WHALING
Bold, hardy men, with blooming age,
Our sandy shores produce;
With monstrous fish they dare engage,
And dangerous callings choose.
From a ‘Whaling Song,’ by Dr. John Osborn, of Sandwich
Whenever a man speaks of whaling nowadays, he is pretty sure to mention
New Bedford in the same breath; and naturally enough, because New
Bedford, by almost exclusive devotion to killing whales, brought the
business to a degree of perfection that stands unsurpassed. But New
Bedford learned the art from Nantucket, and Nantucket learned it from
Cape Cod. The fame of the Cape whalemen had reached the ears of the
Islanders and excited their admiration as early as 1672, for they held
out flattering inducements to one James Lopar if he would move from
the Cape to Nantucket and teach them how whales should be killed. For
some reason the scheme fell through; but another Cape-Codder, Ichabod
Paddock, of Yarmouth, answered a second call about 1690, and carried
the light to the Island.
It was a dim and feeble ray, however, compared with the subsequent
science of New Bedford, for never has an art developed more
brilliantly--or for that matter more logically and inevitably--than
the art of whaling. The first Cape-Codders to profit by whales never
left dry land; they were in fact not whalemen at all, but farmers, who,
quite by chance, found dead whales washed up on the beach, and stripped
them of their blubber. Attending to whales of one kind and another that
came ashore on the Cape was a pleasant diversion from clearing woodland
and cutting salt hay; it was a more frequent pastime, too, than one
would suppose, for whales were incredibly abundant. A school of them,
it may be remembered, nearly drove Captain Jones out of his senses by
playing about the Mayflower as she was standing in for Provincetown
Harbor, for he had no harpoons and was in the tantalizing position
of the man without a gun. Fall and winter were the best seasons for
whales, and by a happy chance these were the off months for farmers,
who were able to reap the full benefit of this peculiar crop without
neglecting their farms. After the Cape was settled, few whales, gallied
at finding themselves in the shoal water of either the Sound or the
Bay, ever thrashed themselves to death in vain.
Frequently, instead of a single specimen, a whole school of blackfish
(a species of small whale) was stranded on the beach, and then there
was need of lively work if all the blubber was to be boiled down before
the air became too fragrant for human nostrils. But sanguinary as
the job was, the townspeople looked upon it as a lark, particularly
since the profits were immediate; and before long some began to wish
that whales would come ashore often enough to provide steady work in
trying them out. At this point the seed was sown that was to turn the
Cape-Codders into whalemen.
The disputes that arose over the dead bodies of stranded whales were
many and bitter. Riparian rights at their simplest have always been a
Sargasso Sea for lawyers, and when this intricate question, instead of
being allowed to drift along in the usual state of uncertainty, was
brought to an immediate issue by the arrival of a school of blackfish
on a particular stretch of beach, the fat was in the fire with a
vengeance. The man who found them said, ‘Findings are keepings; if it
hadn’t been for me, nobody would have known they were there.’ The town
authorities said, ‘The oil is the town’s, because the shore where the
fish stranded is within the town limits.’ Plymouth said, ‘The profits
belong to the Colony, for without our consent you would never have had
any town.’ The King said, ‘You are all my subjects;--therefore the
oil is mine.’ [See notes to Chapter IX.] Here, indeed, was work for
lawyers; but there were no lawyers, and there was no time to argue, for
such donations of the tide do not improve with age. If the townspeople
were wise, therefore, they first tried out the oil and then sat down to
see if they could find out whose it was.
The various towns reached different solutions. In 1653, Sandwich,
basing its argument on the fact that the beach was common land, decided
that the proceeds should be divided equally among the householders of
the town. This Utopian solution was too good to last, for Plymouth
soon decided that so much liberty was not good for young towns, and
demanded one hogshead of oil from each whale. There was a vague idea
in the Plymouth brain that this oil was the property of the Crown;
but how much of it ever went to lubricate the wheels of government in
England does not appear. As a matter of fact, the proceeds from almost
every drift whale were disposed of differently. In 1682, for example,
a school of blackfish dotted the Sandwich beach, and Jo Holway and
some others began immediately to strip them and boil down the blubber.
