For my part, I will not cross the Arctic Ocean in an open whale-boat laden with men and provisions in the latter part of the month of September and October. As far as Icy Cape, there is no danger, but beyond that, (if all ships’ companies have to take to boats to Behring’s Strait) the sea is dangerous at this season of the year. Out of the 1,400 men not 100 will survive. I will return from Icy Cape if ships cannot be found.
On September 11, Captain D. R. Frazer, of the Florida, who had earlier set out to the south in command of three whaleboats, found the whaleship Lagoda in clear water ten miles off Icy Cape. Until that day, the Lagoda and six other whaleships had also been locked in the ice and trying to sail free. On the eleventh, the ice broke up sufficiently to allow them to work their way out into open water. If they had not been frozen until then, or if Captain Frazer’s boats had not encountered them that day, the seven ships would have sailed south. Boats from the Lagoda were dispatched to other ships, which lay within a few miles of each other off Icy Cape. All agreed to wait until the boats from the fleet, with their 1,200 passengers, reached them.
Captain James Dowden, of the Progress, not far from the Lagoda, gave Captain Frazer this message to take back to the other captains: “Tell them all I will wait for them as long as I have an anchor left or a spar to carry a sail.”
Frazer returned to the fleet with this message the next day, September 12. On that day all the captains met aboard his ship, the Florida, where they signed the following statement:
Point Belcher, Arctic Ocean, Sept. 12, 1871
Know all men by these presents, that we, the undersigned, masters of whale-ships now lying at Point Belcher, after holding a meeting concerning our dreadful situation, have all come to the conclusion that our ships cannot be got out this year, and there being no harbor that we can get our vessels into, and not having provisions enough to feed our crews to exceed three months, and being in a barren country, where there is neither food nor fuel to be obtained, we feel ourselves under the painful necessity of abandoning our vessels, and trying to work our way south with our boats, and, if possible, get on board of ships that are south of the ice. We think it would not be prudent to leave a single soul to look after our vessels, as the first westerly gale will crowd the ice ashore, and either crush the ships or drive them high upon the beach. Three of the fleet have already been crushed, and two are now lying hove out, which have been crushed by the ice, and are leaking badly. We have now five wrecked crews distributed among us. We have barely room to swing at anchor between the pack of ice and the beach, and we are lying in three fathoms of water. Should we be cast upon the beach it would be at least eleven months before we could look for assistance, and in all probability nine out of ten would die of starvation or scurvy before the opening of spring.
Therefore, we have arrived at these conclusions [after] the return of our expedition under command of Capt. D. R. Frazer, of the Florida, he having with whale-boats worked to the southward as far as Blossom Shoals, and found that the ice pressed ashore the entire distance from our position to the shoals, leaving in several places only sufficient water for our boats to pass through, and this liable at any moment to be frozen over during the twenty-four hours, which would cut off our retreat, even by the boats, as Captain Frazer had to work through a considerable quantity of young ice during his expedition, which cut up his boats badly.
It was awkwardly written, in part because it was painstakingly specific, and rang with a defensive solidarity. To abandon a ship and its cargo, together worth perhaps $50,000, in some cases much more—particularly those ships still floating sound and unwrecked in the channel—was, for these upstanding men, who were always mindful of their responsibility to their ship’s owners (and many of them were themselves part owners of their ships), a terrible act that would carry a long shadow down through the remainder of their careers. For a seaman, the loss of a ship is always tainted with shame, no matter what the circumstances; and it is always subject to speculation, by those who weren’t there, of what else might have been done. To abandon a vessel that, like most of the fleet, still floated sound and in good condition, was almost unheard of. Few of these captains would have left their ships unless all of them had agreed upon the necessity to do so, and then formalized that agreement in what amounted to a shared oath swearing to the extremity of their situation. They knew that other men, at home or in other ships, would question their decision. They had to affirm, to one another and the world, that there was no alternative.
They did so: every captain, except those, like Benjamin Dexter, who had already set out with his wife in a whaleboat heading south, signed this letter. They agreed to abandon their ships on September 14. But by then many boats and ships’ crews had already left.
The Abandonment of the Whaling Fleet, 1871. From Harper’s Weekly.
(Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum)
Sixteen
Abandonment
The 1,219 men, women, and children of the fleet now faced an open-boat journey through the harshest of arctic conditions. The distance to Icy Cape and where the waiting ships lay, on Blossom Shoals just off the cape, was forty to sixty miles, depending on the positions of the abandoned ships.
It was fifty miles for the party from the Monticello, a grueling trip in an exposed open boat. With Eliza, Willie, his ten-year-old daughter Mary, and himself, all crammed into a whaleboat with gear, provisions, and five or six other men at the oars, Thomas Williams decided to make the trip over two nights and two days. Willie remembered it all well:
I doubt if I can adequately describe the leave-taking of our ship. It was depressing enough to me, and you know a boy can always see possibilities of something novel or interesting in most any change, but to my father and mother it must have been a sad parting, and I think what made it still more so was the fact that only a short distance from our bark lay the ship Florida, of which my father had been master eight years and on which three of his children had been born.7 The usual abandonment of a ship is the result of some irreparable injury and is executed in great haste [e.g., Williams’s previous command, the Hibernia]; but here we were leaving a ship that was absolutely sound, that had been our home for nearly ten months and had taken us safely through many a trying time.
The colors were set and everything below and on deck was left just as though we were intending to return the next day. All liquor was destroyed, so that the natives would not get to carousing and wantonly destroy the ship. . . . Our boat contained in addition to its regular crew, my mother, sister and me, and all our clothing, bedding and provisions, so that we were loaded nearly to the gunwales.
Willie’s nineteen-year-old brother, Stancel, Thomas and Eliza’s first-born son, who was one of the Monticello’s officers on this voyage, was in another boat. (Their second son, Henry, had died of scarlet fever at the age of nine, in 1864.)
They left the Monticello on the afternoon of September 13 and rowed and sailed twenty miles to the stranded Victoria, where they spent the night as guests of its Captain Redfield, who was still aboard with some of his men. They started south again early the next morning, rowing and sailing along the channel between the ice and the land, where, despite strong winds, the water was still reasonably smooth. Williams landed the boat on the beach just as darkness was falling on the second night. Tents, fashioned from sails, were erected to shelter Eliza and the Williams children, together with several other captains’ wives and children; great fires were built on the beach, and meals prepared. During the night it rained heavily and the wind increased.
In the morning, “a good fresh breeze” was blowing. The boats set out for the ships, which lay several miles outside the sheltering ice pack in the open ocean. “It was a hair raising experience,” remembered Willie.
My father had decided to go aboard the Progress. She was still at anchor and pitching into the heavy seas, that were then running in a way that would have made you wonder how we would ever get the men aboard, let alone a woman and two children; but
it was all accomplished without accident, or even the wetting of a foot. As fast as the boats were unloaded they were cast adrift, to be destroyed against the ice pack a short distance under our lee where the waves were breaking masthead high.
It was no easier for others to leave their ships. Men imbue the vessels that carry them, womblike within their hulls, protecting them from the cold, hostile environment outside, with a kind of maternal love. “She,” they invariably call these mother ships, feeling them to be immeasurably more than the sum of their planks and bolts, ropes and canvas. They know this from watching a ship make its way across tens of thousands of miles of ocean, shouldering aside storm swells and rogue waves with a solid, unshakable, seemingly instinctive devotion to plowing ahead, all the while protecting them—just as they might, for the most part, remember their mothers. “With sad heart ordered all the men into the boats and with a last look over the decks abandoned the ship to the mercy of the elements,” wrote Earle, first mate of the Emily Morgan, about their leave-taking on the afternoon of the fourteenth.
Earle decided to keep his group of four whaleboats from the Morgan going through the night (three more of the ship’s boats had left earlier). With icy waves slopping into the open boats, breaking over the men (whose canvas or wool coats were perpetually soaked and freezing), dodging visible and submerged clumps of ice—while it was light—and trying to row and sail through a short, steep chop thrown up by the shallow depths beneath them, it was as desperate as a small-boat journey could be, and it only got worse, as Earle recorded:
As night approached the wind increased and heavy banks of cumuli came swelling up from the SE and soon enveloped us in a mantle of the blackest darkness. We were now in constant danger of coming in contact with the many fragments of ice floating between the land and the main pack.
At 10.30 [p.m.] landed and gathering driftwood built a fire and made some strong coffee, this warmed us up a little. The wind increasing, we double-reefed our sails and shoved off at 11.30 into the darkness and rain; the navigation was difficult, and, as far as the boats were concerned, dangerous from the drift ice. The water did not exceed six feet in depth anywhere and in some places we went thumping over shoals. We kept the land well aboard—it is very low and we could see nothing of it at times.
At one a.m. on the fifteenth, one of the Morgan’s boats hit a solid piece of ice, staving in its planks. The boat, and the others with it, were quickly run ashore, and in near-total darkness, occasionally using roman candle flares, the crew (well practiced from walrusing) nailed canvas over the smashed wood. They set out again an hour later. At eight in the morning, still ten miles north of Icy Cape, they landed for coffee and breakfast. They reached the cape at 10:30 a.m., where they found twenty-five or thirty other whaleboats, among them the Morgan’s remaining three, waiting out the wind, which by now had become a strong southwest gale. But Earle was anxious to reach the waiting ships before the wind grew even stronger, so, under his command, the Emily Morgan’s seven boats set out once more, rowing and beating under sail directly into the wind, first inside the ice, and later outside its protective barrier, plunging through what one whaling captain described as “the full force of a tremendous southwest gale and a sea that would have made the stoutest ship tremble.” The seven stout ships waiting for the boats were indeed trembling; they had remained at anchor off a now highly dangerous lee shore in conditions that would ordinarily have long before sent them beating out to sea or running for shelter, but they held on. Two of them, the Lagoda and the Arctic, parted their chain anchor cables as they lay pitching into the storm waves. Both managed to reset their anchors. All through the fifteenth and sixteenth of September, tiny bobbing, storm-tossed whaleboats, singly and in ragged, strung-out groups, crabbing to windward under sail and oar, their passengers soaked and raw with cold, made their perilous way out to the ships. Earle and his boats reached the ships late in the afternoon of the fifteenth and were all taken aboard the Europa.
William Earle’s account of his passage down the coast in the Emily Morgan’s whaleboats describes every other journey of this massive evacuation. Almost miraculously, between 150 and 200 whaleboats (each ship carried five on davits, and usually at least three others on deck) ferried 1,219 men, women, and children from the trapped fleet to the seven vessels waiting for them off Icy Cape. Not a single person was lost or badly injured, a testament not so much to luck but to the extraordinary seamanship and skill shown by every captain and every man.
The Progress took aboard a total of 221 people, including the Williams family, and two other captains and their wives and two children, one of them “a baby in arms.” These last two families were probably Captain Edmund Kelley, wife, and child, from the Seneca, and Captain Robert Jones, wife, and child, who had been enjoying the plush accommodations aboard the Howlands’ still-sparkling Concordia. The Progress’s captain, James Dowden, gave up his cabins to these three families. Aboard the Europa, Captain and Mrs. Benjamin Dexter, of the Emily Morgan, and Captain and Mrs. John Heppingstone, of the Julian, were taken in along with 276 other men. The remaining men were packed aboard the other five ships, like so many Irish immigrants, noted one whaleman.
Nathaniel Ransom and the John Wells’s boats also made it to the Europa. Like many others, Ransom had taken with him in his boat what he could of his personal belongings, including some prized reindeer coats he had obtained by trading with the Eskimos, but whether because these became soaked on the journey or because there was simply no room for them on the crowded ships, they were jettisoned at some point:
OFF ICY CAPE JUST AT PRESENT SEPTEMBER FRIDAY 15 TH.
Strong breeze from S.W. I’ve just [come] aboard of Ship Europa Captain Mellen after being out in a hale & rainstorm pulling & sailing for last 24 hours I had to throw my bomb gun a box of bomb lances with a musked [musket] & lots of ammunition with several other things overboard my boat & all Cote[s] of Esquimaux garments.
Thirty-two whaleships had been abandoned. Many were old, and not all were in good condition, but the fleet’s replacement value would have been in excess of $3 million. No meaningful modern equivalent can be calculated. The replacement value today of a fleet of thirty-two factory fishing vessels would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The loss of so many ships today, in a single event, would be reckoned a national disaster.
Seventeen
Aftermath
By September 17, all the refugees from thirty-two whaleships had been taken aboard the fleet’s remaining seven vessels. Remarkably, there had not been a single loss of life, a testament to the extraordinary degree of seamanship shown by every man under the severest of tests.
They sailed for the Bering Strait, stopping for water and supplies at Plover Bay, at the southern end of the strait, then on to the Hawaiian Islands, reaching Honolulu by the end of October. From there, many of the captains and their families and crews sailed by scheduled passenger steamer to San Francisco, where, in early November, they boarded trains heading east. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies had finished linking an unbroken transcontinental railway line less than two years earlier, in November 1869, often said to be the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century, the equivalent for its day of the moon landings a century later. The exhausted shipwrecked whalemen and their families, used to crossing oceans at six or seven miles per hour, tore across the continent, sometimes reaching speeds of sixty miles per hour. They marveled at the plunging California Sierras, the Rocky Mountains, the unending Great Plains (which reminded them of the vast featureless ocean, and ended after just a few days), and they experienced a profound alteration of their former perception of time and distance when they reached New York, a distance from San Francisco equivalent to an Atlantic crossing, in exactly seven days. The passage from New England to San Francisco by ship, which many of them had made, still took seven months by way of Cape Horn.
Nathaniel Ransom still carried with him the John Wells’s logbook and continued making regular
daily entries, aboard ships and trains, beginning as always—the first instinct of a good seaman, and the first requirement of a logkeeper—with weather observations, until Tuesday, November 14, the day before he reached his home and “darling wife” in Mattapoisett:
THURSDAY 9TH. [OF NOVEMBER].
Pleasant weather passed quite a number of towns & villages. . . . I have felt quite like myself again today [that is, after suffering from a toothache for quite some time].
SUNDAY 12TH.
Nice weather passed through Chicago in afternoon. . . .
MONDAY 13TH.
Cloudy about noon arrived at Pittsburg. . . .
There would have been little visible weather to report from inside a train in the very early hours of a November morning, but Ransom’s arrival in New York on November 14 did involve a short passage by boat, since the Pennsylvania Railroad line terminated at Jersey City, on the western shore of the Hudson River. The passengers boarded ferries to a Manhattan riverside terminal and from there took trains to the Grand Central Depot—none of which he had time to note, because he temporarily lost his bags:
Final Voyage Page 22
