Final Voyage (17 page)

“
Wednesday [August] 2nd. Strong breeze from North’rd working to wind’rd foggy most of the time,
” wrote Nathaniel Ransom in the
John Wells
’s logbook, as the ship tacked again and again, pushing into strong headwinds, seeking any opening in the ice.

But on August 6, the wind shifted to northeast, blowing off the land. The
Henry Taber
, at the front of the fleet, found a channel between the ice and the land off Blossom Shoals, and, working into this shifting opening, passed Icy Cape. Three days later, the
John Wells
followed her:
“Wednesday 9th. Fresh breeze from North’rd on wind forenoon pass icy Cape & blossom shoals found a very narrow passage through between land & ice afternoon a little more room to work ship made sail evening foggy came to anchor.”

The not unpleasant-sounding description “fresh breeze” used by these rugged whalers aboard heavy, slow-moving ships generally meant winds that were nearly gale-force. “Strong” winds would indicate a true gale. Understatement is a consistent factor in gauging reports of conditions faced by men aboard whaleships. Usually, the weather they faced was appalling.

The
Wells
found sixteen ships ahead of her, four of them “boiling”—giving off black clouds of greasy smoke as their tryworks melted blubber—a happy sight.

The next day, Thursday, August 10, after most of the ships had squeezed their way into the finger of water between the ice pack and the low dismal shore, Lewis Kennedy died aboard the
Henry Taber
. He was one of the crewmen of the
Japan
who had never recovered from his ordeal. Abram Briggs, the
Taber
’s logkeeper, recorded (in his characteristically tidy hand) this death in a neat, black-ink-bordered note in the logbook.

A fleet of twenty ships, including the
Monticello
and the Howland brothers’
Concordia
, now crowded into the narrow channel that had opened between Icy Cape and Wainwright Inlet, thirty-five miles to the north. The wind fell light and settled into the northeast for a few days, and conditions at last seemed promising for the final push to Point Barrow, another sixty miles beyond Wainwright Inlet, where they all wanted to be, and where, they believed, lay the richest whaling grounds on earth.

But that spring an anomalous (compared with the patterns of the previous three years) stationary high-pressure system developed over Siberia. Through the spring and early summer, persistent cold winds—the northerlies noted by all the ships’ logkeepers—blew across the Arctic Ocean, keeping the ice pack pinned to the coast of Alaska and preventing its normal melting and dispersal. The narrow channel that had opened up, as it had done in years past, would prove to be a temporary aberration that season. The ships had sailed into a trap.

The Profits of Asceticism

W
ell, Hiram, I suppose thee is ready for work now,” Caleb Wellworthy, a New Bedford Quaker and whaling merchant, says to his son in the 1890 novel
A Quaker Home
, by George Fox Tucker.

“Yes, I am ready if thee desires it,” Hiram replies, “but I feel that I would like to remain in school a little longer.”

“When a man chooses business as his occupation,” his father tells him, “it is better for him not to remain too long in school.”

It’s June 1867, and fifteen-year-old Hiram has come home to New Bedford from the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island. He’s supposed to begin work the next day in his father’s countinghouse and offices on New Bedford’s waterfront. Caleb outlines for the boy the shape of his apprenticeship:

Tucker’s novel is closely and avowedly autobiographical. Novelist George Fox Tucker (named by his rigorously faithful parents for the sect’s founder) was born in 1852, the same year as Hiram, and also attended the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence. His father, Charles R. Tucker, a contemporary of George Howland, Jr., and Matthew Howland, was an eminent and successful whaling merchant who “won, to an extent reached by few, the approbation and regard of his associates and of the community,” notes a history of New Bedford.
A Quaker Home
details Hiram Wellworthy’s resistance to following the career his father has planned for him; he wants instead to write novels and recoils at the aridity of business and the countinghouse, but eventually he compromises with his father and takes up the law. Author Tucker also served a brief apprenticeship in his father’s business before turning to the law, and subsequently wrote novels. Strict Quakers, like the Tuckers, the Howlands, and the elite Quaker society that monopolized New Bedford’s—and for a time the world’s—oil business, did not read novels, let alone stand back and observe themselves or write memoirs of their lives. One may read in
Moby-Dick
and many seamen’s memoirs of the procedure of chasing and harpooning whales and the whaler’s life at sea, but Tucker’s book provides one of the rare depictions of the hermetic world of Quaker home life, society, and the shorebound business of a Quaker whaling merchant. His characters speak and behave with artless inevitability (perhaps the believable flavor of the author’s straitened early life), but the detailed specificity of Hiram’s route to his father’s office—“following Union Street to Front Street, I turned south and soon found myself at the office door . . . in the old brick building which stands at the head of Commercial Wharf ”—reads true.

This is a description of the offices of Charles R. Tucker & Co., where the novelist sat and worked during his apprenticeship. It occupied the southeast corner of the large brick building on Commercial Wharf—the sort of building and harbor aspect that, in the grip of twentieth-century urban renewal, have revitalized old ports around the world. Many such can still be seen today farther west along I-195 in Fall River and Providence, and around Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. But the building Tucker writes of was demolished, along with much of New Bedford’s historic waterfront, in the early 1970s, more irreparably than the British fires of two hundred years earlier, to make way for the history-obliterating four-lane connector, Route 18, that now runs south from the interstate, along the Acushnet River, and effectively severs the waterfront from the town’s historic district, which now gazes at a shoreline swathed in concrete. Of this busy world and time, there are photographs to show us what it looked like, but of the people and their tics and speech and prejudices, only George Fox Tucker’s
A Quaker Home
remains as documentary evidence.