The town then woke up to what was going on and voted to allow Holway
and his friends to buy from the town what oil they had already made;
the rest was to be sold to others for the benefit of the town. The
next year four men were granted a monopoly on all drift whales in
Sandwich for ten years, provided they gave half the oil to the town,
and deducted from their own half the barrel per whale that must go to
Plymouth. Eastham and Truro decided that drift whales were blessings
sent by the grace of God, and so dedicated a part of the proceeds to
help pay the minister. Each town made up its mind for itself what to do
with its share of the proceeds of these valuable carcasses and changed
its decision as often as it saw fit--which was about as often as a
whale was stranded.
As long as whale oil had any market value, and long after the Cape
was sending elaborately equipped whalers to all the seven seas, drift
whales continued to be prized and were welcomed ecstatically by the
amateur whalemen at home. The cry ‘A whale in the Bay!’ was enough to
empty the hall during a town meeting; every able-bodied man rushed to
the beach with the same speed that citizens to-day show in leaving
church at the alarm of a forest fire. There is a story of a Truro
youngster who abandoned some cows he was driving to pasture and,
unaided, captured and killed a porpoise that he saw floundering about
on the flats. The boy held him by the tail to prevent his thrashing
his way into deep water, and then, after dispatching him with a knife,
stripped off the blubber with the skill of a professional. All was
fish that came to the townsmen’s net provided it contained a gallon of
oil, and every chance prize--from the lone porpoise of the Truro boy
to the record school of two thousand blackfish taken at Provincetown
in 1884--was drained to the last drop. By 1850 findings were keepings;
in that year Captain Daniel Rich cut his mark in the sides of a school
of seventy-five blackfish on the beach between Wellfleet and Truro and
thereby established an indisputable claim to them. Within twenty-four
hours he had sold them as they lay for $1900. That the Standard Oil
Company has not altogether changed the Cape-Codder’s attitude toward
drift whales was illustrated in July, 1928, when eighty blackfish
came ashore at Eastham. The lucky man who found them collected twelve
dollars apiece from parties in New Bedford, who hurried to Eastham and
took the ‘melon’ from the head of each blackfish. Since the ‘melon’
contains oil which, when properly tried out, brings upward of sixty
dollars a gallon, it is safe to say that New Bedford lost nothing by
the transaction. On the other hand, a lone dead finback, sixty-five
feet long, which drifted into Barnstable Harbor in the autumn of 1928,
had to be towed to sea at the town’s expense lest he pollute the water
and spoil the clams.
[Illustration: BLACKFISH ASHORE AT PROVINCETOWN]
Not every school of blackfish, however, or every lone whale that was
sighted offshore, was unlucky enough to be stranded on the flats. More
than once the citizens who lined the beach, waiting for the prize
to blunder into shoal water, were chagrined to see it turn seaward
and vanish. One or two such experiences changed the townspeople from
watchful waiters into pursuers. Their tactics at first, at least as
regards blackfish, were not very aggressive, for most of them were
farmers and more dexterous with a pitchfork than with a harpoon. Their
method was to surround the fish in a fleet of small boats and, by
beating the water with the flat of their oar blades, to drive them
ashore in a panic. This maneuver was an exciting one to execute and it
produced good results. It is easy to imagine a fleet of dories half a
mile off shore, spread out fanlike beyond a school of blackfish, and
slowly closing in with yelling and splashing until the fish struck the
sand. Then the fun was over and the work began, the proceeds usually
being divided equally among the boats that had taken part in the
pursuit.
It must be clearly understood that these men were in no sense of the
word whalemen. They were not professionals but amateurs. None of them
owned any whaling gear, or would have known how to use it if he had
owned it. To them a harpoon was a dangerous weapon--not a tool of their
trade. They were no more whalemen than a man who shoots a skunk in
his henyard is a hunter. But some of the youngest had the makings of
whalemen in them. They had tasted the wine of pursuit, and it was an
insidious vintage; it urged them to try a deeper draught by cruising
round the Bay and harpooning whales.
This was called shore-whaling, and though the men who practiced it
never went on long voyages, and though the Cape-Horners who came
afterwards regarded them much as deep-water shipmasters regarded
coasting skippers, they were nevertheless real whalemen, and
experienced the same thrills of pursuit and capture as their successors
who cruised to Davis Straits or the South Pacific. Furthermore, they
had the advantage of being able to operate their farms in spring and
summer. The tactics of the shore whalemen were simple. They watched
from the shore until they saw a spout or the rounded backs of a school
of blackfish. Then they shoved off in clinker-built cedar whaleboats,
and the chase began. If they came up with the monster and succeeded
in planting an iron, they played him in the regular way, paying out
line around a post in the bow of the boat as long as they could,
and, as a last resort, heaving overboard a drag--or heavy buoy--with
the end of the line made fast to it. When finally they came close
enough to the exhausted whale to reach ‘the life’ with a lance, the
excitement was over and the toil began, for the carcass had to be
towed ashore--sometimes a distance of a good many miles. When their
boat grounded, they dragged the carcass up the beach with heavy tackle
rigged to a capstan. There the blubber was boiled in the try-yard near
by, and the bone was scraped and cleaned.
