Final Voyage (16 page)

The
Japan
, a lucky ship until it smashed into Siberia, had already reached the Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Strait, by late March, 1870. Conditions were markedly different for the fleet a year later. “The ice was still heavy and well to the south all across the ocean,” wrote Willie Williams, as the fleet pushed north through the strait in July 1871, “and as the whaling the year before had been around Point Barrow, all the ships commenced to work to the northeast, in the clear water between the ice and the American shore.”

Eskimos trading with the whalers that season advised them that the weather would not be favorable, that the ice would be slow to break up and early to return, and they urged the Americans to turn their ships around and sail south while they could. The whalers, some of whom had been sailing on these arctic “grounds” for twenty years, dismissed the natives’ warnings. They knew from experience that easterly and northeasterly winds would eventually blow the ice away from the land, creating a channel between the land and the ice all the way to Point Barrow. The previous three years had seen steadily rising numbers of whales caught by whalers who had taken advantage of this seasonal waterway, who had sailed farther north each year, and remained there longer.

Whaling captains acquired firsthand most of their knowledge of the conditions they might encounter at sea and off distant coasts, the same way they learned navigation and ship-handling. This empirical education began when they first shipped aboard as green hands, and was added to over the course of many voyages. Competition was great and such information was jealously kept from foreign ships, but among friends and colleagues, and particularly among the captains of vessels owned by the same company, men shared this hard-won insider information. In time, such knowledge, spoken, written down in logbooks and letters, would inevitably become public and eventually be verified and gathered into “pilot” books, published by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington. (While most seafaring nations—Britain, with a millennium of such nautical lore, being a preeminent example—have similar publications with their origins in the same sort of vernacular and empirical sources, it sometimes appears that less “salty” governments have copied, almost word for word, from the pilot books of other, better-informed sources.) The early editions of the
United States Coast Pilot
for Alaska, published in Washington, contained daunting descriptions of the ice and weather conditions faced by mariners navigating arctic coasts, much of it directly reflecting the experiences of nineteenth-century whaling captains, whose efforts comprised the earliest sustained attempts at arctic exploration and navigation:

Many early editions of the
United States Coast Pilot
for Alaska carried remarks by Captain M. A. Healy about the 1884 cruise of the revenue ship
Thomas Corwin
(the same vessel that had reported the extent of the 1879 famine in the Eskimo settlements). Like 1871, 1884 was an unusually severe season, and it confirmed for Captain Healy that “the experience of many years in the Arctic has demonstrated the fact that no rules whatever can be given as to the time of the breaking up [and the return] of the ice.” Arctic pilot books note that “maximum fogginess occurs during the summer.” Dense fog had been “almost constant” through the summer of 1884, and Willie Williams and all the logbook keepers aboard the other whaling ships recorded that it was nearly so during 1871. Healy wrote that “for weeks at a time it was impossible to take observations [i.e., to obtain a position by celestial navigation], dead reckoning was almost worthless, owing to the continual changes in force and direction of the currents.” Then the navigator depended entirely on the lead line—a rope with a lead weight—to measure the depth of water beneath a ship, which would indicate shoaling and the approach of land. Fog distorted the views of whatever piece of shore might be glimpsed, “high bluffs often appearing like low beaches and small rocks looming to gigantic size,” and the marshy tundra land was devoid of distinguishable landmarks. Among the best aids to navigation were the bird rookeries at King Island, the Diomedes, Cape Seppings, Cape Thompson, and Cape Lisburne. “The distance between these rookeries enables one to form a very accurate idea of the one he is approaching, while the cries of birds congregated at them answer the purpose of a fog signal.”

Whalers also discovered that their compass—normally the navigator’s most dependable and necessary tool—was often useless in the Arctic. The horizontal intensity of the earth’s magnetic field becomes progressively weaker as a ship—or a compass—nears the North Pole, until the pole itself becomes an elusive abstraction. The magnetic north pole is actually hundreds of miles from the geographical pole and, the navigator discovers, is constantly on the move. “Measurements indicate that the north magnetic pole moves within an elongated area perhaps 100 miles in a generally north-south direction and somewhat less in an east-west direction,” states the
American Practical Navigator
—a door-stopper volume generally referred to by sailors as “Bowditch,” after its eighteenth-century originator, Nathaniel Bowditch—some edition of which was carried aboard many whaleships. This book’s treatise on the capricious wanderings of the magnetic north pole could hardly enlighten a navigator: “Normally, it is at the southern end of its area of movement at local noon and at the northern extremity twelve hours later, but during a severe magnetic storm this motion is upset and becomes highly erratic. . . . There is some evidence to support the belief that several secondary poles exist.” Location of the pole aside, the daily changes in its magnetic field could be as much and abrupt as ten degrees one way or another.

Some sailors even found their compasses affected by the wind in the Arctic, while acknowledging that this seemed impossible. Captain William H. Kelley of New Bedford reported this, guardedly, in a letter to the
Hawaiian Gazette
in 1874:

For arctic mariners, wind shifts often precipitated a change of course, and, as slow as the ships were, magnetic anomalies in the Arctic left the compass needle far behind, and sluggish in catching up. “I have often seen the ship tack and the compass remain stationary,” Willie Williams noted, “but by a vigorous shaking . . . the compass needle would finally respond.”

Into this featureless, disorienting environment sailed the fleet of heavy, tub-shaped, wind-powered whaleships. The
Corwin
was a coal-fired steamship, and Healy wrote that even at anchor, “moving steam had to be kept”—that is, the engines had to be kept running, in a state of readiness to haul anchor and steam to safety “to prevent being dragged ashore by fields of ice moving in the rapid and changing currents.” The skill and difficulty of the negotiation of such constant obstacles entirely under sail can scarcely be appreciated by anyone who has not actually witnessed the maneuvering of a square-rigged ship from on board. Few modern sailors take the time to develop the skills, and the nerve, required to handle their highly efficient and maneuverable sailboats—to sail them in and out of a congested harbor or negotiate adverse piloting conditions—under sail alone, for when the wind drops or pipes up too much, they prefer, naturally, to push a button and start the diesel. Whaleships were to modern yachts what steam-rollers are to race cars, yet their captains and crews sailed them like crack racing teams, through ice floes, up narrow inlets, turning them completely around inside their own length, and even sailing them backward when conditions warranted. They did this out of pragmatic necessity, but also with pride and pleasure. “The contest to be head ship was close and spirited,” wrote Willie Williams of the fleet’s race to the northern whale grounds, when ten or fifteen ships crowded the narrow and fickle waterway between land and ice:

The suddenness and casualness of the loss of the
Oriole
were endemic to arctic navigation, where collisions with ice were an unavoidable, sometimes daily, occurrence. The single great advantage of having so many ships vying for the diminishing number of whales on the arctic grounds was the security they provided one another when cruising in close company. Never at any time during or after the collision did anyone aboard the
Oriole
fear for his life. The captains of nearby ships quickly came aboard to share their opinions of what might be done for the ship, no doubt enjoying refreshments laid on by the
Oriole
’s cook and steward, and to offer what they could of their own stores and men. And if a ship had to be abandoned, there was a floating village close at hand to take in its crew. In June 1858, the whaleship
Addison
, of New Bedford, struck ice off Cape Thaddeus in the Bering Sea. The
Addison
’s captain, Samuel Lawrence, had his wife, Mary, and seven-year-old daughter, Minnie, aboard. The whaling wives who accompanied their husbands were, manifestly, extraordinary women, particularly for their time, generally at least as brave as any man aboard, with an interest in the ship’s business that was second to none. When the
Addison
was in trouble, Mary Chipman Lawrence was gratefully aware of the whaling community standing by, ready to help. From her diary, of June 17, 1858:

The
Addison
was luckier than the
Oriole
. It was beached at Masinka Bay, a few miles north of Plover Bay, was repaired, and profitably saw out the end of the season.

The
Addison
did not go as far north, nor remain as long in the Arctic Ocean, as ships began to in later years. The increasing scarcity of whales would drive whalers to push the limits of whaling grounds, weather, and the balance between prudent seamanship and the tightening economic realities of whaling. In the arctic whaling seasons of 1868, ’69, and ’70, ships probing farther north, and remaining there longer, did substantially better. The weather during these years was forgiving (the severe storm experienced by the
Japan
and the
Champion
in 1870 came in October, after most ships were south of the Bering Strait). Whales were taken in good numbers around Point Barrow well into September. The experience of the
Henry Taber
in 1870 was common: her crew didn’t spot a whale for three months, until late August, and then caught seventeen during the following three weeks around Point Barrow. In 1871, every captain was determined to reach Point Barrow and stay there as long as possible. Captains whose long experience made them feel they were being foolhardy by cruising such waters at such late dates made some accommodation with their fears and discovered within themselves unimagined stoicism and skill, or else found themselves without a command. Less responsible crewmembers, whose eyes rested solely on their take of the profits, and who would not be blamed for the loss of or damage to a ship, could, and did, write to a ship’s owners to complain if they felt their captain was being too timid.

So the fleet pushed north, negotiating conditions that in any other circumstances would have been considered unacceptable. But still they found they could not keep to the schedule of recent years, which had seen ships close to Point Barrow by early August. In August 1871 they were 150 miles south of there, facing apparently impenetrable pack ice, which was held against the land by a nearly steady wind from the north.