Final Voyage

by Peter Nichols

  With the capital he was now able to raise, Willie launched an ambitious scheme to create Howland Village, a 150-acre company housing park for his workers. He hired the Boston architectural firm of Wheel-wright and Haven to produce three different house designs in a Dutch Colonial style, each varying in window, roof, ornament, and other details. The first fifty houses in Howland Village were built by 1889 (fifty-eight years before groundbreaking at Levittown, Long Island, New York). These were not cramped worker bungalows: thirty-five of the houses had five bedrooms, the remainder, three bedrooms; all had indoor plumbing, bathrooms with toilets and tubs, rare luxuries for the 1880s. Howland Village was sited on a hill west of the mills, with winding roads, and the houses and their lots were laid out in a pleasing, nonuniform effect. Rents for the houses ranged between $8.50 and $10 per month, for both skilled and unskilled Howland workers, who were earning between $50 and $80 per month.

  By the 1890s, New Bedford had turned away from the sea. Its ships lay for sale and rotting along its depressed waterfront. Its industry looked landward over the rising, flourishing brick mills, and the railroads were now carrying raw materials into the city and its cottons and yarns away to market. With 1,000 workers operating 78,000 spindles in 200,000 square feet of floor space in two plants, the Howland Mills Corporation ranked third in size of New Bedford’s textile mills, and was thought to be on its way to overtaking the Wamsutta and Potomska mills by the end of the century.

  Willie’s commitment to the welfare of his workers was tested and proven through the depression that gripped the American economy and created strife between capital and labor during the early to middle 1890s. In 1892, a state law reduced the working hours of mill employees from sixty to fifty-eight hours a week; while the other mills in New Bedford reduced their workers’ pay, Willie kept pay rates at their former levels. In August 1894, the New Bedford Manufacturers Association, of which Willie was a member, recommended a 10 percent wage cut-back for the city’s 10,000 textile employees. The textile unions called for a citywide strike. Willie attempted to reach an agreement between the workers and the manufacturers, and when asked by the New Bedford Evening Standard what he would do if that failed, he replied that he would continue to run his mills at the former pay rates and do nothing that would disrupt “the smooth and friendly relations we have in our mills at present.” When his efforts to break the strike failed, Willie kept his word. While the Wamsutta, Potomska, Acushnet, and other mills and related concerns remained closed for the next two months, the Howland mills continued at full operation, their employees still earning their old pay rates. Even when the State Board of Arbitration and Conciliation finally reached a compromise agreement with the unions for a five-percent pay cut, workers at the Howland mills continued to receive their prestrike pay. The New Bedford Evening Journal reported that Willie was “almost worshipped” by his employees, who subsequently presented him with a framed address in appreciation of his stand.

  William Howland was seen, not only in New Bedford, but around the country, as a model employer. The Cleveland Plain Dealer featured an article describing the wages, housing, annual steamboat excursion to Martha’s Vineyard enjoyed by Howland workers, and Willie’s plans for their further benefit, which included a cooperative insurance scheme, and expansions at Howland Village that would provide a gymnasium, library, and an evening school for his employees and their families. “A few more such ventures as this and we shall see the beginning of the end of the great struggle between capital and labor,” concluded the article.

  New Bedford’s newspapers frequently noted that “the most cordial relations have always existed” at the Howland mills; they compared the “air of comfort, contentment, and prosperity” in Howland Village with the “squalor” of the housing provided to Potomska mill employees, and described Willie as a “sagacious manufacturer, a man who has long shown it to be his belief that it is good business to treat the help fairly and liberally.” The Quaker ethic, learned from his parents and grandparents, and in his father’s countinghouse, seemed to be paying off for Willie in his great enterprise.

  But the downturn in the American economy, and its effect on the textile market, could not be averted through goodwill. On April 15, 1897, the New Bedford Evening Standard reported irregularities in the finances of two New Bedford mills, the Bennett and Columbia mills, Howland competitors. It was soon revealed that management of both companies had paid out excess dividends, made false reports to state officials, banks, and stockholders, and embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. On April 16, both mills were placed in receivership. On April 23, William Howland requested a loan of $200,000 from New Bedford’s National Bank of Commerce to cover his own mills’ debts that were about to fall due. There had also been rumors of financial difficulties at the Howland mills, which Willie’s request seemed to bear out. Notwithstanding that the bank had been founded by his father, Matthew Howland, and that Willie himself was on its board of directors, the business climate in New Bedford had suddenly grown wintry, and bank officials now asked to see the Howland books.

  Willie returned to his office. His bookkeeper, Harry M. Pierce, later reported their conversation to the Evening Standard: “Well, Harry, the game’s up,” Howland told him. “The bank has refused to let us have any more money, and they want to put a man on the books to see if I’m a thief. It’s too much for me, and all that’s left for me to do is go and hang myself.” Pierce tried to calm his employer, and then Willie said he was going out for a walk.

  He was not seen again for thirteen days, until May 6, when his body was discovered floating under the wharves along the waterfront. He was forty-four.

