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

Author:Peter Nichols
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fisheries & Aquaculture, Whaling, State & Local, ME, Fiction, NH, New Bedford (Mass.) - Economic conditions - 19th century, VT), Massachusetts, History, RI, 19th Century, Whaling - Arctic regions - History - 19th century, New Bedford, Seafaring life, United States, Sea Stories, Historical, Whaling - Economic aspects - Massachusetts - New Bedford - History - 19th century, Arctic regions, Business & Economics, Economic History, New Bedford (Mass.), Technology & Engineering, New England (CT, MA, Marine accidents, General, Marine accidents - Arctic regions - History - 19th century, Economic aspects, Seafaring life - Massachusetts - New Bedford - History - 19th century
ISBN: 9780399156021
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: 2009-10-15T10:00:00+00:00

Eleven

The Ships and the Men

William Fish Williams’s childhood homes, the ships Florida, Hibernia, and Monticello, were more alike than any three houses in a small suburban neighborhood. The distinguishing marks between these ships, and the ships of the 1871 arctic fleet, were fewer than those between a Buick and a Ford, discernible only by knowing observers.

Between the landing of the first sperm whale in 1712 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the design of the American whaleship and the American whaleman’s techniques evolved into the classic model that would remain essentially unchanged until the dissolution of the industry one hundred years later. Herman Melville, who shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841, might not have understood the workings of whaleships of the 1740s, but he would have been quite familiar with those of the 1770s. A whaler of the 1870s coming aboard a whaleship built a hundred years earlier in Nantucket or New Bedford would have found it smallish, but otherwise ordinary and serviceable. Once the design had been perfected, and with it the methods, they remained largely unimprovable. The whaleship Maria, built in Nantucket in 1781 by Joseph Rotch’s son, William, was still working in 1866, well past the peak years of Yankee whaling. A few other venerable—and lucky—ships had similar careers: the Rousseau, owned by George Howland (he hated the “infidel Frenchman” name, but changing a ship’s name has always been considered unlucky, so he purposely mispronounced it “Russ-o”) and then passed on to his sons, George Jr. and Matthew, was built in 1801 and outlived two generations of her owners, to be broken up in 1893. Most famous of all is the Charles W. Morgan, “a ship on which Poseidon and gods of the sea must have looked with special favor, because not only did she survive for more than eight decades the countless hazards of the sea as an active whaleship, but also—and equally miraculous—she was saved at the end of her long career by men who had come to love her and saw in her, as the last of her kind, a need to preserve her for posterity.”5 The Morgan, built in 1841, twenty-five years before the Howlands’ Concordia, is still afloat today at the Mystic Seaport Museum (in Mystic, Connecticut), a perfect time capsule of her time and purpose. These are extraordinary life spans for working wooden vessels, pointing not only to the duration of practical designs and techniques, but also to the economical habits of whaleship owners. Such ships paid for themselves many times over and made their owners rich.

They were as functional as spaceships. After Christopher Hussey and his crew had laboriously towed a single sperm whale back to Nantucket in 1712, prompting ships to voyage far out into “ye Deep,” whalers evolved the technique of cutting up a whale at sea and storing the chopped-up blubber in hogsheads. Until mid-century, these vessels displaced between thirty and fifty tons and remained at sea until their hogsheads were full before sailing home, where the blubber was boiled and the oil extracted in tryworks ashore.

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