Final Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season

202 Pages·2009·1.16 MB·English

by  Nichols Peter

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
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Copyright © 2009 by Peter Nichols
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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, most whaling captains normally started heading south from
the Arctic by early September. Lulled by continued fine conditions and an
abundance of bowhead whales—and mindful of the injunction given by all
whaling ship owners to their captains: “You are not to omit taking a whale when
you can”—Captain Barker delayed his departure by a full month. He continued
taking whales even as the autumn rime coated the shore, the true barometer of
what was coming.
Early in October, Barker finally turned his ship south. On October 4, a heavy
gale struck the Japan, and with it came the full, brutal, change of season. In
driving snow, with ice forming in the rigging, Barker and his crew attempted to
work the ship through the fast-disappearing channel between the coast and the
solidifying ice pack that the storm was hourly driving closer to shore. With the
ice and the storm came snow squalls, and between the squalls, the air was filled
with a dense, disorienting fog. When even the roughly level plane of the sea
beyond the decks became invisible, Barker’s world was reduced to an icy,
disorienting cloud. Without visual or celestial aids, his navigation exponentially
veered toward guesswork as he aimed the Japan for the eye of a geographic
needle, the sixty-mile-wide Bering Strait, beyond which lay the open waters of
the Bering Sea and the North Pacific.
The benign season had also seduced other whaling captains into postponing
their departure from the Arctic, and these ships were now sailing through this
same storm. The New Bedford whaleship Elizabeth Swift was not far away. “
This day blowing a terible gale from the N,” noted the Swift’s logkeeper on
October 5. Waves continually broke aboard the Swift, filling her with water,
keeping her men laboring at her pumps. The oar-powered whaleboats carried in
davits high above the decks were swept away. As the storm went on, the height
of the waves and the force and weight of the water crashing aboard increased.
On October 6, a great wave smashed into the ship’s side and “stove our
starboard bulwarks all to atoms.” Sails blew to ribbons. Another New Bedford
whaleship, the Seneca, was seen working heavily through the seas not far away.
Neither ship knew its position with any certainty. “ Dont know whare we are,”
wrote the Swift’s logkeeper. “Vary cold. So ends this day.”
On October 8, the men aboard the Japan sighted another whaleship through
the snow, the Massachusetts, of New Bedford, also running south at speed. The
Japan made signals to the other ship, hoping to stay in company with her, for
Barker feared the Japan might not weather the storm. But the Massachusetts
either did not see the signals or could do little about them, and disappeared into
the spumy air.
At the same time, the Champion, of Martha’s Vineyard, lay about sixty miles
to the north, behind the Japan. She had recently caught and cut up four whales,