TUESDAY 14TH.
We arrived at NY this morning at 7Am in time to get to Mattapoisett tonight but on account of my baggage not being here at the depot had to wait till midday. . . . Shall have to weather it out one more night—I’ve got the toothache of course—
It’s no wonder his bags were misplaced. The recently completed Grand Central Depot (not the present structure, which was built between 1903 and 1913) had been open only a few weeks, and combined four lines, the New York Central, the Hudson River, the New York and Harlem, and the New Haven railroads, creating much chaos and confusion with luggage.
Ransom must have hurriedly written this last entry (above) in the John Wells’s logbook somewhere inside the depot—after sorting out his baggage problem, but before learning that he would in fact be out of New York and on his way to Massachusetts that afternoon. He was part of a large group from the shipwrecked fleet that was making its way from San Francisco to New Bedford together. Their progress was reported on November 16 by the Republican Standard of New Bedford, where many families eagerly awaited them:
The whole party of captains and officers from the shipwrecked fleet . . . came through together from San Francisco to New York by way of Omaha, Burlington, Chicago, Fort Wayne, Pittsburg, and the Pennsylvania Central route, making all connections and arriving in New York promptly on time, at 7 o’clock Tuesday morning, just one hour short of a week from the time they left San Francisco.
While the returning sons and husbands of New Bedford, Mattapoisett, Edgartown, New London, and elsewhere were welcomed and embraced by their families, second-guessers in whaling ports everywhere began to voice suggestions—just as the captains had anticipated—that the fleet had been abandoned too hastily. The Friend, the whaling community’s newspaper in Honolulu, quickly responded strongly to these critics:
“WE LEFT NOT ONE MINUTE TOO SOON.”
In conversation with a very sensible and reliable first officer [probably William Earle] of one of the lost ships in the Arctic, we asked him this question: “Did you not quit your vessel too soon, ought you not to have waited a little longer?” He replied with much decision, “We left not one minute too soon.” This appears to be the unanimous opinion of all the masters, officers and seamen, with whom we have conversed.
We have heard an opposite opinion expressed by some who never saw the Arctic Ocean. It is an easy matter in Honolulu, with the thermometer at 80º, to criticise the actions of men who have faced danger and starvation under the shadow of icebergs, and while the icy barrier was momentarily pressing a fleet of ships on the barren shores of Siberia [sic]. We have no doubt that the owners and agents of whaleships and Insurance Companies in New Bedford, seated before a good coal fire, will express their deliberate opinion that the fleet was abandoned too soon. We have been permitted to read the private journal of one of the shipmasters, whose ship was saved, and it tells a story of anxiety that ought to silence all foolish censure of those shipmasters who were compelled to leave behind them their hard-earned wealth. The idea that thirty-three [sic] shipmasters and their crews abandoned their ice-bound vessels, except from stern and dire necessity is not to be entertained for one moment.
With so many lives at stake, the whaling captains had undoubtedly made the prudent decision. And yet, they may in fact have left too soon.
Thomas Williams had moved his family from Wethersfield, Connecticut, to the San Francisco Bay area after the Civil War, and on their return from Honolulu, Eliza and the younger children settled back into their home in Oakland. But Thomas immediately began making plans to return to the Arctic. With Samuel Merritt, the former mayor of Oakland, and others, he formed a salvage company. They bought and outfitted the whaleship Florence, and with a large crew that included his oldest son, Stancel, Williams sailed north again in May of 1872.
Others had the same idea, and a number of salvage ships joined the smaller but undeterred fleet of whaleships again trying to push through the ice in the Bering Strait in early summer. As they neared the whaling grounds, the whaleships and the salvors were met by Eskimos in their umiaks with great quantities of baleen for trade. They presumed these cargoes had been plundered from the abandoned whaleships.
