Final Voyage (5 page)

The small aft cabin was furnished with a geranium and a pet kitten. The food at her first meal aboard was
“a good deal like a dinner at home”
except for the universally disliked, rock-hard ship’s biscuit. But as the boat that brought her out to the ship headed back to shore, Eliza found herself miserably awash with “tender associations” of home and thoughts of
“Dear Friends, Parents, and Children, Brothers and Sisters, all near and dear to us. But I will drop the subject; it is too gloomy to contemplate.”

And she did thereafter almost completely drop the fulsome lamentations for home and family. Her entries were confined to the world of the ship and its business. At first she didn’t know enough about that world to write about it, and could only focus on the misery of her own condition:

While Eliza lay sick in her bed, Captain Williams was going through the procedures accompanying the commencement of a whaleship voyage. On the first day out, the crew were mustered in the “waist,” the clear area of the main deck forward of the mainmast where the drawing of the boat crews—the men who would actually go out in the small whaleboats after whales—took place. These boats were usually commanded by the first, second, third, and fourth mates, but aboard the
Florida
and all the ships of which he was the captain, Thomas Williams, a large, powerful man who had been a successful boatsteerer, always “lowered” in his own boat to chase after whales himself, unless weather conditions or the close presence of land made it imprudent for him to leave the ship. So, in turn, the first, second, third mates, and finally Williams, sang out names from the crew gathered before them until five men, in addition to the mate or captain, had been chosen for each boat. The crews of the captain’s and the second mate’s boats stepped to the starboard side of the ship, and became the starboard watch; the men of the first and third mates’ boats stepped to port and became the port watch. The men not selected in the draw were divided between the two watches. Then Williams explained (for the green hands) that watches were four hours long, starting at midnight. While one watch was on deck, running the ship, the other was off watch, below, sleeping if at night. From four to eight p.m. daily, the “dogwatch,” all hands remained on deck working the ship, then the order of watches—the next watch to go below—changed from the preceding twenty-four hours. Every man was to learn to steer and take his two-hour “trick” at the wheel. The ship’s cooper, cook, steward, and cabin boy were exempt from watches and rarely went off in the boats after whales, as they had regular duties and rested at night when not engaged at these.

When better weather returned, Eliza got up and began to explore. Her first impressions of the activities aboard ship were strange and baffling, as the coopers, carpenters, blacksmiths worked away and the officers bawled orders to the men, who tried to obey them.

More quiet days followed, helping Eliza to get her sea legs, with several
“beutiful moonshiny evenings”
during which
“one of the boat steerers, a colored Man, has a violin, and we have some musick occationaly which makes it pleasant these nice evenings. There is a splendid comet to be seen.”

On another clement day, she did some sewing, helping Thomas make a new sail for his whaleboat.

On Sundays, unless whales were spotted and chased, all work was laid aside and Eliza was surprised, after the bellowed orders that accompanied every heave of the ship, at the solemn peace aboard the ship. Many of the men read their Bibles, or worked at some piece of carving or scrimshaw.
“It is the Sabbath, and all is orderly and quiet on board; much more so than I expected among so many Men between 30 and 40 . . . nothing done on Sunday but what is necessary.”

Three weeks after leaving New Bedford, when the ship was close to the mid-Atlantic islands of the Azores, sperm whales were spotted. Though it was late in the day, boats were lowered, including the captain’s, and rowed off into the twilight that was deepening across the ocean. It was night when the second and third mates’ boats returned, without whales, and Eliza grew worried about Thomas, who, like the first mate, was still out on the water, fighting whales in the dark.
“My anxiety increases with the darkness. . . . The Men have put lanterns in the rigging to help them see the Ship.”
The mates’ and Thomas’s boats eventually returned with a catch.
“All is confution now to get the whale fast alongside. . . . I am quite anxious to see how [the] fish looks, but it is too dark.”