As long as the supply of local whales held out, shore-whaling on the
Cape was profitable and immensely popular. Barnstable, Yarmouth, and
Truro reserved whaling grounds for the use of their citizens. No doubt
other towns made similar provision. Chatham, at any rate, offered to
exempt the Reverend Daniel Greenleaf, of Yarmouth, from all taxation
if he would settle somewhere in Chatham and follow shore-whaling. But
the minister apparently decided that empty souls in Yarmouth were more
important than empty oil casks in Chatham, for he did not move.
Most of the young men, after a taste of this sport, found farm work
dull, forsook the plough for the harpoon and lance, and lived in
whale-houses alongshore. Two hundred Barnstable men were shore-whalers
in 1715 for three months of every year. And no wonder, for sometimes
stranger creatures than blackfish challenged their skill. In 1719, a
sea-monster appeared in Provincetown Harbor and defied the combined
efforts of a whole fleet of shore-whalemen; B. Franklin (uncle of the
celebrated Benjamin) has left a racy account of its appearance:
Boston, Sept 28, 1719. On the 17 Instant there appear’d in Cape-Cod
harbour a strange creature, His head like a Lyons, with very large
Teeth, Ears hanging down, a large Beard, a long beard, with curling
hair on his head, his Body a bout 16 foot Long, a round buttock,
with a short Tayle of a yellowish colour, the Whale boats gave him
chase, he was very fierce and gnashed his teeth with great rage when
they attackt him, he was shot at 3 times and Wounded, when he rose
out of the Water he always faced the boats in that angry maner, the
Harpaniers struck at him, but in vaine, for after 5 hours chase, he
took to sea again. None of the people ever saw his like befor.
Provincetowners, it would seem, were still fond of strong waters!
Captain John Thacher, whose duty it was to draft recruits for the
French and Indian Wars, had great trouble in rounding up the young
bloods who were shore-whaling. In a letter to Governor Stoughton he
says: ‘All our young and strong men are employed in whaling and mostly
have their rendivous remote from the towns, and if they see any man
coming towards them, presently mistrust; make a shout and run into the
thickets.’
So jealous was each town of its whaling rights that trespassers were
instantly detected and either warned off or forced to pay for the
privilege of fishing the local waters. By 1711, the barren stretches
of Sandy Neck in Barnstable had caught the eye of strangers as being
a good base for whaling stations. Some of them squatted there, to
the displeasure of the Proprietors, who promptly voted that ‘every
stranger, both English and Indian, that shall come and settle at Sandy
Neck to go on whaling voyages ... shall pay for their fire wood each
person three shillings, at entry.’ The amount of fuel consumed in
the try-houses must have been enormous, and this was one of the many
factors in the demolition of the Cape forests.
Not content with challenging strangers who came poaching whales, the
authorities of the various towns kept a sharp eye on the activities
of their neighbors. Thus, in 1758, Eastham considered measures for
preventing Harwich enthusiasts from pursuing whales at Billingsgate.
Drift whales, too, were still bones of contention, particularly when
they came ashore near town lines. A contemporary jingle states the
situation exactly:
‘Down on East Harbor bar there lays a cow and a calf;
Provincetowners swear they’ll have the whole;
Truroers swear they shan’t have but half.’
But such difficulties were easy to settle compared with the disputes
that arose over whales that had been wounded in the Bay by men from
one town, had escaped, and had afterwards died and been washed ashore
within the limits of another. Did the oil belong to the boat’s crew
that struck the whale; to the town where the body had been found
stranded; to the man who found it, or to the owner of the strip of
beach where the carcass came ashore? Here, for example, is an affidavit
signed by a Barnstable man who found himself trying to harpoon a whale
off Truro:
Dec. 7th, 1725; The declaration of John Lewis in Barnstable.--I,
being at sea near a place called Hogg’s Back, with the boat’s
company, I then and there struck and wounded a whale fish, she lying
soothing under water;--my iron took her upon the rising of her bulge,
but she drawing my iron made play, and was soon struck and wounded
by James Bearse, and after awhile drawing his iron, she still making
play, was in a few moments struck by Thomas Thatcher, and they and we
soon killed said whale.