Thomas Williams and his crew beat all the competing salvors to the fleet by traveling ahead inside the ice in whaleboats—a reversal of their escape. Near Wainwright Inlet they came upon the wrecks: ships lying on their sides in the shallows, their masts and spars broken, hulls crushed, timbers, rigging, barrels, boats, sea chests, and supplies littering the shore. Most of the ships were readily identifiable, even in their scattered pieces: Williams found parts of the Monticello’s bow and stern half a mile apart. A number of the ships, including the Howlands’ beautiful Concordia, had been burned.
Astonishingly, there was a witness to the aftermath of the fleet’s abandonment waiting to tell Williams and others what had happened after they had left. A boatsteerer from one of the ships had not gone with them in the whaleboats. He had stayed behind, planning to spend the winter inside one of the ships, to salvage what he could from them. His identity was not recorded, but what he told the men who met him on the shore in 1872 was soon known from Honolulu to New Bedford: two weeks after the whaleboats had escaped to the south, a heavy northeasterly gale—what everyone had been hoping and praying for—had sprung up and pushed out to sea most of the ice, freeing the ships. The greatest damage had then occurred from their being unmanned, smashing and grinding into each other and the leftover ice. The natives had subsequently looted what they could. Although many of the departing crews had smashed their liquor bottles so the Eskimos wouldn’t find them, they had not thought to destroy their medicine chests. These had been found and opened, and some of the Eskimos had died after drinking the contents of their medicine bottles. These ships the Eskimos had burned. The winter appeared to have been a mild one, for the whalers and salvors found only small scattered ice. But the boatsteerer, who had felt his life in danger from the Eskimos, said $150,000 would not tempt him to spend another winter in the Arctic.
Thomas Williams floated and secured two ships, the Minerva and the Seneca, and filled his own and these two vessels with barrels of salvaged oil and many tons of baleen. He put his crews aboard the two ships and sailed south, the Minerva sailing by herself, the Florence towing the Seneca. He was forced to cut the Seneca free during a gale, and the ship was lost, but the Florence and the Minerva returned to San Francisco with a cargo of oil and baleen worth $10,000—all that was realized from a potential catch, had all the ships returned to port with average cargoes, worth $1.5 million.
George Jr. and Matthew Howland had lost three of their ten ships, the Concordia, the Thomas Dickason, and the George Howland, and their cargoes, for which they had no insurance.
Eighteen
“How Hard It Is to Rise, When You’re Really, Truly Down”
I wish I knew why George and Matthew didn’t quit the
whale fishery entirely in 1871. George was 66 years old,
Matthew 58; they were still rich men and had virtually
unlimited opportunities to invest in forward-looking
enterprises—textile mills, railroads, banks, real estate
developments. . . . Was it sentiment? Did they honestly
expect a return to the old prosperity; did they really believe
there would be no more losses in the Arctic? . . . Whaling
always was a kind of gambling, and after winning for
five decades, their time had come to pay.
—LLEWELLYN HOWLAND III, “Children of the Light” (1964)
Disasters that are more abstract, while no less damaging or terrifying, are more difficult to perceive than a crushed whaleship. Their true scale and ramifications may not be seen until they are well advanced. They take men by surprise in the middle of a normal day when they look up and find the world changed forever.
The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript scarcely knew what to think about the state
of its industry following the arctic disaster of 1871. It reported, in February 1872, under the headline “Review of the Whale Fishery for 1871”: “We have to record another year of poor success in the whalefishery, both as concerns oil taken and pecuniary results.” Poor results might occur in any year, but the prospects for the future had never looked so ominous: “Of the 34 vessels now in port, half are for sale.”
Also for sale in New Bedford, but not selling, despite the enormous losses in the Arctic the previous summer, were thousands of barrels of oil, covering wharves and filling warehouses. Prices were depressed, and their owners were holding on to them, hoping for an improvement in the market. “With the uncertainty in [oil] prices, partly from substitutes [petroleum], and low prices of them, only good prices can be hoped for, and not counted upon.”
