Final Voyage (26 page)

But coinciding with the sudden impact of the petroleum business, the Civil War proved a major disruption for the whale fishery. Seeking to put a stranglehold on the Confederacy’s supplies, Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Union navy, sent agents to New Bedford and other whaling ports to purchase twenty-five old vessels, of at least 250 tons each, to be filled with blocks of granite, sailed south, and sunk in the harbor mouths of Savannah and Charleston, stoppering up the South’s two most vital ports. For many whaling merchants, then burdened with aging vessels and a declining market, the appearance of Welles’s agents, offering ten dollars per ton for their oldest, most decrepit ships, was a boon. Fourteen of the twenty-five ships were purchased in New Bedford; the rest were found in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, New London, Mystic, and Sag Harbor. New England’s ubiquitous fieldstone proved easier to obtain than quarried granite, and New Bedford’s farmers reaped an unexpected harvest selling their stone walls to government agents at fifty cents a ton. The “stone fleet,” as it came to be called, departed from New Bedford on November 20, 1861. The operation was supposed to be a clandestine war secret, but the town gave the fleet a send-off, with thousands cheering from the docks and a thirty-four-gun salute, with the result that the departure was reported the following day in
The New York Times
. Nevertheless, many of the Confederate forces in Savannah watching the fleet assemble outside the harbor believed it to be an invasion of warships, and, beating the stone fleet at its own game, sent a few of their own older ships out toward the fleet and sank them in the harbor channel. Many of the stone fleet’s ships arrived, after their stormy passage south, leaking so badly that they sank or grounded in ineffectual positions outside the harbor or near the shore. The remainder of the fleet was directed to sail on to Charleston, where sixteen vessels were sunk in a checkerboard pattern across Charleston’s main shipping channel. Secretary Welles was pleased with the result and ordered a second stone fleet organized and sailed south to Charleston, where it was also sunk in a checkerboard pattern in January 1862. The results did little to impede navigation into and out of Savannah and Charleston. Strong tidal currents racing between the Atlantic and the cities’ inland rivers soon broke up the weakened wrecks, scattered and buried their stone cargoes in the silt and mud, or made new channels. But the action of the stone fleets—something that, had it been successful, might have proved ruinous to the commerce of the cities and their civilians for decades after the war—was widely seen as a barbaric war crime, something beyond the pale of the gentlemanly code of war as then conducted. It was denounced not only throughout the South but also in France and England, and excoriated by
The Times
of London, which observed: “People who would do an act like this would pluck the sun out of the heavens, to put their enemies in darkness, or dry up the rivers, that no grass might for ever grow.”

The stone fleets may have been beneficial for shipowners, enabling them to sell off old vessels for good money, but the navy of the South had its own plans for disrupting the economy of the North, and the whale fishery lay directly in its sights. Confederate president Jefferson Davis and secretary of the Confederate navy Stephen Mallory dispatched an agent, James Bulloch, to England to procure warships that would attack the Union’s commercial shipping. Whaleships, as well as merchant vessels carrying oil from New Bedford to London—the oil tankers of the nineteenth century—were crucial to the Northern war machine. Britain was neutral during the Civil War, its subjects and businesses forbidden to aid either side. While Bulloch, an American, was allowed by law to commission the building and outfitting of ships in Britain, and even purchase arms there, he was careful to deal with different firms for every item, and keep his arms and ships separate, to minimize the possibility of his suppliers’ being seen to be aiding the Confederate war effort. Even when his activities were discovered by Union spies and the British government was informed of his purpose, Bulloch was found to be operating within the strict letter of British law, and the government could not stop him. The Confederacy’s loophole-enabled warship
Alabama
, a 210-foot steam-auxiliary-powered sailing ship, built by the Birkenhead Ironworks in Liverpool, was launched on July 29, 1862. It sailed immediately to the Azores, where Bulloch had already dispatched a ship loaded with arms and supplies. On September 5, off those whale-infested islands, the
Alabama
approached the Edgartown whaleship
Ocmulgee
. Flying the Stars and Stripes, the
Alabama
gave no alarm to the whalers, but as she hove up close alongside, the Union colors were lowered and the Confederate flag was raised. The whaleship’s captain, Abraham Osborne, later deplored this subterfuge as a “disgraceful” ruse. Like all whaleships, the
Ocmulgee
was defenseless, barring the few personal firearms that might be carried by the captain or a mate. The
Alabama
’s captain, Raphael Semmes, ordered the ship’s crew into their whaleboats, whereupon the
Ocmulgee
was burned. The whalemen were allowed to row themselves to a nearby island.