JOHN LEWIS
Attest, JOHN SNOW--_Town Clerk_
Clearly this affidavit was connected with a dispute over the ownership
of the whale, and Lewis and his friends were indeed in a dilemma. It
was out of the question to tow the carcass all the way to Barnstable;
if they brought it ashore at Truro, the townsmen would probably warn
them off or charge rent for the beach. And Lewis’s predicament was only
one of many like it. The only solution in such cases was to equip boats
with casks to hold chunks of blubber that could be cut up at sea and
carried home to be tried out in the local try-yards. This practice was
followed for a time, and from then on it was only a step to the last
stage in the development of whaling. Men went farther and farther from
shore in bigger and bigger vessels that carried try-works built into
their decks, until at last cruises of four years were not uncommon.
Scarcity of whales now drove men to sea oftener than disputes. The
constant activity of hundreds of shore-whalemen had chased the monsters
out of the Bay so effectively that by the middle of the eighteenth
century only an occasional whale was sighted. Shore-whaling was a thing
of the past--it was now a question of deep water or nothing. The Cape
chose deep water.
But the vanishing of the shore-whaleman’s livelihood must not be taken
lightly. It was a very real disaster to scores of Cape families, some
of whom had neither the capital nor the courage to follow the whales to
sea. In 1739, only about half a dozen whales were taken in Provincetown
waters, and a number of families decided to move away. Ten years
later, the citizens of Yarmouth were so impoverished by the failure of
the whale-fishery that they were barely able to give the minister an
increase in salary they had promised him. It was only by the titanic
exertions of the wealthiest and most energetic citizens on the Cape
that money was raised in each town and fleets equipped for deep-sea
whaling.
Truro was the pioneer in this hazardous business. In 1758, one of her
citizens, Captain Henry Atkins, cleared from Boston for Davis Straits
in the ship Whale, and filled in the gaps between whales by trading
with the natives. He soon found that this was by far the quickest
and cheapest way to get bone, for in return for ten shillings-worth
of trinkets they gave him whalebone valued at one hundred and twenty
pounds! Other Truro whalemen cruised along the shores of Africa, and
two of them, Captains David Smith and Gamaliel Collins, won fame that
reached the ears of the British Parliament when in 1774 they pursued
whales as far south as the Falkland Islands. Not content with this
bleak outpost, others soon rounded the Horn and pursued sperm whales in
the uncharted waters of the South Pacific.
Wellfleet, during the years preceding the Revolution, devoted
almost her entire energy to whaling. Nearly every man in town was a
whaleman--and the result of thus putting all the eggs in one basket was
that the declaration of war in 1775 and the immediate blockading of the
Cape ports utterly prostrated the town. The citizens could not pay the
Provincial tax and, in a petition to the General Court for exemption,
they declared that nine tenths of the townsmen had been engaged in
whaling and were now left with no source of income. Exaggerated as
this statement may appear, it is borne out by statistics, which show
that four hundred and twenty men and twenty or thirty vessels were
thus employed at Wellfleet up to the beginning of the war. The local
honors were divided about evenly between Captain Jesse Holbrook,
whom the British employed to teach them the art, and Colonel Elisha
Doane, who, having learned in his youth how to handle a harpoon,
spent the latter years of his life financing the voyages of others
and reaping the profits--with such success that he died one of the
richest men in Massachusetts. After the war, Wellfleet tried to launch
her fleet again; but none of the citizens had capital enough to build
new vessels, and the old ones had perished during the seven years of
disuse. In 1802, her fleet had shrunk to five schooners, and these set
sail half-heartedly; they lacked the confidence that is necessary for
success, and were quite as much fishermen as whalers, carrying salt and
fish lines as well as whaling gear.
Taken by and large, Provincetown has done most for Cape whaling.
