“Three of them ran something like the following,” Ishmael tells us: “SACRED To the Memory of JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836 . . . ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN . . . Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st, 1839 . . . CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who, in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3rd, 1833. . . .”
Dreaming up his big book down in “the insular city of the Manhat toes,” Melville didn’t want to travel all the way from New York to New Bedford to copy the exact inscriptions, so he made them up, adding “but I do not pretend to quote.” Yet he caught exactly the flavor, the tragic untimeliness, and the exotic locations of so many whalemen’s deaths.
Three examples on the walls of the bethel today read:
ERECTED
By the Officers and crew of the
Bark A.R. Tucker of New Bedford
To the memory of
CHARLES H. PETTY
of Westport, Mass.
who died Dec. 14th, 1863,
in the 18th year of his age.
His death occurred in nine hours
after being bitten by a shark,
while bathing near the ship,
He was buried by his shipmates
on the Island of DeLoss, near
the Coast of Africa.
... In memory of
WILLIAM C. KIRKWOOD
of Boston Mass. aged 25 y’rs,
who fell from aloft, off
Cape Horn, Feb 10, 1850.
and was drowned.
... to the memory of
NATHANIEL E. COLE
Boat steerer of Fall River Mass.
Aged 24 y’rs
EDWARD LAFFRAY
of Burlington Vt.
Aged 22 y’rs
FRANK KANACKA
Aged 19 y’rs.
all lost by the upsetting of their
Boat July 15, 1854.
In the Ochotsk Sea.
Whalers died far from home, in places most people had never heard of—though to New Bedforders in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sea of Okhotsk (in the western Arctic) was as familiar a name as Bagh dad in our own time. Others—from the cenotaphs in the Seamen’s Bethel—died in Calcutta, in Sumatra, and Wm. Googins, aged nineteen, was lost overboard in a nameless piece of ocean, but the place of his death was given a latitude and longitude—47.50 S, 173.20 W—and many in New Bedford would have known without looking at a map that this was in the remotest area of the South Pacific, on the New Zealand “grounds.”
The whaleman’s weekly newsletter, the Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, of New Bedford, was filled with similar news: “carried out of sight by the whale . . . The ship cruised for two days for the missing boat, but could not find her”; “fell from the stern overboard and drowned”; “taken out of the boat by a foul line, and drowned.” Or: “Charles W. Warner of Springfield, Mass. killed by a fall from the foreyard of the ship Mary & Susan, August 9, 1851.” Such notices also routinely appeared in the Honolulu paper The Friend, published for whalemen and their families, who were increasingly spending time (many even took up residence) in what were then known as the Sandwich Islands.
These stark death notices were of enduring importance to the people of New Bedford and whaling communities everywhere. They were losing sons, husbands, and fathers as regularly as the losses in an endless war. If it didn’t seem like war to them, but the normal attrition of life, it was only because these losses occurred throughout the whole of their lives, part of the daily news that arrived with the docking of every ship. But they memorialized their men and the details of their lonely deaths.
Fishermen still had the most dangerous jobs in America in 2005, with a fatality rate of 118.4 per 100,000 (nearly 30 times higher than the rate of the average worker). But today’s fishermen are incalculably safer than the whalers of two hundred years ago. There were virtually no safety measures aboard whaleships. Half the men coming aboard at the start of a voyage were “green”—farmers’ sons, poor city boys, and, in a few cases, romantic dreamers who had never sailed before. They learned their way up, down, and around the deadly maze of a square-rigged whaleship by following the man in front of them up the rigging and into a whaleboat. Their hesitations were answered with the bellowing of the mate, who could make his voice heard above the eldritch howling of a gale, and, in the more brutal ships, by the laying on of clubs, belaying pins, or any handy piece of rope improvised as a whip. It was always a savage initiation. “John Prior . . . fell from the main top-galant cross trees . . . fracturing his jaw bone, and injuring him internally,” wrote boatsteerer Dean C. Wright (see below), who witnessed this accident; “he providentially fell upon a dog which was lying on deck, which no doubt saved his life.” Men fell in uncountable numbers from the masts, yardarms, and the cat’s cradle of rigging that wheeled, arced, lurched across the sky, developing centrifugal forces that would terrify circus acrobats, and there was seldom a dog to cushion the blow.