  The New Bedford Manufacturing Company, the Howland Mills Corporation, and the Rotch Spinning Company were all declared bankrupt and put into receivership. The mills were reorganized. Within a year, the employees of the former Howland mills had joined the city’s other textile workers in a long and bitter strike. The renters in Howland Village were turned out and the houses sold, and New Bedford’s workers’ utopia vanished forever.

  Virtually all of the shareholders Willie had successfully persuaded to invest in his mills had been his immediate family—his mother and father, Dick, and Morrie—other Howland relatives, and lifelong friends. Like New Bedford’s whaling interests, the mills and their stock had been owned by the city’s oldest, most venerable families. The failure—and the deepening troubles overtaking the city’s other mills—had, like whaling’s failure, struck deepest at the core of New Bedford’s once brilliant plutocracy.

  WILLIAM HOWLAND LEFT BEHIND a wife and two sons, and a gold Patek Philippe pocket watch. The watch was found on him when his body was recovered. Its ruined original works were replaced by a less expensive mechanism.

  Willie’s son, Llewellyn Howland, eventually passed that watch on to his grandson, Matthew Howland’s great-great-grandson, Llewellyn Howland III. A few days before that young man left home to start his freshman year at Harvard in the 1960s, the elder Llewellyn called him over to his house. He wished him luck, offered a few words of general advice, and then told him about the end of his own abbreviated single year at Harvard:

  When your great-grandfather died, I, of course, had to leave Cambridge and come right home. It was a nasty April day, raining, grey, bitter. I hated to leave Cambridge and I hated the stink of the New Haven cars and I hated the dreadful stretch of tenements by the track and the soot and the dirt. And when I looked out and saw the old men picking garbage in South Boston and the ragged children playing in the streets, God! how it frightened me to see them there. The squalor of it. The hopelessness of being poor. . . . Well, I’ve been fortunate, the family has been fortunate. But don’t ever forget, don’t ever forget what it would mean, being in those people’s place. How hard it is to rise, when you’re really, truly down.

  Barrels of unsold whale oil on the New Bedford waterfront.

  (Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum)

  Epilogue 1

  William Fish
Williams made a fourth whaling voyage with his father as captain, shipping aboard the Florence, as a boatsteerer, from December 25, 1873, to November 12, 1874, sailing from San Francisco to the Sea of Okhotsk and back. At the end of that voyage, Willie, aged fifteen, decided he had had enough of the sea and wanted instead to become an engineer. He entered the School of Mines at Columbia University, in New York, in 1878, and in 1881 earned the degree of civil engineer. In 1882 he earned the further degree of engineer of mines. He worked as a mining engineer, far from the sea, in several places in the United States, but eventually settled in New Bedford, where he became the first city engineer. He wrote several accounts of his voyages as a boy aboard whaling ships. Williams died at home in New Bedford in 1929, at the age of seventy.

  ...

  HIS FATHER, Captain Thomas William Williams, continued whaling in the Arctic until 1879. That summer, on his last voyage, aboard the bark Francis Palmer, he carried on deck a small steam launch in which he chased whales at speed through the ice. “He would be gone for days at a time,” wrote his son Willie, “and suffered hardships from exposure, poor food, and water, beside worries which broke his health.” He died at home in Oakland the following summer, in August 1880.

  Eliza and her daughter Mary returned to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Eliza died in 1885.

  MATTHEW’S SON, Dick—Richard Smith Howland—finally found the right outlet for his talents. In 1884, his wife Mary’s uncle died and left her a large amount of stock in the profitable Providence Journal Company, publisher of the Journal and Bulletin newspapers in Providence. Dick, Mary, and their five children returned east to the city in 1885, and eventually Dick became manager of the Providence Journal Company. According to the centennial history of the Journal, published in 1962, his twenty-year stint as manager was a happy one. Circulation and income climbed.

  Morrie never made a success as a businessman. He accepted Dick’s offer of a job as the Journal ’s book review editor. Dick also moved his mother, Rachel, to Providence, where she lived until her death in 1902. In 1905, Dick left his position at the Providence Journal Company and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he bought local railroad, quarrying, and textile stocks. With Dick gone, Morrie was let go from the Journal and joined his brother in Asheville, as his bookkeeper. The two retired and died in Jacksonville, Florida.

  George Howland, Jr., died in 1892, outliving his younger half brother, Matthew, by eight years, and his wife, Sylvia, by two. Four years before his death he was forced to sell his mansion on Sixth Street, in which he had lived for more than half a century. He died penniless, but he had seen worse than the loss of his wealth. George’s three children, sons, had all died before him, two as infants, and the third at the age of twenty-eight, in 1861, more than thirty years before his father.

  Epilogue 2

  In the wake of the closure of a BP oil field in Prudhoe Bay,

  Alaska, oil prices shot up to $77 a barrel on Wednesday. . . .

  The Prudhoe Bay oil field was discovered in 1968, and

  began pumping in 1977. That first year, up to 1.5 million

  barrels a day were pumped from the site. Now the site is

  what is called a mature field and is far less productive,

  pumping a maximum of about 400,000 barrels a day into

  the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. . . . The future of oil production

  at Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in the United States,

  is tangled in issues like depletion of the fields, and global

  pressure to find alternate sources.