Provincetown, indeed, ranks with Truro as a pioneer in the business,
and continued it long after the last Truro whaleman was in his
grave. The town was virtually depopulated when, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, twelve whalers were equipped and manned in its
harbor and set out simultaneously on long voyages. The Revolution gave
the Provincetown whalemen pause, but did not stop them altogether, for
after the war, they started out again with a determination unequaled
anywhere else on the Cape, and succeeded in bringing the business back
to a prosperous basis. The Civil War dealt it another blow; several of
the whalers burned by Confederate cruisers were owned in Provincetown.
But even this--a heavy loss for so small a town--did not kill the
business. With high courage, the citizens began once more to sharpen
their harpoons, and in 1876 they had seventeen whaling vessels at sea.
Thanks to the energy of such men as Captain John Cook, the Cape flag
was flying on the whaling grounds until 1916. During the last century
about one hundred and seventy-five whaling vessels have hailed from
Provincetown.
The history of these three towns, Truro, Wellfleet, and Provincetown,
comprises the bulk of the history of the Cape long-voyage
whale-fishery. But no town was immune. Eastham was represented until
the eighties by Captain Edward Penniman, who commanded half a dozen
different barks out of New Bedford, and, on retiring, handed the torch
to his son Eugene, who continued until the business died. Falmouth
has a goodly list of vessels and commanders to her credit, the most
celebrated of whom--Captain Silas Jones of the Awashonks--will demand
further attention presently. Barnstable now and then sent out a whaler,
and was credited with two at the beginning of the Revolution. During
the Civil War, Semmes burned one of Sandwich’s two representatives, the
brig Ocean.
But not even Provincetown and Wellfleet, in their palmiest days, were
in a class with Nantucket in its time. Long before the Revolution the
pupil had far outstripped his teacher, and the men who a century before
had sent to the Cape for a whaling instructor were now in a position
to instruct Cape-Codders. Forty men left Harwich for the new whaling
headquarters in 1760.
Yet the Cape whalemen, before they yielded the palm to Nantucket, and
afterwards as well, were leading lives of adventure in remote seas
that made them something more than mere killers of whales. They were
not always successful, either. Captain Solomon Sturgis, for example,
who sailed his sloop out of Barnstable on a whaling voyage in 1741,
was no match for a Spanish privateer who seized his vessel but let
the chagrined Captain escape. Then there was the question of storms.
As a matter of fact, whalemen were better off in bad weather than
their more aristocratic brethren of the merchant service, for their
barrel-bottomed, apple-cheeked hulls, built for capacity and without a
thought for speed, were as good dirty-weather sailing vessels as have
ever been built. Unlike the clippers, they were not heavily sparred;
the crew had no towering skysails or moonrakers to struggle with, and
the Captain never hesitated to snug down at night, for there was just
as much danger of sailing past a school of whales in the dark as there
was of not coming up with one. So the whalers rode out in comfort many
a storm that would have brought the overcrowded spars of a merchantman
crashing down on the heads of the overdriven crew.
But no ship is safe at sea, and even the stout barks of the
blubber-boilers were sometimes in trouble. In 1881, Captain Caleb
Hamblin, of Sandwich, commander and half-owner of the brig Henry
Trowbridge, was returning from a combination whaling and sealing
voyage below Cape Horn. In the tricky latitudes of the West Indies, a
hurricane tore down on his vessel and swept her decks clean, carrying
both masts over the side. When the storm was over, Captain Hamblin
rigged jury masts, set what sail they could carry, and worked his way
to the Azores--a distance of about a thousand miles. This achievement
is important, not because it is unusual--hundreds of shipmasters have
done as much--but because it answers an accusation that is sometimes
heard, to the effect that whalemen were not sailors. If this means
that they did not spend their time making Flemish eyes or hoisting
coach-whip pennants, the statement is true. But such frills were
refinements of the sailor’s art, not essentials of it. When it came
to sending down a sprung spar, setting up new shrouds, or reeving off
running rigging in a high sea, the whalemen were as good as any British
East-Indiaman. They had to be, in fact, for their cruises took them
for months at a time to unfrequented corners of the world far from any
ports where they could put in for repairs. The best they could hope
for was the shelter of an atoll where the natives were friendly and
would let them work in peace. At worst they could set up new spars and
rigging at sea--as Captain Hamblin’s crew did in the South Atlantic.
Resourcefulness beyond the usual resourcefulness of sailors was the
prerequisite for the captain of a whaler; and it is fair to say that
resourcefulness is as valuable an asset to a sailor as knowing how to
make a Flemish eye.