The deck and interior of the ship itself offered only marginally better odds. “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself in jail,” said Samuel Johnson, “for being in a ship is being in jail, with a chance of being drowned.” Ships often sank at sea in bad weather, or ran aground on poorly charted coasts, or collided with ice. A whaleship was hijacked by convicts in the Galápagos, and whalemen were attacked by natives from the Equator to the Arctic. Melville’s giant white sperm whale, Moby Dick, was based on the famous story (even then) of a great albino sperm whale, Mocha Dick, that repeatedly and intentionally rammed and eventually sank the whaleship Essex in 1820. Other whaleships were sunk, apparently purposely, by whales, while countless whaleboats were smashed by harpooned whales, intentionally and otherwise, and their crews were often dragged down to their deaths entangled in rope or simply drowned clinging to scraps of planking too thin to float a cat while waiting to be picked up—life preservers had yet to be thought of. All those Currier & Ives prints and magazine illustrations showing splintered boats and men being tossed rodeo-style into the air by a bucking sperm whale weren’t exaggerating anything: it was as dangerous as it looked, or as one easily imagined it to be.
The inside of a whaleship was no place to find solace from the terrors without. Whaling artist and historian Clifford Ashley described the fo’c’sle of the whaleship Sunbeam, which he shipped aboard as a common seaman:
On a clutter of chests and dunnage the boatsteerers sprawled, drinking, wrangling, smoking. . . . The floor was littered with rubbish, the walls hung deep with clothing; squalid, congested, filthy; even the glamor of novelty could not disguise the wretchedness of the scene. The floor was wet and slippery, the air smoky and foul; often a bottle was dropped in passing, or an empty one smashed to the floor. Through it all was an undertone of water bubbling at the ports and a rustle of oilskins swinging to and fro like pendulums from their hooks on the bulkhead. Roaches scurried about the walls. A chimneyless whale-oil lamp guttered in the draft from the booby-hatch.
For whalers who survived the chase and the accidents, a long whaling voyage could be as grim as a prison sentence. An early-nineteenth-century whaler, Dean C. Wright, found that, as in jail,
in a whaleship may be found men of all classes, from the lowest to the very first circle in society. The whaling business is, in fact, a general receptacle for every kind of adventurer on the ocean. The ships very frequently go to sea with men in them who have been educated in the first institutions in the country, and been in extensive and respectable businesses on shore, but have been reduced in their circumstances by intemperance, or met with some misfortune and, in a fit of despondency, have entered on board for a whaling voyage, with no specific object in view but a vague idea of something which they do not understand is continually before them, and they are kept along in a kind of delusion untill the ship sails, and
then, when the vast ocean separates them from their friends they arouse themselves to the recollections of what and where they are, and what and where they might have been. They find themselves on board of a Cape Horn whaleman, and unless they run into disgrace by leaving the ship, they have got to spend three or four years of the prime of their life in a business which they do not understand, and from which they will not recover any thing commensurate to the time spent.
Like many whalemen, Wright came to hate whaling. In his seaman’s papers (official credentials, written by a ship’s agent), issued at New Bedford in 1835 for his first voyage, he gave Avon, New York, as his hometown, and his age as seventeen. Six years later, working his way up, he joined the whaleship Benjamin Rush as a boatsteerer or harpooner. By then he seemed unmoored between ambition and the status of his new job, as he wrote in his journal, on June 16, 1842:
A man who has been one voyage in the whaling business and then will ship again to do a boatsteerer’s duty must be either mad or drunk, or else a fool or a saint. . . . For he is not respected at all, he has more work to do than all hands besides, and he has no privileges whatever but to bear the blame for every thing which may go wrong in the ship. If the Capt finds a smoothing plain dull he immediately says that a boatsteerer has been planing his Iron pole [harpoon] and dulled it. If there is two quarts of tobacco juice found spit on the deck . . . it is lain directly to the poor boatsteerer . . . [who needs] to be a sailor, a whaler, a mechanic, a saint, a bully, a man of no kind feeling whatever, and very little sense. He ought to be a man who can be spoken to in any tone of voice and called by an epithet, and still give a fawning, sycophantic answer; one who is built of steel and hung on spring steel, and cannot tire, and does not require any sleep or bodily rest of any kind; one who can content himself without any place which he can call his own, or where he is not liable to be crowded out. And he ought to be a man who can be an officer and still be a tar, one who can walk to leeward and not be offended at having any one spit in his face . . . who can show himself worthy of confidence in all cases and not have any placed in him, & be contented to be called a good man, and used like a dog—and do all this for the sake of advancement of which he is not at all sure, when it is done. A Boatsteerer is placed between two fires, being neither man nor officer, yet required to be both. He is beneath the officers and not above the men. He has to obey every body and be obeyed by nobody, give no ungentlemanly language to any person but take it from every person, look cross at none but be frowned upon by all.
So why the repeated embrace of such humiliation and hardship? Why was he there? Why did young men from all over New England walk to New Bedford and other whaling ports and sign on as crew to seek a very uncertain, palpably dangerous fate that lay over the horizon? It was not, on their first or even second voyage—a total of four to eight years—for money. While some men became wealthy through whaling, working their way up to captain, able to build a captain’s house ashore, perhaps even becoming a shipowner and retiring on the proceeds from cargoes of oil and bone, the pay for the common seamen who “came up through the hawsepipe” was not enticing.
“Well, Captain Bildad,” asks Captain Peleg, when the two old Quaker captains, part owners of the Pequod, squint at Ishmael as a prospective crewmember. “What d’ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?”
“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much would it? . . .”
It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
Whalemen, from the captain down, worked for a “lay,” a fractional share of the ship’s net profit from a voyage, after all the expenses had been deducted. Though shipowners’ agents, who hired crews, might easily have befuddled green hands with such fractions, as Melville lampoons, most offered standard lays for recruits and positions. For a common unskilled seaman in the early to middle nineteenth century (when data sets become abundant), this averaged between 1/180th and 1/200th of the net profit, which might ultimately net a sailor six to eight dollars per month. This was about 60 percent of a laborer’s wages ashore. Out of this sum, a seaman’s food and new issues of clothing would be deducted. A whaleman returning home from three years at sea might collect little more than $100 at the end of the voyage. Skilled seamen, stewards, cooks, carpenters, coopers, sailmakers, and captains did better. A captain received, on average, one-fifteenth, or a “15 lay,” which worked out (between 1840 and 1866) to between $70 and $130 per month. But captains often received bonus payments over and above their lays, and even cooks made money on the sale of the ship’s slush (its refuse of grease and fat), and this could often substantially improve their earnings.
A first voyage was a whaler’s apprenticeship, and his low wage the price of entry into the profession, if he chose it. If he was young and not discouraged by his first voyage, a returning sailor might reasonably hope for advancement. More than half the crew aboard a ship might leave it—through death, dismissal, or desertion—before a voyage’s end. Men handy with oars and a harpoon, and those gifted with good eyesight who regularly spotted the spouting of whales, moved up fast, becoming boatsteerers and mates, and their lays bettered dramatically: an 85 lay for a boatsteerer, 55 for a third mate, 40 for a second mate, a 25 share for a first mate. After several good voyages, a captaincy lay in the offing for solid—and lucky, always a factor at sea—men in their early thirties.