Yet three weeks later, the newspaper peevishly dismissed the summary of its own reports reprinted elsewhere: “The following which we clip from the Philadelphia Commercial List, shows how near home, an idea erroneous, may be disseminated:
THE WHALE-FISHERIES—A review of the whaling business for 1871 states that the past year was one of disaster and discouragement. The constant decrease of whaling vessels by loss, condemnation and sale is very ominous, and as no new vessels are added, it is believed that the trade will soon die out.
The Whalemen’s Shipping List vigorously rebutted such dire conclusions—“We don’t believe in the dying of whaling”—citing a confusing series of numbers meant to reveal the Philadelphia paper’s ignorance of the difference between the sperm and right whale fisheries, and the returns from bone and oil sales. But a month later the Shipping List carried the following two articles:
A PARALYSED INDUSTRY—The depression of our ship building interest has continued so long that the race of hardy and intelligent mechanics whose works reflected credit upon the country, are now fast becoming extinct. Of course, in the present condition of business, no new hands engage in it, and the old ship-carpenters are rapidly adapting themselves to kindred trades which are still useful. Once we boasted of half a dozen or more yards. . . .
OPIUM EATING—We are told by one of our Apothecaries, who does a large and flourishing business, that the sales of opium amount to 20 p. cent more than they did ten years ago. It is a sad state of things if we are relinquishing rum for opium. . . .
In New Bedford, business was down, self-medication was up. In October 1872, the Whalemen’s Shipping List lamented that another three New Bedford whaleships, the Helen Snow, the Roscoe, and the Sea Breeze, had been lost the previous August in the Arctic, and that the season there had again been a poor one, although “ships had done as well as usual walrusing.”
Joseph Grinnell’s Wamsutta Mills—four of them built and operating at a profit at the time of the disaster in the Arctic, and a fifth under construction, to open in 1875—saved New Bedford from complete economic collapse. While work along the waterfront and whaling’s attendant service and product industries slowed and ground to a halt, many whalemen, particularly the Portuguese immigrants and their families living in the shanty neighborhoods along the river, found steadier work, even a growing demand for employment, in the mills. The city’s poorer inhabitants had no investment or long family history in the whale fishery to tie them to it or keep them hoping, unrealistically, for an unlikely turnaround. They wanted only work and wages, and to get these without leaving home for years at a time was an added benefit.
No sudden, calamitous depression overtook New Bedford as a whole. Rather, there was a washing away, as if by a slow but inexorable tide, of an old order, and its concurrent replacement by a very different one. And in the course of this exchange, the nature and tone of New Bedford changed. It lost its elite position as a headquarters for a fabulously wealthy plutocracy and began to establish itself as a working-class city that was soon in the vanguard of the burgeoning textile industry. Just as whaling and the Industrial Revolution had fueled each other’s growth, the development of the railroads and the use of mail-order catalogues, like Sears, Roebuck’s, created a continent-wide market for cotton and textile goods—in the form of clothing for farmers and their families in the expanding West—while conveniently supplying New Bedford with a new industry, just as the old one withered. Workers’ homes and whole new neighborhoods sprouted up in the immediate vicinities of the proliferating mills, while the genteel center of the town began to calcify and grow brittle. Large houses that had remained in families for generations were put up for sale.
THE HOWLAND BROTHERS did not know how to change. They noted what had happened; they were certainly aware of the general depression in their industry; yet they pressed on as before. They had never learned financial versatility. They were not businessmen in the truest sense, doing business for its own sake, or for the sake of making money. That had never been their primary concern. For two centuries their family had been engaged in a compact with God to slay the leviathan in the sea; wealth and station and power had derived from their unswerving adherence to this agreement. Efforts at diversification—their father George Howland’s attempt to invest in other towns and other businesses, adventures motivated purely by financial interests—had ended badly, in failures all too human, and conspicuously lacking the wondrous returns of the whale fishery. And there remained good reasons for them to persevere at whaling: their ships—those that remained—were all paid for, and still earning a profit; sales of bone were still encouraging. They simply had no idea of the speed at which their world was passing away.
