Final Voyage (29 page)

They did so: every captain, except those, like Benjamin Dexter, who had already set out with his wife in a whaleboat heading south, signed this letter. They agreed to abandon their ships on September 14. But by then many boats and ships’ crews had already left.

The Abandonment of the Whaling Fleet, 1871.
From
Harper’s Weekly.
(Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum)

Abandonment

T
he 1,219 men, women, and children of the fleet now faced an open-boat journey through the harshest of arctic conditions. The distance to Icy Cape and where the waiting ships lay, on Blossom Shoals just off the cape, was forty to sixty miles, depending on the positions of the abandoned ships.

It was fifty miles for the party from the
Monticello
, a grueling trip in an exposed open boat. With Eliza, Willie, his ten-year-old daughter Mary, and himself, all crammed into a whaleboat with gear, provisions, and five or six other men at the oars, Thomas Williams decided to make the trip over two nights and two days. Willie remembered it all well:

Willie’s nineteen-year-old brother, Stancel, Thomas and Eliza’s first-born son, who was one of the
Monticello
’s officers on this voyage, was in another boat. (Their second son, Henry, had died of scarlet fever at the age of nine, in 1864.)

They left the
Monticello
on the afternoon of September 13 and rowed and sailed twenty miles to the stranded
Victoria
, where they spent the night as guests of its Captain Redfield, who was still aboard with some of his men. They started south again early the next morning, rowing and sailing along the channel between the ice and the land, where, despite strong winds, the water was still reasonably smooth. Williams landed the boat on the beach just as darkness was falling on the second night. Tents, fashioned from sails, were erected to shelter Eliza and the Williams children, together with several other captains’ wives and children; great fires were built on the beach, and meals prepared. During the night it rained heavily and the wind increased.

In the morning, “a good fresh breeze” was blowing. The boats set out for the ships, which lay several miles outside the sheltering ice pack in the open ocean. “It was a hair raising experience,” remembered Willie.

It was no easier for others to leave their ships. Men imbue the vessels that carry them, womblike within their hulls, protecting them from the cold, hostile environment outside, with a kind of maternal love. “She,” they invariably call these mother ships, feeling them to be immeasurably more than the sum of their planks and bolts, ropes and canvas. They know this from watching a ship make its way across tens of thousands of miles of ocean, shouldering aside storm swells and rogue waves with a solid, unshakable, seemingly instinctive devotion to plowing ahead, all the while protecting them—just as they might, for the most part, remember their mothers.
“With sad heart ordered all the men into the boats and with a last look over the decks abandoned the ship to the mercy of the elements,”
wrote Earle, first mate of the
Emily Morgan
, about their leave-taking on the afternoon of the fourteenth.

Earle decided to keep his group of four whaleboats from the
Morgan
going through the night (three more of the ship’s boats had left earlier). With icy waves slopping into the open boats, breaking over the men (whose canvas or wool coats were perpetually soaked and freezing), dodging visible and submerged clumps of ice—while it was light—and trying to row and sail through a short, steep chop thrown up by the shallow depths beneath them, it was as desperate as a small-boat journey could be, and it only got worse, as Earle recorded:

At one a.m. on the fifteenth, one of the
Morgan
’s boats hit a solid piece of ice, staving in its planks. The boat, and the others with it, were quickly run ashore, and in near-total darkness, occasionally using roman candle flares, the crew (well practiced from walrusing) nailed canvas over the smashed wood. They set out again an hour later. At eight in the morning, still ten miles north of Icy Cape, they landed for coffee and breakfast. They reached the cape at 10:30 a.m., where they found twenty-five or thirty other whaleboats, among them the
Morgan
’s remaining three, waiting out the wind, which by now had become a strong southwest gale. But Earle was anxious to reach the waiting ships before the wind grew even stronger, so, under his command, the
Emily Morgan
’s seven boats set out once more, rowing and beating under sail directly into the wind, first inside the ice, and later outside its protective barrier, plunging through what one whaling captain described as “the full force of a tremendous southwest gale and a sea that would have made the stoutest ship tremble.” The seven stout ships waiting for the boats were indeed trembling; they had remained at anchor off a now highly dangerous lee shore in conditions that would ordinarily have long before sent them beating out to sea or running for shelter, but they held on. Two of them, the
Lagoda
and the
Arctic,
parted their chain anchor cables as they lay pitching into the storm waves. Both managed to reset their anchors. All through the fifteenth and sixteenth of September, tiny bobbing, storm-tossed whaleboats, singly and in ragged, strung-out groups, crabbing to windward under sail and oar, their passengers soaked and raw with cold, made their perilous way out to the ships. Earle and his boats reached the ships late in the afternoon of the fifteenth and were all taken aboard the
Europa
.

