Final Voyage (33 page)

But the downturn in the American economy, and its effect on the textile market, could not be averted through goodwill. On April 15, 1897, the
New Bedford Evening Standard
reported irregularities in the finances of two New Bedford mills, the Bennett and Columbia mills, Howland competitors. It was soon revealed that management of both companies had paid out excess dividends, made false reports to state officials, banks, and stockholders, and embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. On April 16, both mills were placed in receivership. On April 23, William Howland requested a loan of $200,000 from New Bedford’s National Bank of Commerce to cover his own mills’ debts that were about to fall due. There had also been rumors of financial difficulties at the Howland mills, which Willie’s request seemed to bear out. Notwithstanding that the bank had been founded by his father, Matthew Howland, and that Willie himself was on its board of directors, the business climate in New Bedford had suddenly grown wintry, and bank officials now asked to see the Howland books.

Willie returned to his office. His bookkeeper, Harry M. Pierce, later reported their conversation to the
Evening Standard
: “Well, Harry, the game’s up,” Howland told him. “The bank has refused to let us have any more money, and they want to put a man on the books to see if I’m a thief. It’s too much for me, and all that’s left for me to do is go and hang myself.” Pierce tried to calm his employer, and then Willie said he was going out for a walk.

He was not seen again for thirteen days, until May 6, when his body was discovered floating under the wharves along the waterfront. He was forty-four.

The New Bedford Manufacturing Company, the Howland Mills Corporation, and the Rotch Spinning Company were all declared bankrupt and put into receivership. The mills were reorganized. Within a year, the employees of the former Howland mills had joined the city’s other textile workers in a long and bitter strike. The renters in Howland Village were turned out and the houses sold, and New Bedford’s workers’ utopia vanished forever.

Virtually all of the shareholders Willie had successfully persuaded to invest in his mills had been his immediate family—his mother and father, Dick, and Morrie—other Howland relatives, and lifelong friends. Like New Bedford’s whaling interests, the mills and their stock had been owned by the city’s oldest, most venerable families. The failure—and the deepening troubles overtaking the city’s other mills—had, like whaling’s failure, struck deepest at the core of New Bedford’s once brilliant plutocracy.

 

 

 

WILLIAM HOWLAND LEFT BEHIND a wife and two sons, and a gold Patek Philippe pocket watch. The watch was found on him when his body was recovered. Its ruined original works were replaced by a less expensive mechanism.

Willie’s son, Llewellyn Howland, eventually passed that watch on to his grandson, Matthew Howland’s great-great-grandson, Llewellyn Howland III. A few days before that young man left home to start his freshman year at Harvard in the 1960s, the elder Llewellyn called him over to his house. He wished him luck, offered a few words of general advice, and then told him about the end of his own abbreviated single year at Harvard:

Barrels of unsold whale oil on the New Bedford waterfront.
(Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum)

Epilogue 1

W
illiam Fish Williams made a fourth whaling voyage with his father as captain, shipping aboard the
Florence,
as a boatsteerer, from December 25, 1873, to November 12, 1874, sailing from San Francisco to the Sea of Okhotsk and back. At the end of that voyage, Willie, aged fifteen, decided he had had enough of the sea and wanted instead to become an engineer. He entered the School of Mines at Columbia University, in New York, in 1878, and in 1881 earned the degree of civil engineer. In 1882 he earned the further degree of engineer of mines. He worked as a mining engineer, far from the sea, in several places in the United States, but eventually settled in New Bedford, where he became the first city engineer. He wrote several accounts of his voyages as a boy aboard whaling ships. Williams died at home in New Bedford in 1929, at the age of seventy.

...

 

 

HIS FATHER, Captain Thomas William Williams, continued whaling in the Arctic until 1879. That summer, on his last voyage, aboard the bark
Francis Palmer
, he carried on deck a small steam launch in which he chased whales at speed through the ice. “He would be gone for days at a time,” wrote his son Willie, “and suffered hardships from exposure, poor food, and water, beside worries which broke his health.” He died at home in Oakland the following summer, in August 1880.

Eliza and her daughter Mary returned to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Eliza died in 1885.

 

 

 

MATTHEW’S SON, Dick—Richard Smith Howland—finally found the right outlet for his talents. In 1884, his wife Mary’s uncle died and left her a large amount of stock in the profitable Providence Journal Company, publisher of the
Journal
and
Bulletin
newspapers in Providence. Dick, Mary, and their five children returned east to the city in 1885, and eventually Dick became manager of the Providence Journal Company. According to the centennial history of the
Journal
, published in 1962, his twenty-year stint as manager was a happy one. Circulation and income climbed.

Morrie never made a success as a businessman. He accepted Dick’s offer of a job as the
Journal
’s book review editor. Dick also moved his mother, Rachel, to Providence, where she lived until her death in 1902. In 1905, Dick left his position at the Providence Journal Company and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he bought local railroad, quarrying, and textile stocks. With Dick gone, Morrie was let go from the
Journal
and joined his brother in Asheville, as his bookkeeper. The two retired and died in Jacksonville, Florida.

