Final Voyage

by Peter Nichols

  THESE WHALING WIVES developed a keen, sometimes intense interest in the taking of whales, which had a direct bearing on their husbands’ fortunes. Eliza found “that odor with the smoke that comes below from the try works is quite unpleasant, but I can bear it all first rate when I consider that it is filling our ship all the time and by and by it will all be over and we will go home.”

  Mary Chipman Lawrence, of Falmouth, Massachusetts, sailing with her husband, Captain Samuel Lawrence, and their daughter Minnie, aboard the New Bedford whaleship Addison, became obsessively involved with the ship’s search for whales. “A whale, a whale, a kingdom for a whale!” she moaned to her journal in July 1858, during a dismal summer of arctic whaling:

  We have looked and searched in vain. . . . If we cannot find the whales, we cannot get the oil. . . . [The captain of the Dromo] had been to Cape Lisburne and as far north as the barrier of ice and had not seen a spout. . . . Captain Bryant came on board and stopped until dinner. He has been as far as the ice barrier . . . and has seen ne’er a whale. If we cannot get ourselves, it is a great satisfaction to know that others are not taking it in great quantities. . . . Oh, where shall whales be found?

  Mrs. Lawrence recorded that her “sorrow found vent in tears,” until finally, “Eureka! Eureka! We have got a bowhead at last.” And then: “We have been eating bowhead meat for several days. . . . It is really good eating, far before salt pork in my estimation.”

  In July 1859, when she learned that a few lucky ships had, just one month earlier, found a great pod of whales and scored an enormous windfall of oil off Cape Thaddeus, where the Addison had cruised so fruitlessly the year before, Mary Lawrence was sick with envy:

  Imagine our feelings when we were told there had been a grand cut taken off Cape Thaddeus by a few ships in June, where thirty or forty ships were hanging about for weeks in the ice last season and not a whale to be seen. . . . The Mary and Susan took 1,600 barrels, the Eliza Adams 1,400, Nassau seven whales, Omega seven, Mary six, William C. Nye six. Those are all the ships we have heard of that were there. I never felt so heartsick in my life. . . . Why couldn’t we have been one of the number? Because it was not for us, I suppose.

  In the late fall, when the weather turned cold off Siberia, Captain Williams turned the Florida east and sailed his ship across the entire Pacific Ocean for a winter’s whaling off the Mexican coast of Baja California. This was a seasonal migration for many whaleships, and the wide bays and lagoons north of Cabo San Lucas had all the social attractions of a riviera for whaling wives and families.

  At Turtle Bay, the Williamses’ Florida shared an anchorage with four other ships, another Florida among them:

  DECEMBER 9TH.

  It has been a splendid day, and my Husband, Willie and I have been aboard of the Florida, to see Capt. Fish and Wife, and spent the day very pleasantly. They have a little Son with them, 6 years old. . . .

  DECEMBER 23RD.

  It has been a very fine day. My Husband, Willie and I have been aboard of the Florida and spent the day very pleasantly with Capt. Fish and his Wife. Captain Hempstead and his Wife were there. I like them very much. Mrs H. is a little, small Woman and quite pretty.

  Cruising along this same coast two years earlier in the Addison, Mary Lawrence, her husband Samuel, and their eight-year-old daughter Minnie joined a picnic in progress:

  Saw a tent with flags flying onshore; concluded they were having a picnic. Soon after we were anchored, a boat came off to us with an invitation to us to unite with them, which invitation we cordially accepted. On our arrival there we found Captain Willis, wife, and three children; Captain Weeks, wife and two children . . . Captain Ashley, wife and one child of the Reindeer; Captain May of the Dromo . . . and Captain Lawrence, wife, and one child of the Addison. Made ten captains, four ladies, and seven children. We could hardly realize that we were whaling. Had a nice chowder, coffee, cold ham, cake, bread, crackers, and cookies. We also roasted plenty of oysters.