Like many of the wives of whaling captains, Mrs. Hamblin, herself the
daughter of a shipbuilder, went several voyages with her husband, and
after the two came ashore for good and settled in Falmouth, she had
something more interesting to talk about than the outrageous behavior
of the neighbors. She had been round the world, had had one child born
at sea in the cabin of the Eliza Adams, another in New Zealand, and a
third in Australia. Hers was the horizon that bounds the seven seas;
she liked Falmouth, but she knew that Falmouth was not the world.
Captain Hamblin, too, was more than a seaman. Early in his career,
while second officer of the Congress, he found himself half in and half
out of the mouth of a sperm whale that was fifty feet under water and
headed for the bottom. The whale had a harpoon in his side, and before
the monster had carried out all the line, Hamblin managed to take a
couple of turns with it around his hands. It jerked taut; the whale was
captured; and the young whaleman, half drowned, his arms pulled almost
out of their sockets, and with a wide gash the length of one leg, was
hauled into the boat--ready for the next encounter. It is dangerous to
generalize about human nature, but it is a reasonable guess that such a
man, when he retires and settles down at home, is not likely to go to
law if an overenthusiastic young marksman breaks his henhouse window
with a stone.
Silas Jones, of Falmouth, was twenty-one years old when, in 1835, he
started on a four-year cruise as third mate of the whaler Awashonks.
After the ship had been a year or two at sea, Captain Coffin hove to in
a squall in the lee of Baring’s Island in the South Pacific. It had not
been his intention to trade with the natives of the island; in fact,
according to the chart it was uninhabited. But as soon as the squall
blew over, a number of canoes put off from shore and headed for the
Awashonks. The chief, followed by a group of naked savages, clambered
over the rail, and the crew began to barter with them for cocoanuts and
breadfruit while the Captain and Mr. Gardiner, the first mate, went
below for dinner, leaving Jones in charge. Scrap iron was the currency
the natives chiefly desired; soon they had turned over all their fresh
fruit for some bits of this metal, and with the usual curiosity of
primitive peoples, were nosing about the deck examining everything with
the greatest interest. The gleaming blades of the cutting-in spades,
neatly ranged in their racks, seemed to fascinate them particularly;
they tried the edges with their thumbs, their eyes wide in admiration.
The Captain, who had finished his dinner and come on deck,
good-naturedly showed the natives how they were used on whales. Their
excitement and wonder grew; they began to jabber in their outlandish
dialect and more canoes appeared alongside. Some of the newcomers
were armed, and young Jones, who felt vaguely uneasy, gladly obeyed
the Captain’s orders to disarm them before they came on deck. While
he was thus engaged, he heard a whoop from behind, and turned to see
the natives making a rush for the spades. They got most of them and in
the twinkling of an eye had sliced off the Captain’s head, killed the
first mate, and were starting operations on the crew. The second mate
dived overboard and was never seen again. This left Jones in command.
He jumped into the midst of the fight, grabbed a spade from one of the
islanders and thrust at him with it so hard that the blade was embedded
in the woodwork of the deckhouse, and he was left unarmed. He attacked
one native with his fists, but was confronted by three more, one of
whom had a spear. Realizing that in another second it would be lodged
in his breast, Jones leaped down the open hatchway into the forehold.
Here he picked up one or two recruits, and they made their way aft
below decks and forced an entrance to the cabin.
Here there was a moment’s respite, which was used in loading all the
firearms the ship carried, and from the shelter of the cabin Jones and
his followers, one of whom was desperately wounded and another useless
from fright, directed a musket fire that for a moment silenced the
yells of the savages, who were now masters of the deck, with their
chief standing in childlike pride at the helm, though he knew as little
of its use as a baby at the wheel of a motor-car. He was invisible
from the cabin, but, realizing that some one was monkeying with the
steering-gear, and alarmed lest the ship might go aground, Jones and
one of the crew fired at the same moment through the cabin roof in the
direction of the wheel, and by great luck killed the chief. This was
the turning-point of the fight. Some of the natives took to the canoes;
others stood undecided, their thirst for blood still unquenched. It
was the strategic moment for a sally, and Jones led the way on deck
with a loaded musket. He found that the battle was over. The last of
the savages had gone over the side and was swimming for shore in the
wake of the departing canoes. The vessel was promptly headed away
from this ‘uninhabited’ island, and Jones, keenly aware of his new
responsibility, divided his time between sewing up the gashes of his
men and navigating his ship. After fifty days he dropped anchor in
Honolulu Harbor and turned the Awashonks over to the American Consul.