George Howland, Jr., died in 1892, outliving his younger half brother, Matthew, by eight years, and his wife, Sylvia, by two. Four years before his death he was forced to sell his mansion on Sixth Street, in which he had lived for more than half a century. He died penniless, but he had seen worse than the loss of his wealth. George’s three children, sons, had all died before him, two as infants, and the third at the age of twenty-eight, in 1861, more than thirty years before his father.

Epilogue 2

The New York Times,
August 11, 2006

I
n August 1886, as William Howland was expanding his mills in New Bedford, a twenty-three-year-old adventurer and part-time whaleman named Charlie Brower, a New Yorker by birth, was heading east with a group of ten men from Point Barrow in two small whale boats. They were exploring the feasibility of small-boat whaling from a fixed base on Point Barrow for the Pacific Steam Whaling Company, based in San Francisco. Brower and the others had traveled north by steamer and been dropped off at the company’s Point Barrow “station”—a shack above the beach. The company believed that newer, less exploited whaling grounds lay to the east of Point Barrow, along the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska’s northern shore, where few whaleships had ventured.

Heading eastward around the point by oar and sail in their small whaleboats, they camped the first night on an island between the sea and Elson Lagoon, close to the spot where Jared Jernegan’s whaleship
Roman
had sunk fifteen years earlier. In addition to the wreckage of countless whaleships that littered the shore and barrier islands around Point Barrow, Charlie Brower and his men also found human skeletons and bodies in various stages of decomposition and preservation—probably some of the fifty men who remained behind with their trapped ships in the winter of 1876-1877, and had disappeared by the next summer.

After several days of hard rowing and beating to windward, camping ashore each night, the two boats were stopped by a storm at Cape Simpson, forty miles east of Point Barrow. The men aboard had seen no whales, and were discouraged. While the weather kept them pinned ashore, Brower and another man, Patsy Grey, headed inland over the marshy tundra with guns, hoping to shoot something to eat. Climbing over the top of a low rise of ground, they saw a small lake stretching out below them. It looked oddly black. They walked down to the edge of the lake. Liquid at its center, the “water” at their feet appeared to be “an asphalt-like substance.”

Oil, thought Brower. Grey disagreed, having never heard of such a thing. Brower had: his luckless father had unaccountably gone bust in the wild early days of the Pennsylvania oil fields. Brower lit a match and lowered it to the asphalt. “It burned with intense heat and lots of greasy smoke,” he later wrote.

They walked on around the small burning lake. Half a mile farther they reached a much larger “oil lake,” where they saw the black carcasses of caribou and eider ducks trapped on its surface. Brower and Grey had discovered the seeping surface of the vast oil reserve that lay beneath the northern rim of Alaska, which would eventually be tapped from Prudhoe Bay, 120 miles to the east of where the two men stood. Apart from blundering caribou and eider ducks, it would lie undisturbed for another eighty years.

The whaleboats had come as far as they could go. Provisions were running low. When the storm passed, the whalemen sailed west again, back to Point Barrow.

A litany of inadequate expression:

I can’t sufficiently thank my longtime literary agent, Sloan Harris. He is pragmatic, scrupulously honest, a gentleman, and a friend. Every book I’ve written owes him a great debt. Kristyn Keene has also been unfailingly helpful. I also want to thank Liz Farrell and Josie Freedman at ICM.

At Putnam, I’m extremely grateful to Ivan Held for his faith in this book. Dan Conaway, my editor on two previous books, championed this one and then moved away, and I’ve missed you, Dan. I’ve been fortunate to have the sage editorial skill of Rachel Kahan, who took the book over from Dan, and its finished shape bears her contribution and commitment. I want to thank Rachel Holtzman for her enthusiasm, and Lauren Kaplan for her help. This book has benefited greatly from the knowledge, judgment, eye, and ear of its extraordinary copy editor, Ed Cohen.

The generous contribution, suggestions, and friendship of Llewellyn Howland III have meant a great deal to me and to this book. I can’t thank you enough, Louie. I want to thank Polly Saltonstall for introducing me to Louie.

Mike Dyer, curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Laura Pereira, Kate Mello, Maria Batista, and Michael Lapides of the New Bedford Whaling Museum were also helpful.

Thank you, Jan Keeler, for your supply of clippings, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

Paul Cyr at the New Bedford Public Library was helpful.

John Bockstoce’s work on American whaling in Alaskan waters and in numerous publications, especially the book
Whales, Ice, and Men
, is unparalleled, and I’m grateful for his comments and observations.

Phil Hardy, Chris Whann, and Susannah Mintz were valued mentors at Skidmore College.

In Tucson, Stephanie Pearmain, Aurelie Sheehan, Larry Cronin, and Marla Reckart.

For their friendship and encouragement, with this inadequate mention, I want to thank Kelly Horan; Robert and Penny Germaux; Jennie, Oskar, and Katya von Kretschmann; Peter Birch and Barry Longley; David and Anita Burdett; Jennifer Haigh; Kat Laupot; Bill and Jan Conrad; Robert and Sarah Reilly; Richard Podolsky; Robert and Su. Sane Hake; W. Hodding Carter; Bennet Scheuer; Amita Jarmon; Tom and Sasha Laurita; and their families.