Whaleships proved the easiest of prey: they congregated in fleets on known whaling grounds and, like the
Ocmulgee
, could offer no defense. The
Alabama
captured and burned nine whaleships off the Azores during September. Over the next twenty-one months, she destroyed forty-six whaleships in the Atlantic, twenty-five of them from New Bedford. She was finally sunk off Cherbourg, France, by the USS
Kearsarge
, but Bulloch quickly purchased another British ship, the steam-auxiliary East India merchant ship
Sea King
. She was sailed to Madeira, where Bulloch had another supply vessel waiting to arm and outfit her. The
Sea King
was rechristened
Shenandoah
, and her new master was a luxuriantly mustachioed former U.S. Navy lieutenant from North Carolina, James I. Waddell. He was ordered to take his ship to “the far-distant Pacific,” specifically to hunt down the Union’s whaling fleet. Before the
Shenandoah
had left the South Atlantic, Waddell encountered and burned the New Bedford whaler
Edward
near the island of Tristan da Cunha. He sailed on to Melbourne, Australia, where the
Shenandoah
underwent repairs and loaded coal. It was early 1865 before she reached the Pacific. In the Caroline Islands, Waddell captured four whaleships, and with them their captains’ detailed charts of the whaling grounds of the Pacific, the Okhotsk and Bering seas, and the Arctic Ocean—where he could sail directly and be assured of finding dozens of whaleships. In May, on the Kamchatka grounds, Waddell captured and burned the New Bedford ship
Abigail
. In June, his crew observed floating pieces of blubber in the Bering Sea and soon afterward encountered the ships
William Thompson
and
Euphrates
, both from New Bedford. Their crews were taken aboard the
Shenandoah
and the ships burned. The next day three more New Bedford whaleships,
Milo
,
Sophia Thornton
, and
Jireh Swift
, were captured—the last two after a chase through the ice floes. The captain of the
Swift
was Thomas Williams; because of the war, his wife Eliza, son Willie, and daughter Mary were for once not with him but living ashore in San Francisco. At this point, Waddell had a full shipload of Union whaling crews as prisoners, so after burning the
Sophia Thornton
and the
Jireh Swift
, he ransomed the
Milo
to its captain for an IOU of $46,000, to be paid by the
Milo
’s owners to the Confederacy after the war, then loaded that whaleship with all the captured whalemen and set them free. The
Milo
sailed to San Francisco, where many of the whalemen promptly found berths aboard other whaleships.

Waddell had had no news of the war since leaving Australia until, late in June 1865, he found newspapers aboard a captured trading ship with reports of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination. While this was disastrous news for the Confederacy, Waddell remained uncertain of the outcome of the war, so he continued to do what he could for the South. The
Shenandoah
steamed on through the Bering Sea, eventually capturing and burning another fifteen vessels, and sending a second ransomed ship full of prisoners back to San Francisco. Finally, anxious for further war news, Waddell sailed the
Shenandoah
south, where, in August, off the California coast, he sighted a British merchant ship, closed with it, and learned that the war was indeed over and that the South had lost. Realizing that his most recent captures and burnings had probably taken place after the war’s end, Waddell continued sailing south, intent on avoiding capture. The
Shenandoah
rounded Cape Horn and, completing a circumnavigation of the world, reached England on November 5, 1865. The arrival was an embarrassment for the British government, which had allowed the ship to sail from there thirteen months earlier, and failed to stop it in Melbourne, by which time it had already sunk a whaleship and its mission was clear. According to
The Times
of London:

The American press urged that Waddell and his men either be tried in England for piracy or handed over to the U.S. government. The ship was turned over to the American consul in London, but Waddell and his men were set free. Waddell remained in England for ten years, until he was hired as captain on the mail packet running between Yokohama and San Francisco. He eventually settled in Annapolis and died there in 1886.