William Earle’s account of his passage down the coast in the
Emily Morgan
’s whaleboats describes every other journey of this massive evacuation. Almost miraculously, between 150 and 200 whaleboats (each ship carried five on davits, and usually at least three others on deck) ferried 1,219 men, women, and children from the trapped fleet to the seven vessels waiting for them off Icy Cape. Not a single person was lost or badly injured, a testament not so much to luck but to the extraordinary seamanship and skill shown by every captain and every man.

The
Progress
took aboard a total of 221 people, including the Williams family, and two other captains and their wives and two children, one of them “a baby in arms.” These last two families were probably Captain Edmund Kelley, wife, and child, from the
Seneca
, and Captain Robert Jones, wife, and child, who had been enjoying the plush accommodations aboard the Howlands’ still-sparkling
Concordia.
The
Progress
’s captain, James Dowden, gave up his cabins to these three families. Aboard the
Europa
, Captain and Mrs. Benjamin Dexter, of the
Emily Morgan
, and Captain and Mrs. John Heppingstone, of the
Julian
, were taken in along with 276 other men. The remaining men were packed aboard the other five ships, like so many Irish immigrants, noted one whaleman.

Nathaniel Ransom and the
John Wells
’s boats also made it to the
Europa
. Like many others, Ransom had taken with him in his boat what he could of his personal belongings, including some prized reindeer coats he had obtained by trading with the Eskimos, but whether because these became soaked on the journey or because there was simply no room for them on the crowded ships, they were jettisoned at some point:

Thirty-two whaleships had been abandoned. Many were old, and not all were in good condition, but the fleet’s replacement value would have been in excess of $3 million. No meaningful modern equivalent can be calculated. The replacement value today of a fleet of thirty-two factory fishing vessels would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The loss of so many ships today, in a single event, would be reckoned a national disaster.

Aftermath

B
y September 17, all the refugees from thirty-two whaleships had been taken aboard the fleet’s remaining seven vessels. Remarkably, there had not been a single loss of life, a testament to the extraordinary degree of seamanship shown by every man under the severest of tests.

They sailed for the Bering Strait, stopping for water and supplies at Plover Bay, at the southern end of the strait, then on to the Hawaiian Islands, reaching Honolulu by the end of October. From there, many of the captains and their families and crews sailed by scheduled passenger steamer to San Francisco, where, in early November, they boarded trains heading east. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies had finished linking an unbroken transcontinental railway line less than two years earlier, in November 1869, often said to be the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century, the equivalent for its day of the moon landings a century later. The exhausted shipwrecked whalemen and their families, used to crossing oceans at six or seven miles per hour, tore across the continent, sometimes reaching speeds of sixty miles per hour. They marveled at the plunging California Sierras, the Rocky Mountains, the unending Great Plains (which reminded them of the vast featureless ocean, and ended after just a few days), and they experienced a profound alteration of their former perception of time and distance when they reached New York, a distance from San Francisco equivalent to an Atlantic crossing, in exactly seven days. The passage from New England to San Francisco by ship, which many of them had made, still took seven months by way of Cape Horn.

Nathaniel Ransom still carried with him the
John Wells
’s logbook and continued making regular daily entries, aboard ships and trains, beginning as always—the first instinct of a good seaman, and the first requirement of a logkeeper—with weather observations, until Tuesday, November 14, the day before he reached his home and “darling wife” in Mattapoisett: