Final Voyage (21 page)

The dilemma of longing for those at home yet needing to leave them—and stay away for years on end, for the purpose of earning a living—is perfectly caught in New Bedford captain Samuel T. Braley’s journal entry for the last day of 1849:

Captain Braley went back to sea because it was the only way of life many men knew, the only industry that offered the possibility of steady work.

The modern seaman’s homecoming may not be so freighted with emotion: arriving home by car or cab, carrying a duffel bag, glancing at the yard, the scattered toys, it appears almost as mundane as a daily return from the office; modern professional seamen have blunted loneliness and isolation down to a very tolerable inconvenience, managed with cell phones, conjugal visits aboard, and regular trips home. But these periodic visits between lengthy absences have the same effect on these seamen and their families as they did 150 years ago. Being away from home is surely the reason many modern sailors’ marriages continue to work. They can stay away and gaze at their loved ones in picture frames in their cabins, and leave the exhausting work of raising a family to their wives and the children’s coaches and schoolteachers. When they do go home their guest appearance seldom lasts long enough to upset the status quo there; soon they’ll be gone, and everyone knows when, and they hang on, waiting for them to go. Families become used to the long absences, and the spells at home, and the continuity of his schedule, on which the seaman, his wife, and his children come to depend as routine. But he is still away for at least eight months a year, a familiar stranger in his own home. Like the absent whaler, his most constant reality is his ship. It’s the only place where he really belongs.

The absences endured by whalers and their families now seem otherworldly. Whalers led lives resembling nothing so much as science fiction. Contained in a small, world-girdling capsule, they matter-of factly went where few if any had gone before them, and they remained away for years at a time. One whaling captain calculated that at an average rate of four miles per hour while at sea over a period of forty-one years, he had sailed more than 1,191,000 miles, and during all that time had spent four years and eight months at home.

And there was the otherworldly nature of the work itself. Only in the literature of myth, the Homeric monsters of Scylla and Charyb dis, tales of the Hydra, the Kraken, and in movies like
Godzilla
, can a comparison be found for the physical scale of man to monster, for the whalers’ puny, archaic, pitchfork weaponry, and for the fear men felt when they got the full measure of what they were up against: “Don’t ye look ahead an’ get gallied, ’r I’ll knock ye stiff wi’ the’ tiller,” the mate tells Frank Bullen, an English whaler who sailed aboard the New Bedford whaleship
Cachalot
. The men who rowed the dainty whaleboats right up to the broad backs of cruising whales were forbidden to look over their shoulders at what they were approaching for fear the sight would “gally” (frighten) them. They sat pulling with their backs to the bow and the whale ahead, instructed to keep their head and eyes facing straight aft. Only the experience-tempered mate steering the boat and the harpooner readying his “iron” could see what was coming.

Of the many memoirs written by common sailors, some published more than a century ago, and others that continue to be found in old attics, Bullen’s
The Cruise of the Cachalot,
despite the dime-novel clichés, is perhaps the most authentic and detailed description by a whaleman of what exactly that work entailed.

Bullen called this “Abner’s whale,” because it had been sighted by a Vermonter named Abner Cushing. After a long spell without a catch, the captain had promised twenty pounds of tobacco, instead of the usual ten, to the man who first spotted the next whale taken and brought successfully to the ship. (Most whalemen were addicted chewers of tobacco; “plugs” and cut cubes of black Navy brand tobacco made good trading currency aboard ship and ashore, and were used as poker chips by sailors.) Abner had been the man aloft on lookout when he saw the spouts of this large sperm whale. “He brought his bounty forrard, and shared it out as far as it would go with the greatest delight and good nature possible.”

Only a few weeks earlier Abner had been disciplined for the theft of a few potatoes:

Bullen was sailing in the 1890s, far past whaling’s peak years, yet conditions aboard whaleships even then were unchanged from a hundred years earlier.

To understand that the sailors who did this work were not prisoners or galley slaves, or involuntary victims nabbed by press gangs, but employees who did it routinely, generally cheerfully, often (for those who didn’t jump ship, like Melville) for years at a time, is to know that such men, like their ships, were peculiar adaptations of their time, and they will not be seen again.

Old Lights and New

W
hile George Jr. and Matthew Howland, and George Tucker and his autobiographical creation Hiram Wellworthy, dutifully attended the Friends Academy, and the Friends boarding school in Providence, and trod the hidebound path prescribed for them by their parents and their social milieu, they did so in the calm center of a storm of change. While these young men were growing up, New Bedford was becoming one of the more cosmopolitan spots on earth; ships arrived daily with news and people from the farthest reaches of the world. Beneath the gaze of the great houses of the whaling merchants rising on the hill above the harbor, whole shanty neighborhoods of foreigners and heathens sprang up along the tidy Acushnet shores. The impact on the staid and settled town created by its Quaker patriarchs, and their circumscribed world order, and eventually the patriarchs themselves, was steady and unstoppable.