George Jr. was largely uninvolved, and little interested in the running of the business. Like Matthew’s wife, Rachel, he used the family business and the social platform it gave him to perform good deeds. He was, as always, about town and the region with his civic responsibilities: a trustee of banks, of railroads, of Brown University, and he continued to enjoy the respect of others who believed him to be—as he correctly believed himself to be, in 1871—rich. He still saw no reason not to reaffirm what he had said a mere seven years before, toward the close of the Civil War: “ ‘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?”
It was Matthew who daily walked down the hill to the counting house that stood at the head of Howland’s Wharf, and there, bent over ledgers and inkwells, busied himself, as he had every day for more than forty years, with the numbers: the prices of whale oil, sperm oil, and “bone,” the percentages of lays, the cost of provisions, of preserved meats, of whaleboats and oars and shooks. There were still great numbers of numbers, and in these he continued to absorb himself, taking comfort in the familiarity of routine.
And it was Matthew’s line—his sons, warm and well fed on dry land, not men in tiny boats in peril from whales or icebergs—who, in a single generation, would play out the whale fishery’s most vertiginous plunge from securest ivory tower to bottommost condition and, for one son, tragedy.
As circumstances constricted around him, Matthew grew increasingly absorbed in the careers of his three sons: Richard Smith Howland, twenty-three years old in 1871; Matthew Morris Howland, twenty-one; and William Dylwyn Howland, eighteen. Like his own father (and the fictional but authentically representative Caleb Wellworthy) he had groomed his sons to follow him in the whale fishery. They had been devoutly and purposefully educated: first, of course, at the weekly Meeting, then schooled at the Friends Academy, and, inevitably, in light of Uncle George’s trusteeship, at Brown University in Providence. In 1874, Matthew dispatched Dick to California to act as their San Francisco agent. Morrie did not actually “go to sea” as a sailor but made several voyages between New Bedford, Honolulu, and San Francisco aboard Howland vessels. And young Willie went into the countinghouse with his father. Between the three of them, Matthew hoped, they would acquire a complete, complementary, and valuable experience to carry on the family business. For two years, as the boys confidently served out their apprentices
hips, the seven remaining Howland whaleships sailed between New Bedford, Honolulu, San Francisco, and the Arctic. The whale fishery, Matthew still believed, was, and would remain, part of the natural order of things. Many agreed with him: “The [arctic] disaster,” the Boston Post reported in November 1871, “was merely one of those deviations from natural laws against which all precautions are futile. Such an event would probably not occur again in a lifetime.”
But it occurred again five years later. In 1876, twelve of the much smaller twenty-vessel fleet venturing into the arctic grounds that summer were once again trapped by ice. This time, bearing in mind the change in conditions that had occurred after the crews left in 1871, and the possibilities for salvage, at least fifty men remained behind to spend the winter, as caretakers, aboard their ships. Only three were still alive when whaleships returned the following season. All twelve ships were lost. Four of them—the Onward, the Java, the Clara Bell, and the St. George—belonged to George Jr. and Matthew Howland. For them this was a far greater catastrophe than the disaster of 1871. Seven of their ten ships had been destroyed in five years. Now Matthew saw that the earth had tilted on its axis, throwing all natural and ordained laws out of balance, and the specific gravity of the whale fishery had unraveled.
His boys were forced to look increasingly to their own devices to make a living. Dick, who had bought a farm in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, and stocked it with 200 hens, began to import “duck”—cotton from New Bedford’s Wamsutta Mills, bought by Matthew and sent out to him to sell in the Bay Area. Morrie spent time in New York, dabbling as a trader in various commodities. And Willie went to work for Wamsutta management.
Final Voyage Page 23