She got her first look at a sperm whale the next morning. The mate’s whale was a calf, but it looked enormous to Eliza. She groped to describe it:

Eliza was still seasick when she recorded that first sight of a whale. As she got her sea legs and the men caught more whales, her interest in the endeavor—the primary focus of all activity aboard the
Florida
—and her ability to describe what she saw quickly sharpened:

The next day more whales were spotted, and boats lowered to give chase. Eliza stood at the ship’s rail and avidly followed the pursuit with everyone else aboard.
“Though they were a good way off, we could tell when the iron was thrown, for the whale spouted blood and we could see it plain.”
It was a “cow” that had been trying to protect its calf.
“The poor little thing could not keep up with the rest, the mother would not leave it and lost her life. [ The mate] says they exhibit the most affection for their young of any dumb animal he ever saw.”

By the next day, four dead sperm whales were lying alongside the
Florida
, making much work aboard. The first mate took Eliza down to the “reception room, as he termed it,” the “tween-decks” blubber room immediately beneath the main deck, in the middle of the ship, where the great peeled strips of blubber were chopped up for the “try-pots” (great cauldrons placed in the “tryworks”—brick fireplaces—in which the blubber was melted to oil). The men were waist-deep in “horse pieces” of blubber, coated with oil, but all of them “laughing and having a good deal of fun.” Intensive activity aboard a whaleship meant money for all hands. “Greasy work” always put the entire crew in a happy mood.

Eliza became fascinated:
“It is truly wonderful to me, the whole process, from the taking of the great, and truly wonderful monster of the deep till the oil is in the casks.”
Several months later, after a night of watching the crew cutting in and trying out an enormous right whale, she wrote:
“It is certainly the greatest sight I ever saw in my life.”

Yet with the excitement came the frequent anxiety for the safety of the men, sometimes gone all night in the boats after whales, and, on more than one occasion, real fear for her husband’s life. This episode came in the foggy and ice-strewn (even in July) Sea of Okhotsk, off the Siberian coast:

Her fears had been amply fueled by the news a few weeks earlier of
“Capt. Palmer being killed by a Whale, or rather he got fast in the line and was taken down by the Whale and never seen again. His poor Wife and three Children are at Hilo, and will not hear about it till fall.”

And death came to the
Florida
in the Sea of Okhotsk just three weeks later. Tim, the black boatsteerer who had a violin and made the “musick” Eliza liked, had, like Captain Palmer, been caught in a line attached to a whale and dragged out of the boat into the water. The whale was later caught and Tim’s body recovered,
“bruised a good deal by being dragged on the bottom.”

Though she wrote openly of her fears, Eliza was, with the sensibility of her time, conspicuously reticent about certain things. The lead in this entry is buried amid whaleship minutiae:

There is no mention anywhere in Eliza’s journal of her pregnancy, how it made her feel, any difficulty that moving about a tossing ship in her condition might have created for her, or the contribution this might have made to her seasickness; there is only this briefly noted fact: the boy, born in that
“heaviest gale we have had since we left home”
in the notoriously stormy Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, was William Fish Williams (Fish was the name of one of the
Florida
’s New Bedford owners).

Eliza was fortunate in being so close to New Zealand at the time of Willie’s birth, rather than far out on the Pacific. Thomas sailed his ship into the port of Manganui, on New Zealand’s North Island, where he knew they would find an oasis of sailorly and, paradoxically, womanly society. As soon as the
Florida
anchored, the harbormaster, Captain Butler, sent his wife on board, who returned every day until Eliza could leave her bed, and then she and the baby moved ashore to the Butlers’ house. The British Butler family was large: eight children, three of them grown women, who, with Mrs. Butler, enveloped Eliza and her baby in feminine care.
“They are a nice Family, extremely kind and affectionate, and every one of them seemed to try to see which could pay me the most attention. . . . They all sing, dance, and play on the piano. They are quite a lively Family and one of the young Boys plays on the violin.”