  Through the winter, Thomas, Eliza, and Willie socialized their way down the Mexican coast. Eliza was still ready to party on February 26: “I am going on board [the Cambria] to see Mrs Pease this evening.”

  The next day—no mention of the approaching event appears in her journal—Eliza again gave birth. “We have had an addition to the Florida’s Crew in the form of a little Daughter,” she recorded, a full month later, as the ship rolled west again across the Pacific toward the Hawaiian Islands, “born on the 27th of February in Banderas Bay on the Coast of Mexico. She weighed 6-3/4 pounds, is now one month old and weighs 9 pounds. . . . Willie is much pleased with his little Sister.”

  IN THE PROCESS OF SAILING up and down and across the length and breadth of the Pacific—in some cases entirely around the world through the Roaring Forties by way of Cape Horn—Eliza, Mary Lawrence, and the other whaling wives became, each in her own fashion, champion tourists.

  “It will be a pleasant sight to me to see land, even though it be a bleak, foreighn Island of the Sea,” Eliza had written in October 1858, as the Florida approached the first landfall after leaving New Bedford. It was the island of Brava, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. After weeks aboard ship, and in complete ignorance of what it would take to get there, Eliza agreed to accompany Thomas ashore. It was no pleasure trip:

  OCTOBER 12TH [1858].

  The wind not fair to get the Ship in to the harbor; concluded to row there in one of the small boats. My Husband said I could go with him, but I most repented it before we got there. It got quite rugged, and they had to go some ten miles to get into harbor—

  Any sailor will appreciate that “rugged” would be an understatement to describe a ten-mile upwind row and sail in a light whaleboat off an Atlantic island. The small boat was frequently swamped with waves that drenched Eliza, the captain, and the crew. Eliza was frightened, but Thomas told her there was no danger, and the she believed him.

  They had stopped at Brava to buy food and supplies, and to recruit additional crewmen from among the fishermen in the port where their boat landed, but business kept them there overnight. The only accommodations were in “the city,” a three-mile ride by donkey up a steep mountain trail. At times on the way up, Eliza “could hardely refrain from screaming, for it seemed to me that the poor faithful animal must fall.” But her terror was relieved by the sight of her husband close behind: “I would look at him once in a while and laugh in spite of my fear, for he looked so comical on that little Jackass and he so tall, with his long legs coming most to the ground.”

  Eliza’s gaze at the islanders, and her description of their clothing, were clear and—rare for a New England whaling wife—without any kind of censuring prejudice. She was even capable of seeing herself through native eyes: “I suppose we looked as strange to them as they did to us, dressed so different as we were.”

  Mary Lawrence’s attitude toward natives everywhere was framed by a rigid Christian superiority. She could not see a people and their culture, only a substandard race of creatures that needed uplifting: “I confess that I am disappointed in the appearance of the natives,” she wrote from Lahaina, in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, in 1857.

  They are not nearly so far advanced in civilization as I had supposed. Why, the good folks at home pretend to hold them up as a model from which we would do well to copy. I do not doubt but that there has been a great deal done for them, but there is a vast deal more to be done to raise them very high in the scale of morals. From what I saw and heard of them (and I made many enquiries) they are a low, degraded, indolent set. They have no apartments in their houses; all huddle in together. Many of them go without clothing; both sexes bathe in the water entirely naked, unabashed. As I am writing, two men are close by my door without an article of clothing.

  (Mary Lawrence’s first view of the edenic island of Maui and the mountain slope rising through the clouds behind Lahaina was just as blinkered: “I looked in vain for a resemblance to my own dear native land.”
)

  This was the normal, accepted Victorian perception, which, even after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, tended to see Adam and Eve as rather Teutonic-looking northern Europeans, and everyone else, particularly darker races, as benighted, fallen versions of the Scripture-credentialed ideal. A view easy to take issue with 150 years later, but it underscores the freshness and open-mindedness with which Eliza Williams saw the world. In Hakodate, Japan, Eliza described Japanese harbor officials as “dressed nicely though quite singularly, to me. Their dress is quite loose and slouching, very loose pants if they can be called such, and a kind of loose cloak with very large sleeves.” She and Thomas admired the sheathed samurai sword and knife each man wore in his belt, and an interpreter explained the use of each, which Eliza wrote down without comment: “They struck with the sword . . . and they cut off the head with the knife, which it seems they do for a small offence.” She and Thomas watched a funeral procession and visited a temple. She found Japanese workmanship “exquisite” and the word “beautiful” is used repeatedly in her descriptions of Japan. She tried some of their food, commenting that the “Pears and Oranges are poor” but “they have a kind of Fig that is very good.”

  Eliza and Willie went ashore with Thomas and some of his men in Okhotsk, Siberia, where they experienced the sort of hospitality that was only shown when the world was a much younger, less jaded place:

  SEPTEMBER 8TH [1859].

  ... They appear to be a very nice, kind People and did everything for us that they could. They would take all the care of the Baby, hardly giving me time to nurse him. They took me to all the biggest Families and they all wanted me to stop all night, but the first Family claimed the privilege of keeping us. . . . They had everything nice that could be obtained . . . nice butter, and milk. They make very good tarts but no cake. . . . They have nice berries of several kinds. They treated us to wine, tea, and coffee which they make very nicely. . . . I liked them very much.

  Between such Marco Polo adventures, there was the sea in all its states to contend with, ice, storms, the ship and its bits and pieces, and Eliza soon wrote about all this and the business of whaling with the fluency of a seaman; hearing of these things spoken only by whalemen, she knew no other way of describing them. The sights Eliza saw—“the Bears come down from the mountains every night for [stranded] Whale meat” on the Siberian shore, waterspouts, ice floes, tropical islands—and the people she met—the Japanese, Russians, Eskimos, Pacific island kings and queens (“ The King has a nice new house . . . in the centre of the ground was the place for fire” ), British and American settlers and missionaries, and the common people everywhere—all became the ambient features of Eliza’s, and Willie’s, everyday lives, and she put it all down in her journal without a shred of judgment.

  Willie saw all this at close hand and learned much of life from his mother’s example. “I often marveled at my mother’s courage and control of her nerves under real danger or trying conditions,” he wrote, “because in small matters she was timid and dreaded the sight of blood. . . . But when a situation arose that called for the kind of courage that sweeps away all evidences of fear and leaves the mind in calm control, she was superb.” When the lance from a bomb harpoon gun exploded by accident in a whaleboat, it sliced across the face of a mate, James Green:

  His wound was sewed up by my father without anesthetic or antiseptics, as they had none, and first, officers and finally my mother held his head while this sewing was done. . . . I cannot overlook . . . the nerve and grit of one little woman compared to the big strong men. First one officer and then another, as they gave up sickened by the sight of blood, held Mr. Green’s head while my father took the stitches but my mother had to take over and finish the job. . . . In my experience, a woman can be depended upon to show true nerves and grit at the crucial moment better than a man.

  Willie’s experience of women began with an unusual example, and one wonders what he found later that could have measured up to it.

  Willie’s father, whom he idolized, provided an equally high standard of manhood:

  I had an intense respect for my father; he has always been to me the finest type of man I have ever known. He stood six feet three inches in his stockings, was broad shouldered, straight as an arrow, blue eyes, black hair, large and fine-shaped head, and weighed over two hundred pounds with no superfluous flesh. He was a natural leader and commander of men, being utterly fearless but not reckless, and a thorough master of his profession. Like most men who follow an outdoor life, of a more or less hazardous nature, he was reserved. He was always ready to enforce an order by physical means, if necessary, but he was not a bully or a boaster.

  Eliza, too, surely saw a hero in her husband. No captain could be fairly judged by his neighbors or even family members during the relatively short periods he spent at home, where he was perhaps ill-at-ease, or inept, in social settings, on hiatus from his work and what it was that most truly defined him. The conditions of life aboard a whaleship—or any ship—provided extraordinary opportunities for revealing a person’s true nature—to oneself and everyone else aboard. Joseph Conrad liked setting his stories aboard ships because they were entire hermetic worlds: “The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier . . . she was alive with the lives of those beings who trod her decks; like that earth which had given her up to the sea, she had an intolerable load of regrets and hopes.”3 A ship was a crucible holding a packed cargo of human material, and the conditions of life at sea—weather, whaling, and other men—were like a flame that unraveled personalities to their discrete strands.

  Mary Chipman Lawrence, in her acutest insight, realized this early on as she saw her husband, Samuel Lawrence, respond to the demands of captaincy aboard a whaleship: “I never should have known what a great man he was if I had not accompanied him. I might never have found it out at home.”

  Yet even the greatest of whaling captains, and Thomas Williams was certainly one of them, could be overcome by adverse circumstances—it was a lesson the best of them learned firsthand. On August 28, 1870, then in command of the whaleship Hibernia, with his family aboard as usual, Williams was sailing through a driving snowstorm toward another ship that appeared to be in distress (the signal for which was the national flag flown upside down) when the Hibernia collided with a large chunk of ice. Water began pouring into the hull immediately. No longer in a position to help anybody, Williams turned his ship toward the shore. He anchored in shallow water and with the help of crews from several other vessels set men to pumping and bailing throughout the night, but by the next day the Hibernia had settled into the mud and was declared a loss. Williams sold the wreck and its cargo of 500 barrels of oil and 3,000 pounds of whale “bone” (baleen) to another captain for $150 at an impromptu auction held on the ship’s heeled deck. Williams and his family and crew were taken aboard the whaleship Josephine and sailed to Hawaii.

  Thomas Williams’s reputation was strong enough to weather the loss of several ships, for the risks of an arctic voyage were well understood, while the skill of a competent captain in those waters was prized. Williams immediately found another ship, whose owners were happy for him to assume command. On November 24, 1870, within three weeks of landing in Honolulu, the entire Williams family again put to sea, this time aboard the Monticello. They sailed for the South Pacific whaling grounds, the “between season cruise.” In early spring they sailed north once more to the Japan grounds, and from there to the Siberian coast off Okhotsk, and finally, during the long days of June, to the Arctic.

  Four

  The Crucible of Deviancy

  George Jr. and Matthew Howland and their Quaker contemporaries who constituted the world’s first oil oligarchy also represented an American aristocracy of the first water. There was no more esteemed or solid organization of merchants in America than these whaling Quakers of New Bedford, no group more vene
rated for their business acumen and their unswerving religious devotion—two attributes that had dovetailed into an apotheosis of wealth, social station, and worldwide fame.

  The position had been hard won: an evolution of two centuries of obdurate adherence, by a once tiny band of societal renegades, to a singular code of living, in the face of persistent, often savage persecution by America’s founding authorities. The hounding and mar ginalization of the early Quakers case-hardened them into the tightly knit, clannish society of mutual reliance and unyielding stubbornness that produced this seemingly impregnable plutocracy.

  The New England Puritans who fled to the New World because of religious intolerance in England were aware that history was watching them.

  “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill,” John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, told them. “The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

  But by crossing an ocean and setting up a new society on its other side, the Puritans metamorphosed from a band of deviants into a state authority more fanatical and uncompromising than the one they had fled. Their heretical beliefs became the new state’s religious orthodoxy, and the new Massachusetts Bay Colony demanded an unyielding conformity to the state religion.

  One of their early problems was Anne Hutchinson. The wife of the Bostonian William Hutchinson, she struck Winthrop as “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue.” Mrs. Hutchinson enjoyed the company of ministers, the social luminaries of her day, and her parlor was a popular gathering place for discussions of theological scholarship—a religious salon. She had her favorites among Boston’s ministers and wasn’t timid about suggesting that others lacked a sufficient “covenant of grace” to lead their congregations. At first this was simply talk emanating from the Hutchinson home, but it grew into feuding factions that polarized around Anne Hutchinson.