Final Voyage (15 page)

Rotch soon wanted to establish a name for the site of all this industry across the river from the original Dartmouth settlement. In deference to his friend Joseph Russell, whose name suggested a possible kinship with the English Duke of Bedford, whose family name was also Russell, Rotch called the place Bedford village. For the rest of his life, his fellow townsfolk flattered Joseph Russell with the honorific “the Duke.” When the town came to incorporate itself in 1787, it was discovered that there was already a Bedford in Massachusetts, so it was renamed New Bedford.

 

 

 

BUT FIRST, Bedford village and its unparalleled industry were all but destroyed by revolution.

In June 1773, the Rotch ship
Dartmouth
, built under the buttonwood trees, sailed with a cargo of sperm oil to London. There, after unloading her barrels, she took aboard a cargo of tea chests for a return voyage. On the other side of the Atlantic, the
Dartmouth
tied up at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston on November 29. Two other tea carriers, the
Beaver
and the
Eleanor,
arrived and berthed alongside her a few days later. But the unloading of the tea was held up for more than two weeks by Boston citizens, led by John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who opposed the threepence-per-pound tea tariff levied by the British government on shipments of tea from England, although this taxed tea was still cheaper than the Dutch tea then widely supplied to the colonial market by smugglers (New Haven merchant Benedict Arnold among them). It was the principle—taxation without representation—that angered the Bostonians and others. Francis Rotch, Joseph Rotch’s son and a co-owner of the
Dartmouth
, made energetic, even heroic efforts, considering the prevailing mood in Boston, to find a solution between the Boston patriots and the patrician consignees of the cargoes—Joshua Winslow; Richard Clarke & Sons; Benjamin Faneuil, Jr.; and Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, sons of Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts—to land the tea. But on the night of December 16, a group of militant patriots who had started calling themselves the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and boarded the three ships, chopped up the tea chests, and threw the cargoes into the harbor water. It was a signal skirmish in the growing division not only between England and her prize colony, but also between neighbors and friends among the colonists, which was about to erupt into war.

Quakers were pacifists, and though most of Bedford’s citizens were sympathetic to the American cause, few of them enlisted in the Continental Army. For more than three years after the war began, with the battles at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Dartmouth and Bedford remained largely untroubled by fighting. But a number of priva teering ships and their crews used Fairhaven as a base from which to attack the British navy, and their prizes had been sailed up the Acushnet River, until the area became notorious for anti-British shipping activity. The British would not make, or failed to make, a distinction between the two communities facing each other across the river. In dispatches to his superiors, British commander Sir Henry Clinton wrote that in early September 1778, he had directed a naval squadron “to Bedford, a noted rendezvous for privateers.”

On September 4, two British frigates, at least one of them bearing forty guns, plus an eighteen-gun brig, and thirty-six smaller schooners and lighters carrying about 4,000 infantrymen, grenadiers, and some mounted troops, sailed from New London for the towns on the Acushnet River. There were fewer than 7,000 people living in the entire area of the original township of Dartmouth. A Continental Army artillery company of eighty men and four officers arrived a few days before the British, but apart from this token force it was thought that there were no more than “fifteen able-bodied men on this side of the river”—that is, men, other than Quakers, who were armed and prepared to fight in Bedford. On Saturday, September 5, the British arrived. Some of the troops were landed on Sconticut Neck, on the river’s eastern, seaward-jutting arm, south of Fairhaven. The main body of the squadron, piloted by a royalist-sympathetic local Tory, sailed into Clark’s Cove, inside Clark’s Point, a few blocks from the center of Bedford village.

They were seen, of course. The weather was fine. And, with the neighborly intimacy of a civil war, news of the fleet’s impending arrival had been circulating in Bedford and Fairhaven for more than two weeks. Since the middle of August, some villagers had been carrying merchandise and personal valuables into the fields and woods around town. William Russell, unable to carry his prized grandfather clock out of the house, removed its works and hid them in a stone wall in a field. Mrs. Taber left everything behind but a treasured warming pan. Mother Gerrish refused to flee with her neighbors until she had tidied her house. Others waited, too long, to see for themselves what would happen, as people often do, disbelieving until the end, when wars approach their doorsteps.

All day, troops and military stores were ferried ashore from the ships to the fields on Clark’s Point and at the head of the bay below the town. At nightfall the troops marched from the fields through the streets to the waterfront.

“Tradition says,” wrote New Bedford historian Leonard Ellis, “that the night was one of surpassing beauty, for the moon made it as light as day.”

The British intention was to destroy the town’s shipping business. Their first targets were the long ropewalk buildings and adjoining warehouses on the Rotch and Russell wharves; these were set afire in the beautiful moonlight, and more fires, whether set intentionally or not, soon spread and engulfed buildings along the entire riverfront and spread to the stores and houses in nearby streets rising uphill from the river. Twenty-six warehouses in Bedford and across the river in Fairhaven, containing such combustible stores as rum, sugar, molasses, coffee, tea, tobacco, cotton, medicines, sailcloth, cordage, shipping supplies, and gunpowder, were destroyed or blew up in the fire. Seventy ships of varying sizes were set afire and sunk in the river, where some of them remained hazards to navigation for many years.

Surprisingly few people were harmed. Miss Peace Akins, a relative of Joseph Russell’s, was delayed as she tried to flee. “She had forgotten something (how like a woman!),” wrote Ellis in 1892. She was overtaken by the troops but was told she would not be harmed if she remained quiet. She stood to one side and watched the British army torch the town. But bloodlust was ignited in the fire and explosions, and three of Bedford’s citizens, Abram Russell, Thomas Cook, and Diah Trafford, who may have attempted some resistance, were killed by the troops—Russell’s head “being entirely cut to pieces,” Cook’s bowels ripped open by a bayonet, while Trafford, shot in the leg, would die the next day.

(One of the British officers in Bedford that night was Captain John André, a handsome but impoverished twenty-eight-year-old aristocrat. He was ambitious and looking for a faster route to a glorious military career than his current post as a bearer of dispatches seemed to offer. A year later, André was appointed to British intelligence in New York, where his natural talents led him into a spectacular scheme: he began a secret correspondence with General Benedict Arnold, hoping to lure America’s most successful commander over to the British side. André was captured by American forces while helping Arnold cross British lines and was hanged as a spy on October 2, 1780.)

The destruction of Bedford by British forces was as complete as the routing and burning of Dartmouth during King Philip’s War, 103 years earlier, but this time the scale of the wreckage of both property and the hopes that had been invested in it was far greater. Joseph Rotch, who had dreamed up Bedford’s whaling industry and made a town for it, saw his home burned that night and, at the age of seventy-four, was so dispirited that he returned to Nantucket and remained there until his death, in 1784.

Neither Land nor Sea nor Air

A
fter three seasons (1868-1870) of good whaling in excellent weather and forgiving ice conditions, the arctic whalers in 1871 were dismayed by the mass of the ice pack that was still, in midsummer, blocking their route north.

In July, the
Oriole
, a newly built New Bedford whaleship, struck floating ice south of the Bering Strait, off St. Lawrence Island. Little of the shock was transmitted through the heavily constructed vessel, and the collision was dismissed until a boatsteerer jumped down the forward hatch to look for a harpoon and landed waist-deep in icy water. Thomas Williams’s
Monticello
and several other whaleships were cruising nearby, and Thomas (who had lost his own ship, the
Hibernia
, in exactly such circumstances less than a year earlier) was among the men who rowed over to the
Oriole
to offer assistance. With pumps going, the ship reached Plover Bay on the Siberian shore, where she was hove down onto her side on the beach with the hole above water. But the damage was found to be too great to be repaired in such a remote location, and the ship was declared a loss. Benjamin Dexter, captain of the
Emily Morgan,
bought the wreck, otherwise in good condition, for $1,350, and set his men to removing every piece of gear he could get out of her, to be kept or resold throughout the fleet. It was a stark reminder, if anyone needed it, of the danger and unpredictability of arctic conditions.

 

 

 

SOMETIME AROUND 330 B.C., a Greek merchant and explorer named Pytheas sailed from his home port, the Greek colony of Massalia (Mar seille) on the southern coast of France, out of the Mediterranean, and headed north in search of distant trading ports. He sailed to Britain, where he observed the mining and processing of tin in Cornwall, and on up the Irish Sea, around the tip of Scotland. Then he wrote—though his own writings have been lost—that he sailed for six more days northward, to a place he called Thule, a name later appropriated by medieval geographers for their maps as “Ultima Thule,” to mean a place beyond the borders of the known world. Pytheas had probably sailed to Norway, because it can easily take six days to cross the Norwegian Sea from Scotland in what must have been a heroically unsuitable boat, and he found barns there.

In Thule, he noticed, the sun disappeared only for an hour or two in the middle of the night. During his peregrinations around Thule, Pytheas found the sea “congealed” and encountered something he described as neither land nor sea nor air “but a mixture of these things”—as the Greek geographer Strabo, who was familiar with Pytheas’s work, put it—“in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.” Pytheas was describing ice, almost certainly freshwater icebergs, drifting south from the fjord glaciers of Svalbard, Greenland, and Norway.

Off Alaska, Pytheas would have found different-looking, walkable ice. There are no glaciers slipping off the marshy tundra shores at the edge of the Alaska whaling grounds to release the wonderfully spired and castellated icebergs found in the eastern Arctic north of the Atlantic, or in the Antarctic. The pack ice surrounding the Yankee whale ships was made of frozen seawater, stuff the whalers, to a man, referred to as ice “cakes,” because it was made of sheets that reminded them of pancakes. As Willie Williams wrote:

Though whaling fleets had been sailing into the ice for more than a century, the Arctic and most of the polar waste was still a vast unknown, barred by ice and the lack of technology to penetrate beyond its seasonally melting edge. Conditions at its farthest north, and whether there was land there or simply a frozen sea, could only be guessed at. It would still be more than twenty years before the first serious attempt was made to cross whatever was there to reach the North Pole. In 1893, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen sailed his purposely designed ship
Fram
from Christiania (now Oslo) to the Arctic Ocean north of Russia, where it was allowed to become frozen in the ice pack, from which position Nansen hoped the ship would drift with the pack across the Arctic Ocean, over the top of world, to within ski-trekking distance of the North Pole, and eventually reach the Atlantic. He didn’t come close to the pole, but spent three years in the arctic ice pack. He found much of it a flat “ice-plain” of “cold violet-blue shadows, with lighter pink tints where a ridge here and there catches the last reflection of the vanished day.”

But this desolate, occasionally beautiful, jumbled plain was a deadly threat to the whaleships and their crews. As Willie noted, most of the ice lay below the surface, where, in fog and snow, it could not be seen by men aboard the ships. For a wooden ship, however stoutly built, ice was no different from house-sized chunks of concrete or steel, the mass of even a small “cake” displacing far greater weight than that of any vessel, and, on contact, as unyielding as a granite breakwater. The Williams family had already seen their own ship sunk by ice, and again, at the outset of the 1871 season, witnessed the loss of the
Oriole
by a collision scarcely noticed by the men aboard her. Most whalemen, after one season in the Arctic, had seen or personally experienced the same thing. Ice cruised in constant company with the fleet, often yards from every ship’s hull, an ever-present terror, implacable destroyer of ships, killer of men, the constant loom of misadventure; yet so also is the ocean, and the whalemen and their wives and children grew as used to it as to the sea and sky.