 

 

 

EVEN BEFORE EDWIN DRAKE HIT OIL, two of New Bedford’s largest whaling merchants were getting out of the business, in favor of enterprises they believed held sounder prospects for the future.

Joseph Grinnell, born in 1788, was the heir to one of the town’s largest and most successful whaling enterprises, formed by his father, Cornelius Grinnell, and his uncle, Gideon Howland, Jr. Joseph worked for them until he was twenty-two, when he moved to New York City and there, with another uncle, John Howland, started a trading and shipping business called Howland and Grinnell. They were very successful until the War of 1812, which again saw the destruction and confiscation by the British of American property and ships, including Howland and Grinnell’s. John Howland returned to New Bedford, but Joseph, who could have gone home and worked for his father again, remained in New York. He was unusually independent-minded, and this fact would prove crucial to his later career, and to the future of New Bedford. With his cousin, the preposterously named Captain Preserved Fish, he started another shipping and mercantile business in New York, under the name Fish and Grinnell. Joseph’s two younger brothers, Henry and Moses, later joined them. Captain Fish retired in 1825, and Robert Minturn, Henry Grinnell’s brother-in-law, joined the firm, which then changed its name to Grinnell, Minturn & Co.—the firm that owned Thomas Roys’s ship, the
Superior
.

In early middle age Joseph Grinnell returned to New Bedford, leaving his brothers and Minturn in charge of the business in New York City and Sag Harbor. As if to make up for leaving it in his youth, he then devoted himself to doing everything he could for his hometown. He became president of the Marine Bank, holding that position from its founding, in 1832, until he resigned, in 1878. He was president of the New Bedford and Taunton Railroad, and of the Boston and Providence Railroad. In 1843, he was elected to Congress to serve the unexpired term of the deceased New Bedford district congressman Barker Burnell (he was reelected for three additional terms).

While in Washington in 1847, Grinnell met with a group of businessmen who were interested in opening a cotton mill in Georgia, where the manufacture of cotton was extremely profitable at that time. Grinnell was intrigued by the plan, but the Mexican-American War had recently begun, in the wake of the annexation of Texas and the disputed territories, and the threat of hostilities reached deep into the American South. Grinnell proposed that the mill be built in New Bedford, where he was sure the investment would be safe, and where he knew a work-force was available. Whaling in New Bedford was then still approaching its zenith, already one of America’s leading and most important industries, but Joseph Grinnell had a prescient notion that it might not always be so. He had been nearly ruined in whaling and shipping when young, and perhaps he had a better instinct than most for the vagaries of a business pinned to the imponderables of ships, the sea, and the already diminishing resource of whales.

Grinnell and his partners sought a subscription of $300,000 to capitalize the mill, and to build and outfit it with 15,000 spindles and 300 looms. It was to be called the Wamsutta Mill. Grinnell put up $10,000 of his own money, but despite great efforts, only $157,000 was raised. The whale fishery, then generating previously unimagined wealth and a dot-com-like frenzy of irrational exuberance, was sucking up every available investment dollar, and New Bedford was its Silicon Valley. “Everyone who had money to invest sought for opportunities to join with some favorite agent in the numerous vessels that were being added to the fleet,” wrote historian Leonard Ellis. “The profits were large and very certain, and the entire prosperity of the place had grown out of it. This was the one great obstacle in the way of getting sufficient capital for the first mill.”

Grinnell was bucking the trend. Finally he invested another $2,100 of his own money to bring the initial capitalization to $160,000. The mill was built of brick, at the north end of town, conveniently sited between the river and the New Bedford and Taunton Railroad line, both of which would be of use. Ten thousand spindles and 200 looms were installed. The first Wamsutta Mill began operation in the spring of 1849. As soon as its cotton products—shirtcloth, cambrics, muslins, cloths of all types and qualities—reached the market, they were successfully sold and created a demand for more. Coastal New Bedford was found to have natural advantages for the manufacture of cotton goods: there is a year-round dampness and softness to the air that is favorable for the handling of cotton yarns; winters along the Buzzards Bay shore are mild, and summers far cooler than those in Georgia, making comfortable working conditions for mill employees. According to Ellis: “From observations made from 1849 to 1874 the operatives in New Bedford enjoyed better health than those employed in interior towns, and consequently the amount of earnings was correspondingly increased.”