Caleb Wellworthy initially expects his son to do as he did: apprentice himself into the whaling business. This is what Charles R. Tucker expected of his son George, and what he himself had done in 1830, by entering the countinghouse of Quaker businessman Isaac Howland, Jr., then the most successful whaling merchant in New Bedford. Quakers didn’t lavish money on their offices, and it may be presumed that the Howland offices of the early nineteenth century, situated in another brick building at the head of Howland’s Wharf, four blocks north, resembled those of the fictional Caleb Wellworthy.

Isaac Howland, Jr. (the third of that name), was born in 1755. He was a tiny man, said to weigh between ninety and a hundred pounds—not the physique to make a career at sea, but “the fire of a strong determination burned in him,” wrote historian and Howland genealogist William M. Emery. In later years, Isaac Jr. would say that he experienced great hardship and toil in accumulating his first thousand dollars. One of his reported early efforts was to buy the silk stockings worn by sailors arriving in New Bedford on trading vessels from the West Indies in the first years after the Revolution. Howland is said to have washed and ironed these stockings and sold them again for a good profit. This anecdote is probably more revealing of his inventiveness than of the route to that first thousand dollars, but it illustrates the wide embrace of Howland’s enterprises before he concentrated on whaling.

New Bedford’s whaling industry was slow to revive after the Revolution. The defeated British—London had been America’s primary market for its oil—enacted laws against the importation of American oil. Joseph Rotch’s son William attempted unsuccessfully to sell American oil to Europe from the port of Dunkirk. The Napoleonic Wars, between Britain and America’s ally, France, resulted in the seizure of many American ships on the high seas—whalers and ships carrying whale oil were as visible and crucial to the economies of warring states as oil tankers and merchant ships were to Britain in World War II, and, like the transatlantic convoys in the 1940s, were sought-after targets. The resumption of open hostilities between America and Britain during the War of 1812 had a further dampening effect on every American port, but in particular on New Bedford, whose economy was almost entirely dependent on its shipping interests.

Before the Revolution, Isaac Howland, Jr., was involved in his father’s merchant shipping enterprises. Even after this was ruined, he managed to keep his hand in shipping, and formed his own company, Isaac Howland, Jr., & Co. He was soon trading in anything that would turn a profit, while sending his ships to ports in neutral countries: to Göteborg, St. Petersburg, and Riga in the Baltic for Swedish and Russian iron, which was prized for harpoons and whaling lances, as well as to Europe and the West Indies. His store at the head of Howland’s Wharf sold “fresh” Alexandria flour, corn, rye, beef, pork, cheese, tea, coffee, sugar, lumber, and Russian and “Swedes” iron.

Isaac’s second cousin, Gideon Howland, Jr. (1770-1847), married Isaac’s daughter Mehitable in 1798 and became a partner with his father-in-law in Isaac Howland, Jr., & Co. Gideon Jr.’s professional life up to the point of his marriage was a complementary contrast to that of Isaac Howland, Jr.: tall, with a commanding physique, he had spent years at sea, working his way up to the captaincy of a whaling vessel. After his marriage he retired from the sea and brought this practical side of seafaring to the business. It was after Gideon Jr. had joined the firm that Isaac Howland, Jr., & Co. became the dominant shipping concern in New Bedford.

The company was rigorous in sending to sea only well-equipped, seaworthy vessels, commanded by highly competent captains and crews—Gideon Jr.’s experience undoubtedly paid off here. The goods sold at the Howland company store were always first class, at prices that were fair. The dependability of every aspect of the Howland business became well known and trusted. This bred loyalty in customers and business associates. Yet these good practices, followed by other merchants in larger ports that never suffered the tribulations experienced in New Bedford, do not explain the ascent of Isaac Howland, Jr., and his company; nor do they explain the eventual world dominance of the whale fishery by New Bedford. “New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New London or Portland,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, a frequent visitor to the town and, for six months in 1833, a preacher at the town’s First Congregational Church.

At the root of the Howlands’ and New Bedford’s endeavors and singular successes lay the austere sensibility of Quaker doctrine.

From the inception of Quakerism, when its followers were persecuted by the established church and state, in both England and America, Quakers were, by avid choice and practice, outsiders to normal society, barred from government service, from civil and legal professions, and from universities; and their pacifism prohibited military service. Like the Jews of Eastern Europe, persecuted through millennia, what was left to them was trade, financial services, and medicine, and at these callings Quakers excelled. Through native ability, honesty, and energy, they became disproportionately more prosperous and influential than those who had been accorded every advantage offered by the society around them.

Quakers’ honesty led them to pioneer uniform pricing, without discrimination or advantage, which won the confidence of the public market. In England and America they became leaders in textile, shipping, and pharmaceutical industries, in pottery- and clock-making and the manufacture of scientific instruments. Their reputation for honesty and prudent business practices and investment led to the establishment of Quaker-owned banking institutions such as Lloyds and Barclays. The Quaker Fry, Cadbury, and Rowntree families dominated the British chocolate industry for two centuries.