman, Capt. Babcock, on the 11th, bound home. Did not exchange many words, it was blowing so hard. They had Pigeons on board and four of them flew on board of us. They are very pretty and my Husband has had a nice house made for them. We have a fine healthy Boy, born on the 12th, five days before we got into Port.

  There is no mention anywhere in Eliza’s journal of her pregnancy, how it made her feel, any difficulty that moving about a tossing ship in her condition might have created for her, or the contribution this might have made to her seasickness; there is only this briefly noted fact: the boy, born in that “heaviest gale we have had since we left home” in the notoriously stormy Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, was William Fish Williams (Fish was the name of one of the Florida’s New Bedford owners).

  Eliza was fortunate in being so close to New Zealand at the time of Willie’s birth, rather than far out on the Pacific. Thomas sailed his ship into the port of Manganui, on New Zealand’s North Island, where he knew they would find an oasis of sailorly and, paradoxically, womanly society. As soon as the Florida anchored, the harbormaster, Captain Butler, sent his wife on board, who returned every day until Eliza could leave her bed, and then she and the baby moved ashore to the Butlers’ house. The British Butler family was large: eight children, three of them grown women, who, with Mrs. Butler, enveloped Eliza and her baby in feminine care. “They are a nice Family, extremely kind and affectionate, and every one of them seemed to try to see which could pay me the most attention. . . . They all sing, dance, and play on the piano. They are quite a lively Family and one of the young Boys plays on the violin.”

  There were eight other ships in port at the time, and their captains, who used the Butler residence as an informal clubhouse, visited her and the baby and brought gifts: “Oranges, Lemons, several kinds of Preserved Fruits, some Arrowroot, a nice Fan made on one of the Islands . . . and a bottle of currant wine.” Several of the captains had their wives and children with them, one of these a ten-month-old boy who had been born in the Butlers’ house. Eliza was also comforted by the piety of the Butler household. Captain Butler was an Episcopal minister and conducted daily services in his house.

  She spent only two weeks ashore before the Florida left New Zealand for the “Japan grounds.”

  It was almost a year before Eliza referred to her son by his name in her journal. Until then, he remained “the Baby,” a noun, like “my Husband,” whose small adventures were duly recorded. “The Baby is well and healthy and sleeps a good deal,” she wrote on February 24, 1859. “He is a very pleasant Baby.”

  In addition to mastering the pull of gravity, like all babies, Willie had to acquire gyroscopic skills to accommodate the nearly constant roll and pitch of a ship through his first years.

  It has been a very unpleasant day, blowing a gale all day and the Ship rolling very badly. I can’t keep the Baby in one place, and he gets a good many bumps. . . . The Baby likes to be on deck most all day. He goes about the deck by taking hold of things but does not go alone yet. . . . He will climb a good deal for such a little fellow. . . . We have been making a real Sailor’s Cot [hammock] for the Baby to sleep in. The motion of the Ship keeps it in motion all the time. The Baby is delighted with it. . . . Willie [past his second birthday now] has met with a bad accident this afternoon. He was playing in one of the Staterooms and fell off from a Chest and cut his lip open very badly—with his teeth, we suppose. It bled a good deal. His Pa sewed it up. The poor little Fellow bore it better than I thought he would.

  Melville’s Ishmael said that “a whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard.” For Willie it was his nursery and his kindergarten.

  THOUGH THE FLORIDA SET OFF from New Zealand, heading for the remotest regions of the globe, Eliza was to find more female company wherever they went. Whaleships invariably sailed the same routes from commercial hubs like New Zealand or the Hawaiian (then the Sandwich) Islands to the whaling grounds, and from one whaling “ground” to another, and there they would find other whaleships, increasingly in greater numbers, all competing for the same whale stocks. Far out in the lonely, still primitive, barely discovered, and to a large extent still unspoiled Pacific, along routes as well defined as air routes 150 years later, whaleships would routinely see and often “speak”—sail within speaking range of—other ships. On the Brazil Banks, in the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and crowding the narrow channels between ice and land in the Arctic, whaleships met other whaleships. A small number of these were, like the Florida, “lady ships,” which carried a captain’s wife and sometimes their children aboard. These supernumerary passengers formed a floating community that preserved a strong fabric of home. Wives and children visited other wives and children as they might have on any afternoon in New Bedford, except that here they were rowed back and forth by whaleboat crews instead of traveling by carriage. They gathered aboard nearby ships for Sunday services. An active social life, which included cultural and religious visits, was a vital part of what made an isolated life at sea bearable.

  The journals kept by some of these captains’ wives give an indication of this cozy society of satellites, virtually a floating annex of New Bedford neighbors and their families that existed wherever whaleships sailed.

  In the Sea of Japan, Eliza wrote:

  APRIL 23RD.

  This morning it rained quite hard and was rather foggy. As soon as I was up, I heard that there was a Ship ahead, and I was in hopes that it was the South Boston. . . . To my Joy it proved to be. My Husband came to the skylight and told me that I might expect to see Mrs Randolph, for he was going to speak the Ship in a few moments. Very soon he came down and told me to hurry and get ready to go on board. I was not long getting Willie and myself ready. We went aboard before breakfast and stayed till evening. We had a nice gam and spent the day very pleasantly.

  The South Boston also had letters for the Williamses, picked up in Hawaii five months earlier, but written six months before that: “We got our letters—one of them from home—and feel very thankful to hear that our Dear little Boys, Father, Mother and all were well at that time, which was in June.”

  The very next day, the whaleship Harvest hove in sight close to the Florida and the South Boston, all of them cruising the “Japan grounds,” and Eliza and Mrs. Randolph were rowed to the Harvest to spend the day with Mrs. Manchester.

  Such visits offered a respite from the constant claustrophobia of the close quarters aboard ship. In June, the Florida passed through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Okhotsk. The whaling was slow, and the weather for the next week was rainy, snowy, or foggy, keeping the family cooped up in their small cabin.

  “It is very dull on deck,” wrote Eliza, with uncharacteristic complaint. “I have been ironing for one thing and doing other little things too numerous to mention. Thomas [a rare use of his name] has been reading a good part of the day, and Willie
has been through his usual course of mischief.” A week later, Eliza sounded positively peevish: “Have not seen a Whale and scarcely a Bird. It is dull—very dull. We have not seen a Ship since we were in the Straits [nine days earlier].” In the same seas the previous year, Eliza had counted nineteen whaleships in one day. But soon enough company hove in sight again: “This afternoon have been on board the John P. West and spent the afternoon very pleasantly with Mrs Tinker . . . [and] their little Boy. He is about 2 years old and a fat little fellow. . . . Capt. Tinker’s Wife and little Boy have been on board and spent the afternoon. We enjoyed it much—the Children in particular.”