This bloody experience did not discourage Silas Jones. He continued to
go on whaling voyages and commanded various vessels out of Falmouth
until after the Civil War. One of them was the Commodore Morris, whose
figurehead--a grim representation of this maritime celebrity--at
present occupies a prominent position in Mr. Hutchinson’s bookstore
in New Bedford. Jones himself, after leaving the sea, directed the
fortunes of his native town of Falmouth with the same resolution and
vigor which he had shown as a lad in shooting the Baring’s Island
savages off the deck of the Awashonks.
Another Cape-Codder from the opposite end of the peninsula came within
an ace of having his vessel, the bark Parker Cook, stove and sunk by a
fighting whale. This was Captain Cook, of Provincetown. In 1850, while
cruising in the Atlantic, he lowered for a whale, and two irons were
planted in the monster. Like a flash he turned, rising almost out of
water, and capsizing the boat. In the mêlée, a turn of line caught the
boatsteerer’s leg and almost cut it through. The whale then attacked
the Parker Cook, and rushed straight for her bow, hitting the cutwater
with such violence that it was driven deep into the creature’s head.
The impact knocked the men on deck flat, and the vessel staggered from
stem to stern as if she had struck a derelict. The whale suffered more
than the bark, however, and though he tried another charge, his ardor
was quenched, and Captain Cook dispatched him with three shots from
the bomb-lance. The crew of the wrecked whaleboat were picked up, and
all hands took savage satisfaction in extracting one hundred and three
barrels of oil from this ferocious old bull. The Parker Cook put in to
Fayal for repairs to her cutwater, and here the injured bo’s’n received
more skilled treatment than was to be had on board.
Whaling captains had to turn surgeon oftener than other shipmasters,
for their voyages were measured in months instead of in weeks, and
they spent those months in the most hazardous business that has ever
been followed by man. Irrespective of what injuries whales themselves
might inflict, the constant use of formidable weapons like cutting-in
spades, harpoons and lances in the crowded quarters of pitching boats
and rocking decks, produced frightful wounds with a frequency that even
the unluckiest merchant mariner was spared. And when it came to Arctic
cruises for bowheads and bone, the Captain was obliged to treat frozen
hands or feet so often that it became almost a part of the routine.
Arctic whaling was, in fact, a separate science, and a grimmer calling
it is hard for a steam-heated generation to imagine. It combined all
the dangers of sperm whaling in southern latitudes with the perils of
polar exploration; and it was besides the bitterest test that human
patience can be put to, for the voyages sometimes lasted four years,
and of this time only about six months could be spent in whaling; the
remaining forty-two consisted of living aboard a vessel frozen fast in
an ice-bound harbor and trusting to native hunters to supply venison.
Captain John Atkins Cook, of Provincetown, whose book describing his
northern whaling voyages has been recently published, is the last of
the Cape-Codders who has followed this calling. What can have induced
this indomitable whaleman to make voyage after voyage to the Arctic it
is hard to imagine. Not the hope of riches, certainly, for a man of
Captain Cook’s abilities could have made more money in any one of a
dozen callings at home. The only explanation that suggests itself is
that the love of encountering and overcoming hardships--of succeeding
where many fail--perhaps, too, the lure which the very desolation of
the North exerts on some men, kept Captain Cook’s vessel headed time
and again for the frozen latitudes of Bering Strait. In addition to
his other troubles, the Arctic whalemen had problems of navigation to
solve, of which the merchant sailor knew nothing. Here is what Captain
Cook himself says on this topic:
These voyages in the Arctic seas present to the master some of the
most intricate problems of navigation that the world has ever known.
As the Arctic navigator, leaving San Francisco in February looks to
the eastern horizon and sees the last blink of the Farallone Light
(off Golden Gate) he realizes that in his lonely watch at night or
when steaming along among the loose ice off the coast of Alaska,
and in search of whales in the Far North among the icefields, that
light is the last guide he will have, and that no beacon by night or
buoys by day are to be seen by him to warn of treacherous shoals or
other dangers. No: he must sail without them and depend upon his past
experience to bring him out safely.
Captain Cook had his full share of surgery to perform during his many
Arctic voyages. On one occasion a Provincetown boy, Fred West, sailed
with the Captain and was soon made third mate. During the winter at
Herschel’s Island, West obtained the Captain’s permission to go inland
on a hunting expedition with another member of the ship’s company.
