Final Voyage (19 page)

The Ships and the Men

W
illiam Fish Williams’s childhood homes, the ships
Florida, Hibernia,
and
Monticello
, were more alike than any three houses in a small suburban neighborhood. The distinguishing marks between these ships, and the ships of the 1871 arctic fleet, were fewer than those between a Buick and a Ford, discernible only by knowing observers.

Between the landing of the first sperm whale in 1712 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the design of the American whaleship and the American whaleman’s techniques evolved into the classic model that would remain essentially unchanged until the dissolution of the industry one hundred years later. Herman Melville, who shipped aboard the whaler
Acushnet
in 1841, might not have understood the workings of whaleships of the 1740s, but he would have been quite familiar with those of the 1770s. A whaler of the 1870s coming aboard a whaleship built a hundred years earlier in Nantucket or New Bedford would have found it smallish, but otherwise ordinary and serviceable. Once the design had been perfected, and with it the methods, they remained largely unimprovable. The whaleship
Maria
, built in Nantucket in 1781 by Joseph Rotch’s son, William, was still working in 1866, well past the peak years of Yankee whaling. A few other venerable—and lucky—ships had similar careers: the
Rousseau
, owned by George Howland (he hated the “infidel Frenchman” name, but changing a ship’s name has always been considered unlucky, so he purposely mispronounced it “Russ-o”) and then passed on to his sons, George Jr. and Matthew, was built in 1801 and outlived two generations of her owners, to be broken up in 1893. Most famous of all is the
Charles W. Morgan
, “a ship on which Poseidon and gods of the sea must have looked with special favor, because not only did she survive for more than eight decades the countless hazards of the sea as an active whaleship, but also—and equally miraculous—she was saved at the end of her long career by men who had come to love her and saw in her, as the last of her kind, a need to preserve her for posterity.”
⁵
The
Morgan
, built in 1841, twenty-five years before the Howlands’
Concordia
, is still afloat today at the Mystic Seaport Museum (in Mystic, Connecticut), a perfect time capsule of her time and purpose. These are extraordinary life spans for working
wooden
vessels, pointing not only to the duration of practical designs and techniques, but also to the economical habits of whaleship owners. Such ships paid for themselves many times over and made their owners rich.

They were as functional as spaceships. After Christopher Hussey and his crew had laboriously towed a single sperm whale back to Nantucket in 1712, prompting ships to voyage far out into “ye Deep,” whalers evolved the technique of cutting up a whale at sea and storing the chopped-up blubber in hogsheads. Until mid-century, these vessels displaced between thirty and fifty tons and remained at sea until their hogsheads were full before sailing home, where the blubber was boiled and the oil extracted in tryworks ashore. But as they ranged across the more distant waters of the South Atlantic, on the far side of the tropics, the limited shelf life of blubber became apparent. It turned rancid fast, spoiling the oil, curtailing voyages and the opportunity to explore more distant whaling grounds.

The major innovation affecting the design and service of whaleships was the development of shipboard tryworks. These were essentially furnaces, solidly built of bricks, designed to burn tons of matter in giant iron pots for days at a time—not an item that suggested itself to shipboard use. Apart from the inherent difficulty of keeping such fires going aboard a ship at sea in all weathers, the weight of such a construction on the deck of what was already a top-heavy vessel posed serious stability problems.

A modern sailor who has some idea of the singular difficulty of simply staying put, holding on, managing the gear of even a small yacht in bad weather—of just making a cup of coffee in such circumstances—can appreciate the difficulties of employing men to cut up tons of meat and tend to burning fires aboard a large, heavy, complicated square-rigger, as the ship’s entire deck and all its working gear become coated with a viscous, insoluble oil.

Small tryworks were first built on the decks of ships cruising the “southern fishery”—the waters of the Gulf Stream, the Western Islands, and across the tropics into the South Atlantic as far as the Brazil Banks—where blubber spoiled quickly. But these were ships of eighty to a hundred tons, and their tryworks were adequate only for small whales and small catches. The appearance in the late eighteenth century of shipboard tryworks big enough for the efficient processing of larger sperm whales, right whales, and arctic bowheads very quickly doubled the size of whaling vessels.

Aboard these bigger ships, men developed the rare abattoir skills of “cutting in” a whale at sea. For this, a large platform, called the cutting stage, was lowered on hinges until it extended horizontally far outboard of the ship’s deck, above a captured whale that had been brought alongside the hull. Men stood precariously on the cutting stage, leaning against an improvised rail, wielding twenty-foot-long, razor-sharp cutting spades to “flense” the blubber off the whale below them, while the ship rolled and lurched in the ocean swell. The carcass was turned slowly by men on deck with lines hooked into the jaw, tail, and flippers, while long, thick strips of flensed blubber were cut, hooked, unpeeled like orange skin, and hoisted aloft with block-and-chain tackles. The water around the ship became viscous with blood—ten tons of it from a large sperm whale, handily enough to flatten breaking wavetops—and densely clustered with sharks. A Hitchcockian cloud of screeching sea-birds filled the air around them, diving for scraps and offal. It was a scene that might have sprung from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, yet by the early nineteenth century it was being played out daily across the world’s oceans.

With this leap in size, the paradigm changed once again. A bigger ship carried its own carpenter, blacksmith, cooper, and sailmaker to sea, along with a dedicated cook and steward; more whaleboats, now totaling five, were carried on stout wooden davits; barrels were carried packed with “shooks”—barrel staves—and iron hoops, so the cooper could make more barrels at sea as needed. These first true factory ships were big and self-sufficient enough to remain at sea indefinitely, and as crews ate their way through hundreds of barrels of food and otherwise reduced the gear in the hold, this cargo space was refilled by oil. Shipmasters were instructed not to return home until their vessels were full, even when oil could be off-loaded at convenient shipping depots such as the Azores or, increasingly, South American ports. The classic era of Yankee whaling—depicted by scratchings on whales’ teeth, in paintings, and, most harrowingly and accurately, by Melville—had begun.

And “whalemen,” these avid butcher-sailors, began to sign on for voyages they knew would last for years. Being men, they were vastly more unalike than their ships; but being whalemen, their woes were common to all of them.

 

 

 

IN JANUARY 1841, Herman Melville sat, as he makes Ishmael sit (
Moby-Dick
, chapter 7), in the chapel at the Seamen’s Bethel, which still stands as it did then on Bethel Street, in New Bedford, prior to their departures aboard the
Acushnet
(Melville) and the
Pequod
(Ishmael). Naturally, both men were there at the same time of year: “It was cold as Iceland.”

Both sailors, about to head off on a whaling voyage around the world, gazed balefully at the inscriptions on the cenotaphs screwed to the chapel walls beside them.

“Three of them ran something like the following,” Ishmael tells us: “
SACRED To the Memory of JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836 . . . ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN . . . Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st, 1839 . . . CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who, in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3rd, 1833. . . .
”

Dreaming up his big book down in “the insular city of the Manhat toes,” Melville didn’t want to travel all the way from New York to New Bedford to copy the exact inscriptions, so he made them up, adding “but I do not pretend to quote.” Yet he caught exactly the flavor, the tragic untimeliness, and the exotic locations of so many whalemen’s deaths.

Three examples on the walls of the bethel today read:

Whalers died far from home, in places most people had never heard of—though to New Bedforders in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sea of Okhotsk (in the western Arctic) was as familiar a name as Bagh dad in our own time. Others—from the cenotaphs in the Seamen’s Bethel—died in Calcutta, in Sumatra, and Wm. Googins, aged nineteen, was lost overboard in a nameless piece of ocean, but the place of his death was given a latitude and longitude—47.50 S, 173.20 W—and many in New Bedford would have known without looking at a map that this was in the remotest area of the South Pacific, on the New Zealand “grounds.”

The whaleman’s weekly newsletter, the
Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript
, of New Bedford, was filled with similar news: “carried out of sight by the whale . . . The ship cruised for two days for the missing boat, but could not find her”; “fell from the stern overboard and drowned”; “taken out of the boat by a foul line, and drowned.” Or: “Charles W. Warner of Springfield, Mass. killed by a fall from the foreyard of the ship Mary & Susan, August 9, 1851.” Such notices also routinely appeared in the Honolulu paper
The Friend
, published for whalemen and their families, who were increasingly spending time (many even took up residence) in what were then known as the Sandwich Islands.

These stark death notices were of enduring importance to the people of New Bedford and whaling communities everywhere. They were losing sons, husbands, and fathers as regularly as the losses in an endless war. If it didn’t seem like war to them, but the normal attrition of life, it was only because these losses occurred throughout the whole of their lives, part of the daily news that arrived with the docking of every ship. But they memorialized their men and the details of their lonely deaths.

Fishermen still had the most dangerous jobs in America in 2005, with a fatality rate of 118.4 per 100,000 (nearly 30 times higher than the rate of the average worker). But today’s fishermen are incalculably safer than the whalers of two hundred years ago. There were virtually no safety measures aboard whaleships. Half the men coming aboard at the start of a voyage were “green”—farmers’ sons, poor city boys, and, in a few cases, romantic dreamers who had never sailed before. They learned their way up, down, and around the deadly maze of a square-rigged whaleship by following the man in front of them up the rigging and into a whaleboat. Their hesitations were answered with the bellowing of the mate, who could make his voice heard above the eldritch howling of a gale, and, in the more brutal ships, by the laying on of clubs, belaying pins, or any handy piece of rope improvised as a whip. It was always a savage initiation.
“John Prior . . . fell from the main top-galant cross trees . . . fracturing his jaw bone, and injuring him internally,”
wrote boatsteerer Dean C. Wright (see below), who witnessed this accident;
“he providentially fell upon a dog which was lying on deck, which no doubt saved his life.”
Men fell in uncountable numbers from the masts, yardarms, and the cat’s cradle of rigging that wheeled, arced, lurched across the sky, developing centrifugal forces that would terrify circus acrobats, and there was seldom a dog to cushion the blow.

The deck and interior of the ship itself offered only marginally better odds. “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself in jail,” said Samuel Johnson, “for being in a ship is being in jail, with a chance of being drowned.” Ships often sank at sea in bad weather, or ran aground on poorly charted coasts, or collided with ice. A whaleship was hijacked by convicts in the Galápagos, and whalemen were attacked by natives from the Equator to the Arctic. Melville’s giant white sperm whale, Moby Dick, was based on the famous story (even then) of a great albino sperm whale, Mocha Dick, that repeatedly and intentionally rammed and eventually sank the whaleship
Essex
in 1820. Other whaleships were sunk, apparently purposely, by whales, while countless whaleboats were smashed by harpooned whales, intentionally and otherwise, and their crews were often dragged down to their deaths entangled in rope or simply drowned clinging to scraps of planking too thin to float a cat while waiting to be picked up—life preservers had yet to be thought of. All those Currier & Ives prints and magazine illustrations showing splintered boats and men being tossed rodeo-style into the air by a bucking sperm whale weren’t exaggerating anything: it was as dangerous as it looked, or as one easily imagined it to be.

The inside of a whaleship was no place to find solace from the terrors without. Whaling artist and historian Clifford Ashley described the fo’c’sle of the whaleship
Sunbeam,
which he shipped aboard as a common seaman: