Final Voyage (27 page)

So successful was the first Wamsutta Mill that a second was built alongside it and began operation in the fall of 1854. A third mill was built in 1860-1861, a fourth in 1870, a fifth in 1875, and a sixth in 1882. By then the Wamsutta mills employed 2,200 people, housing them in “comfortable” tenements with five to seven rooms in each unit at rents of $5.25 to $7.50 per month. Joseph Grinnell remained president of the Wamsutta Mills Corporation until his death in 1885. With uncanny foresight, he got out of the whaling business at its height and put his money in what seemed in the beginning a very dubious venture.

 

 

 

EDWARD MOTT ROBINSON was “from away.” Born in Philadelphia, in 1800, to a prominent Quaker family, he began his business career manufacturing cotton with his brother in Rhode Island. But Robinson was an ambitious man and moved to New Bedford around 1833 to get into the oil business. His shrewdest move was his marriage, within a year of his arrival in New Bedford, to one of Isaac Howland, Jr.’s, two grand-daughters, Abby. Two weeks after the wedding, Isaac Howland, Jr., died, leaving Robinson, with one other partner, in charge of the largest whaling fleet—eventually more than thirty ships—and fortune in New Bedford. Robinson was described as “forceful, energetic, pushing and far-sighted in business,” and “not personally popular.” He was a physically imposing man. Nelson Cole Haley, a harpooner aboard the whaleship
Charles W. Morgan
when it was owned by Robinson, later remembered him vividly, from when he signed his shipping papers in Robinson’s office in 1849: “I found him to be a tall man (six feet at least) with keen black eyes and a hawkbill nose, with a very dark complexion. I then saw why he was nicknamed ‘Black Hawk.’ ”

Along with the industry’s improving conditions, Robinson’s intelligence and business sense were responsible for the continued growth of Isaac Howland, Jr., Company through the boon decades of the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet at the industry’s peak, in the 1850s, he, like Joseph Grinnell, saw and acted upon early signs of whaling’s decline. Before Drake’s oil well, before the outbreak of the Civil War, and during the years of growing whaling harvests in the Arctic, Robinson began transferring his fortune and assets out of whaling and New Bedford. When his wife, Abby, died in 1860, he wound up Isaac Howland, Jr., & Company completely, selling off its ships and wharves, and his personal property, and moved to New York, done with whaling. (On Edward Mott Robinson’s death in June 1865, his daughter and only child, Hetty Robinson, inherited his estate, worth over $5 million. Just two weeks after Robinson’s death, Hetty’s maiden aunt, Abby’s sister, Sylvia Ann Howland, died, leaving Hetty another $2 million, making her the richest woman in the world. Later reviled as “the witch of Wall Street” for both her financial acuity and her infamous parsimony—she was unwilling to pay for a doctor until it was too late, and thus an infection in her son’s leg resulted in a needless amputation—Hetty parlayed her $7 million into a personal fortune of $100 million by the time of her death in 1916.)

Neither Grinnell nor Robinson subscribed to the sense of divinely directed mission that kept many of New Bedford’s Old Light Quakers, like George Howland and both his sons, unalterably wedded to the whale fishery. Grinnell and Robinson were Quakers by heritage, but they were businessmen first.

YET EVEN AS WHALE OIL became scarcer, and petroleum more abundant and cheaper, there emerged a new and surging ancillary market supplied by the whale fishery. Coinciding with the discovery of the arctic bowhead, richly endowed with an abundance of baleen of great length, came the demand for “whalebone,” as baleen was termed. This had long been merely a by-product of oil-gathering; the densely fronded mouths of right whales had long been cast adrift after the blankets of blubber had been peeled off an animal. But from the mid-nineteenth century onward, an array of new products appeared that made ingenious use of this natural plastic: in addition to corsets and buggy whips and the hoops for increasingly fuller skirt fashions, baleen was used for umbrellas, parasols, neck stocks, canes, billiard-table cushions, pen-holders, paper folders and cutters, graining-combs for painters, fishing rods, bows, divining rods, boot shanks, shoehorns, brushes, mattresses, policemen’s clubs, and a variety of medical instruments, including tongue-scrapers, probangs (“a slender, flexible rod with a sponge on one end used . . . for removing obstructions from the esophagus”), and applicators of iodine to the cervix for the treatment of tumors of the uterus. In 1848, the year Thomas Roys sailed into the Arctic, whalebone was worth twenty-five cents per pound. By 1863, it was worth more than $1.50 per pound. In that year, the ship
Onward
, owned by the Howland brothers’ cousin Edward Howland, docked with a cargo of 62,100 pounds of “bone,” fetching $95,000. Yet as the value of baleen continued to rise, the total catch was already dropping fast, from a high of 5,652,360 pounds landed in 1853, to only 488,750 pounds in 1863.

With the withdrawal, by the 1860s, of the businesses of Grinnell and Robinson and the rest of the fleet thinned out by the war, George Jr. and Matthew Howland found a greater portion of the whale fishery left to them. While others were diversifying, or abandoning the whaling business altogether, the Howland brothers’ concentration of all their assets and focus on the single enterprise started by their father was paying more than ever. They were still making a lot of money “very fast lately in the whaling business,” as R. G. Dun noted. They enjoyed numerous advantages over their remaining competitors: their firm was an old one, long established; their vessels, wharves, candle-making, and other interests had paid for themselves many times over. By sending a large number of ships to sea, they enjoyed the statistical unlikelihood of a significant loss of property—the loss of one ship would not be catastrophic to their business, and less costly than insuring their entire fleet. Matthew Howland, the mathematical-minded brother who kept to the countinghouse, calculated that in a ten-year period only 1.5 percent of New Bedford’s entire fleet had been lost at sea. So, with insurance running at 10 percent (or more) of a ship’s valuation, the brothers chose not to insure their ships, but rather to build another, the
Concordia
, and to send it, along with the rest of their fleet, to the Arctic.

“Our Dreadful Situation”

O
n August 29, 1871, the wind blowing over the arctic fleet, though still light, changed direction 180 degrees and swung into the southwest. Immediately, because of the Coriolis effect, the loosened pack ice began drifting east, shoreward again.

Early in the afternoon, both the
Monticello
and the
Elizabeth Swift
, dodging ice, ran aground. With a tidal range of only six inches in the vicinity of Point Barrow, the ships would not soon float off. The
Swift
, in fifteen feet of water, was stuck for nine hours before a large cake of ice pushed the stern of the ship free to a depth of twenty-four feet at ten in the evening.

Thomas Williams also managed to sail the
Monticello
into deeper water that afternoon, but while the
Swift
stayed anchored where she was, Williams—warier than ever of ice after the loss of the
Hibernia
the year before—now turned his ship around and started beating southwest against wind and tide in an attempt to get clear of both the ice and the shoals. “The sea room, however, was narrow,” remembered Willie, “requiring short tacks and the taking of chances in the shoal water along the shore.”

The sails were quickly furled and a boat lowered to carry an anchor out to windward and deeper water, to try to stop the ship dragging farther into the shallows. There was no physical sense of emergency: the night was quiet, the wind light, and the water in the lee of the ice was almost calm.

Willie remembered the next day, August 30, as “clear and fair,” but Nathaniel Ransom, aboard the
John Wells
, anchored ten miles to the north, wrote in his ship’s log:
“A thick snow storm all day.”
It was probably on the following day, August 31, that the weather improved.
“Good weather,”
recorded Ransom on that day, and though there was
“lots of ice all around,”
Aaron Dean, the
Wells’
s captain, still ordered two boats lowered to cruise for whales.

When the snowstorm cleared on August 31, the ships anchored near the
Monticello
now saw that she was stranded and sent boats full of men to help her. Their captains, always ready to drop everything to come to another’s aid, sat in their sternsheets. To Willie, these other captains, all of whom he knew from many gams aboard his own and their ships, were heroes in the mold of his father. “The American whaling captain of that day was a plain, rather reticent, serious minded man utterly devoid of show or swagger. He held no commission and wore no uniform, but he could say with John Paul Jones, ‘By God sir I am captain of this ship because I am the best man in her.’ ” Twelve years old, unmindful of the seriousness of the situation, Willie was only thrilled by the gathering of such men. “To me it was a gala day, the decks fairly swarmed with men, orders were executed with a snap and vigor that only a sailor can put into his work when he is pleased to.” More anchors were rowed out and dropped in deeper water, their lines and chains hove up tight on the ship’s windlass. The
Monticello
’s bow was aground, her stern afloat, so barrels of oil were lifted out of her hold and rolled aft to redistribute weight. Finally she floated free and was towed out to where the other ships lay clustered together between the ice and the shallows, and there dropped her anchor. Though Williams was still determined to sail away as soon as possible, no escape yet revealed itself, so he waited, with the other ships.

The trapped fleet was now strung out along a curving fifty-mile-long sweep of the coast from a little south of Wainwright Inlet to Point Franklin in the north. While boats were still sent out to look for whales—there was little else to be done—some of the captains, like Thomas Williams, were no longer determined to reach Point Barrow, but hoped only to get their ships and crews safely away to the south.
“Oh how many of this ship’s company will live to see the last day of next August?”
wrote the
Henry Taber
’s captain, Timothy Packard, with vivid foreboding on August 31.

 

 

 

ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, the wind strengthened again until it was a “fresh breeze,” still from the southwest. The current, though running strongly to the northeast beneath the wind, was in fact pushing directly onto the coast with the Coriolis effect, piling ice upon more ice. Captains sent men to the mastheads to look for leads to open water, but they saw only miles of jumbled, densely packed floes stretching away to seaward without a break, pressing toward the land, jammed up against the shoals, driving over them, forcing the ships ever closer to the beach.

Northernmost of the fleet on that day, the New Bedford ship
Roman
was anchored in the lee of the ice off Point Franklin. A studio photograph of her captain, Jared Jernegan, shows a Mount Rushmore visage of encircling beard, jutting, prognathic jaw, clean-shaven mouth clamped in a grim arc of implacable stubbornness; the large, deep-socketed, hooded eyes hold all the terrible, soul-etching memories of a lifetime at sea, every kind of maritime disaster, of whales, icebergs, and death. Though he is properly attired in frock coat, waistcoat, high collar, and tie, Jernegan’s hairstyle is an arrangement of errant, flyaway quiffs, as if he had stepped directly out of a typhoon into the photographer’s studio. No Civil War general’s portrait showed a face sterner or more commanding. (
All
whaleship captains looked like this in photographs: manifestly stamped by weather and peril, hair barely restrained; perhaps it was a look they acquired by unspoken conformity to a desired type, the way twentieth-century American astronauts all looked like happy, corn-fed farm boys.)

The
Roman
’s boats had found a “stinker,” a floating dead whale, probably one of the hundreds that had been harpooned farther south but had escaped beneath the ice. The whale was being towed alongside the ship and the crew were busy cutting it in, while the
Roman
lay tethered by “ice anchors” (probably large blubber hooks) to an acre or so of ice. Late in the morning of September 1, that slab of ice suddenly broke apart.