Final Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season PDF
Preview Final Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season
Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication One - Alaska, June 1871 Two - “The Dearest Place in All New England” Three - A Nursery and a Kindergarten Four - The Crucible of Deviancy Five - The Killing Floes Six - The Nantucket Paradigm Seven - “Well Cut Up” Eight - The Newer Bedford Nine - Neither Land nor Sea nor Air Ten - The Profits of Asceticism Eleven - The Ships and the Men Twelve - Old Lights and New Thirteen - Frequent Visitors Fourteen - Paradigm Shift Fifteen - “Our Dreadful Situation” Sixteen - Abandonment Seventeen - Aftermath Eighteen - “How Hard It Is to Rise, When You’re Really, Truly Down” Epilogue 1 Epilogue 2 Acknowledgements Sources PUTNAM G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Publishers Since 1838 Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2009 by Peter Nichols All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Peter, date. Final voyage : a story of Arctic disaster and one fateful whaling season / Peter Nichols. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN : 978-1-10114880-8 1. Whaling—Arctic regions—History—19th century. 2. Marine accidents—Arctic regions—History—19th century. 3. Whaling—Economic aspects—Massachusetts—New Bedford—History—19th century. 4. Seafaring life—Massachusetts—New Bedford—History—19th century. 5. New Bedford (Mass.)—Economic conditions—19th century. 6. New Bedford (Mass.)—Biography. I. Title SH383.2.N 338.3’72950974485—dc22 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. http://us.penguingroup.com This book is for Gus, my son, Augustus Paris Nichols. Prologue After surging to an all-time peak, oil prices were falling, despite the depletion of fields around the world. Oil itself was talked about as an outmoded commodity, soon to be relegated to the past as cheaper, inexhaustible, emerging energy sources were being developed. Oil barons and financiers were suddenly facing the loss of an industry that had supported them and supplied the world’s needs for generations. Banks and hitherto bedrock-solid financial institutions were foundering. Wealthy men were ruined overnight, stunned that they had not seen what was coming, that everything they had believed in and counted upon lay in ruins. The old paradigm was broken and a new one was overtaking the world. This, then, was the state of the whale-oil industry 140 years ago. One Alaska, June 1871 Early in June 1871, as the whaling bark John Wells, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, approached the snow-and fog-shrouded Siberian shore at the southern entrance to the Bering Strait, the ship was intercepted by a small boat full of wild-looking, fur-clad men. At first the whalemen on the Wells’s deck mistook them for Eskimos, natives of this coast. For the most part, New Englanders found the Eskimos, with occasional female exceptions, repellent- looking (made more so by the chin tattoos of the women, and the holes men bored in their cheeks around their mouths, then plugged with ornamental pieces of bone), but these creatures, as they drew closer, looked particularly wretched. All were bearded, their long hair matted, their faces smeared with grease and blackened from crouching over smoky fires. They appeared out of the cold, vaporous air like spectral phantoms, waving and calling, their voices thin and imploring. But their cries were in everyday English. The boat was soon alongside the John Wells, and its ripe-smelling occupants were helped aboard the ship. One of them introduced himself as Captain Frederick Barker and explained that he and the men with him were the surviving crew of the whaling ship Japan, which had driven ashore on the nearby coast in a storm eight months before. Barker and his men were taken below, where they bathed, shaved, and were given clean clothes. Finally, over a seaman’s meal of beef, pork, beans, and bread—Christian food they had not tasted for eight months—they told their story to the Wells’s captain, Aaron Dean, and his officers. They had enjoyed an exceptionally fortunate season’s whaling the previous year, in the summer of 1870. The Japan had pushed through the ice in the Bering Strait and reached the Arctic Ocean whaling grounds by the unusually early date of March 10—it was normally July before ice conditions allowed whaleships north of the strait. Their good luck had continued throughout the summer and into the fall. Because of mercurial changes of weather at the season’s close, when summer might be replaced by winter in the space of twenty-four hours,
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