While he was taking a loaded gun from the canoe, the trigger caught,
and young West got both barrels in the upper arm. He was brought back
senseless and almost dead from pain and loss of blood. Captain Cook
and the captains of three other whalers took him to a hut on shore and
gave him a tumblerful of raw whisky and a whiff of chloroform. Then
they amputated the arm so successfully that, in spite of its loss, West
continued to follow the sea in command of coasting schooners until
1923, when he was drowned off the Delaware Capes.
In 1908, Captain Cook turned his attention to sperm whaling in Southern
waters, and had the brigantine Viola built for the purpose. In this
graceful vessel--which looked like a yacht--the Captain and his wife
set sail for a two years’ cruise, and made successful voyages in the
South Atlantic and along the African Coast until 1916. This business,
strenuous though it was, seemed child’s play to Captain Cook after the
rigors of the Northern icefields, and his voyages for sperm were more
like pleasure cruises than work. In 1916 he retired for good--the last
of the Cape Cod whalemen.
It is easy, dazzled by the glamour of far voyages to palm-fringed
islands, to be deceived into false sentimentality toward this
great dead industry. Many an up-state farmer’s boy, lured by the
will-o’-the-wisp of romance, left his plough in the furrow and went
whaling--to end his days a beachcomber, disillusioned and beaten.
It was a grim game, with the dollar always at the helm. But the
financial side of it, with all its ruthlessness and with all that it
led to--hazing men into deserting with money due them; overcharging
for shoddy clothing from the slop chest and underfeeding until the
hungry crew looked greedily on slices of broiled whale meat--all
this was not more destructive to men’s fiber than herding together
in a forecastle, compared to which the forecastles of clippers were
palatial, a miscellaneous crew composed of round-eyed lads from the
Vermont hills and crime-hardened degenerates who ought to have been in
jail. Men were not made to live by themselves; wherever circumstances
force them to do so, they seek, like water, the level of the lowest
and most vicious among them. The forecastles of whaling barks produced
these circumstances as perfectly as they have ever been produced in the
world, and our fresh-cheeked youngster, who embarked on a voyage as
immaculate as a man can be, stood a fine chance of emerging from his
four years’ association with the dregs of the water-front, as hardened a
character as they.
‘She’d a crew of blacks from the Cape Verde Isles
That spoke in Portagee,
With men from Norway, Finland too,
And the shores of the Irish Sea.
‘She’d whites from the rocky Yankee farms
Mixed up with Sandwich brown,
With a skipper who hailed from New Bedford,
And a mate from Westport Town.’
Beside learning vice, the young whalemen learned violence. A three
months’ voyage from New York to San Francisco in a clipper ship, with
a ventilated deckhouse for the crew, was enough to beget frequent
mutinies; what, then, can we expect from a forty months’ cruise in a
bobtailed blubber-boiler? Mutinies there were aplenty, and not without
good reason did whaling captains sometimes sign on five mates to help
them hold the lid on. Cook went through one Arctic winter with a
mutinous crew--the only wonder is that crews in those latitudes ever
refrained from mutiny. The sperm whalemen opened the petcock from time
to time by calling at Honolulu, or Tahiti, or Guam, where men might
desert instead of killing an officer, and where natives could easily
be procured as replacements. But captains often neglected this safety
valve, and stayed at sea as long as there was an unbroached barrel of
salt horse in the hold, or a gallon of ropy water in the butts. Under
such conditions, is it surprising that Captain Nathaniel Burgess, of
Bourne, who made his last voyage with a crew that represented nine
nationalities, called discipline the whaling captain’s most serious
problem?
Time has blurred the sharp and cruel outlines of life on a whaler. In
our enthusiasm over those who returned victorious, we are likely to
forget the many who were left behind, broken and polluted, to drag out
the last years of their lives on the beach of a coral island. To-day
there are those who lament the passing of this undoubtedly picturesque,
though certainly ruinous industry. But the world is a better place
without long-voyage whaling than it ever was with it. Keenly as we
appreciate the skill and self-reliance and valor that it taught some of
the men who practiced it, we cannot forget the merciless malignity with
which it shattered the rest. The wreck of the Wanderer, New Bedford’s
last whaler, in the summer of 1925, was a happy event for the march of
civilization.