  The New York Times, August 11, 2006

  In August 1886, as William Howland was expanding his mills in New Bedford, a twenty-three-year-old adventurer and part-time whaleman named Charlie Brower, a New Yorker by birth, was heading east with a group of ten men from Point Barrow in two small whale boats. They were exploring the feasibility of small-boat whaling from a fixed base on Point Barrow for the Pacific Steam Whaling Company, based in San Francisco. Brower and the others had traveled north by steamer and been dropped off at the company’s Point Barrow “station”—a shack above the beach. The company believed that newer, less exploited whaling grounds lay to the east of Point Barrow, along the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska’s northern shore, where few whaleships had ventured.

  Heading eastward around the point by oar and sail in their small whaleboats, they camped the first night on an island between the sea and Elson Lagoon, close to the spot where Jared Jernegan’s whaleship Roman had sunk fifteen years earlier. In addition to the wreckage of countless whaleships that littered the shore and barrier islands around Point Barrow, Charlie Brower and his men also found human skeletons and bodies in various stages of decomposition and preservation—probably some of the fifty men who remained behind with their trapped ships in the winter of 1876-1877, and had disappeared by the next summer.

  After several days of hard rowing and beating to windward, camping ashore each night, the two boats were stopped by a storm at Cape Simpson, forty miles east of Point Barrow. The men aboard had seen no whales, and were discouraged. While the weather kept them pinned ashore, Brower and another man, Patsy Grey, headed inland over the marshy tundra with guns, hoping to shoot something to eat. Climbing over the top of a low rise of ground, they saw a small lake stretching out below them. It looked oddly black. They walked down to the edge of the lake. Liquid at its center, the “water” at their feet appeared to be “an asphalt-like substance.”

  Oil, thought Brower. Grey disagreed, having never heard of such a thing. Brower had: his luckless father had unaccountably gone bust in the wild early days of the Pennsylvania oil fields. Brower lit a match and lowered it to the asphalt. “It burned with intense heat and lots of greasy smoke,” he later wrote.

  They walked on around the small burning lake. Half a mile farther they reached a much larger “oil lake,” where they saw the black carcasses of caribou and eider ducks trapped on its surface. Brower and Grey had discovered the seeping surface of the vast oil reserve that lay beneath the northern rim of Alaska, which would eventually be tapped from Prudhoe Bay, 120 miles to the east of where the two men stood. Apart from blundering caribou and eider ducks, it would lie undisturbed for another eighty years.

  The whaleboats had come as far as they could go. Provisions were running low. When the storm passed, the whalemen sailed west again, back to Point Barrow.

  Acknowledgments

  A litany of inadequate expression:

  I can’t sufficiently thank my longtime literary agent, Sloan Harris. He is pragmatic, scrupulously honest, a gentleman, and a friend. Every book I’ve written owes him a great debt. Kristyn Keene has also been unfailingly helpful. I also want to thank Liz Farrell and Josie Freedman at ICM.

  At Putnam, I’m extremely grateful to Ivan Held for his faith in this book. Dan Conaway, my editor on two previous books, championed this one and then moved away, and I’ve missed you, Dan. I’ve been fortunate to have the sage editorial skill of Rachel Kahan, who took the book over from Dan, and its finished shape bears her contribution and commitment. I want to thank Rachel Holtzman for her enthusiasm, and Lauren Kaplan for her help. This book has benefited greatly from the knowledge, judgment, eye, and ear of its extraordinary copy editor, Ed Cohen.

  The generous contribution, suggestions, and friendship of Llewellyn Howland III have meant a great deal to me and to this book. I can’t thank you enough, Louie. I want to thank Polly Saltonstall for introducing me to Louie.

  Mike Dyer, curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Laura Pereira, Kate Mello, Maria Batista, and Michael Lapides of the New Bedford Whaling Museum were also helpful.

  Thank you, Jan Keeler, for your supply of clippings, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

  Paul Cyr at the New Bedford Public Library was helpful.

  John Bockstoce’s work on American whaling in Alaskan waters and in numerous publications, especially the book Whales, Ice, and Men, is unparallel
ed, and I’m grateful for his comments and observations.

  Phil Hardy, Chris Whann, and Susannah Mintz were valued mentors at Skidmore College.

  In Tucson, Stephanie Pearmain, Aurelie Sheehan, Larry Cronin, and Marla Reckart.

  For their friendship and encouragement, with this inadequate mention, I want to thank Kelly Horan; Robert and Penny Germaux; Jennie, Oskar, and Katya von Kretschmann; Peter Birch and Barry Longley; David and Anita Burdett; Jennifer Haigh; Kat Laupot; Bill and Jan Conrad; Robert and Sarah Reilly; Richard Podolsky; Robert and Su. Sane Hake; W. Hodding Carter; Bennet Scheuer; Amita Jarmon; Tom and Sasha Laurita; and their families.

  I’m more grateful than I can say for the love and support and generosity of Roberta Franzheim and Josephine Franzheim.