Discipline aboard a whaleship was paramount to the success of the voyage; the safety of the ship and of the lives of all aboard her depended on it. As soon as a ship left port, its crew was assembled and addressed on the subject by its captain. He told them that all orders must be executed at once and without questioning their necessity. Punishment for lapses in discipline was usually immediate and brutal. Men were routinely knocked down by an officer’s, or a captain’s, fists. The men who administered such treatment had to be skilled, confident, self-reliant fighters. “In all my experience on a whaleship I never saw the Captain or an officer hit a man with anything but his bare fist,” remembered William Fish Williams.
I do not doubt that belaying pins and handspikes were used on some ships to enforce discipline but it did not happen on any of the five ships on which I spent my days at sea. . . . The captains and officers that I knew intimately were men who did not need such aids and would have looked upon their use as an admission of weakness. The sailors rarely harbored a grudge against an officer for enforcing discipline with his fists but the use of a belaying pin was rarely forgotten and never forgiven.
In the often terrifying environment of a whaleship, the threat of immediate physical punishment was the only persuasive authority. “It was the deduction of the captains of that day from their experiences, that . . . authority must be asserted instantly and effectively. Experience had shown them also that nothing is more effective than physical force.” Respect was equally demanded: “No sailor ever came aft with a pipe in his mouth; that is, not a second time. What happened the first time depended upon whether the officer of the deck decided it was simply ignorance or a dare. If the [former], he would be told by most officers not to let it happen again, but if the latter, he would be promptly and efficiently knocked down.” Insubordination or defiance were best handled with equal promptness and efficiency. Williams later recalled his father’s response to a large group of crewmen who were trying to desert the whaleship Florence in Guam:
My father came on deck and met the crew on the port side amidships and asked them where they were going. One of the men spoke up and said they had gone as far as they intended to and they were leaving the damned old hooker befo
re she dropped from under them, also, he advised my father to step aside if he did not want to get hurt. That was the end of the conversation, my father went into action and ploughed through the front ranks of the group with both arms working like pistons of an engine and men going down like tenpins. The men in the rear took one look and bolted for the forecastle. One man stumbled and fell just as my father was about to hit him but, instead of waiting for the man to get up, he grabbed him with one hand around an ankle and the other in the seat of his pants and hove him down the forecastle scuttle in the rear of the last of those endeavoring to get below.
It was the dominance of whaling in New England society that drew men to it for a hundred years from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Whaling became to New England, and to New Bedford especially, what the automobile industry would become to the Midwest and to Detroit—what gold was to San Francisco, and the building of the pipeline was to Alaska in the 1970s. As the whale-oil business geared up along the shores of the Acushnet, with expanding boatyards, ironworks, and candle factories, as more and more ships headed off to sea and returned home with stories of the South Pacific, “the Brazils,” the “Japans,” and the China Seas, people looked to it as a part of the natural order of things, and naturally became a part of it. Men went whaling first before deciding that it wasn’t for them and opening a grocery store, which almost immediately could prove more profitable by selling goods to the expanding populations of New Bedford and surrounding towns. There was a sizable preexisting population in and close to coastal Massachusetts, and many a boy who lacked a clear opportunity ashore went to sea with a sense of inevitability.
As with soldiers who have been home on furlough and then return to war, the theme of unhappily finding oneself at sea once more, after having been safely home with loved ones and friends, is repeated over and over in the journal writings of whalers—a griping common to all professional seamen down to the present time. The fact that they are away more than they are home is central to the alienation that professional seamen feel from society, and through which they are seen. Sea men have always been marginalized characters, true satellites orbiting society, connected to it mainly by a thick cord of longing. Seamen are absent for much of what other people would consider the crucial episodes of family life—births, birthdays, anniversaries, children’s firsts, illnesses, and the bad times out of which a tempering strength and deeper love are forged. Many seamen never acquire the connection with their families and society that most of us carry around inside us, a connection that may be the most lasting measure of who we think we are.
Final Voyage Page 15
