Final Voyage

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

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 : 978-1-101-14880-8

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.

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.

Alaska, June 1871

E
arly 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, but there hadn’t been time before the storm struck to boil the blubber from these into oil and stow the barrels below. Large chunks of whale meat and blubber, called “horse pieces,” 500 barrels’ worth, were now stored “between decks,” the space between the upper deck and the ship’s hold. This constituted a danger almost as great as the storm, for such deadweight, forty or fifty tons of it, sliding around with every roll and pitch, made the ship dangerously top-heavy, more likely than ever to slew around out of control before the wind and capsize. The
Champion’
s captain, Henry Pease, later described the circumstances aboard his ship as it headed for the Bering Strait:

With the coming of a bleak daylight, the
Champion
’s crew lowered the lead line (a lead weight on the end of a rope) in an attempt to get some idea of where they were. They found seventeen fathoms of water beneath the ship and concluded that they had passed through the Bering Strait during the night and were now headed for the rocks of St. Lawrence Island, directly ahead. By then the storm moderated enough to allow them to raise two small sails and haul the ship away from the island, saving themselves from certain shipwreck.

Barker and his crew were not so lucky. On the morning of October 9, running at “racehorse speed” before the wind, in “such blinding snow that we could not see half a ship’s length,” the
Japan
drove like a runaway train onto the rocky shore at the western side of the strait. All of her crew were miraculously unhurt in the wreck. Most of them immediately jumped overboard and waded a quarter of a mile through the pounding surf to the shore. The water temperature was at, or only a little above, freezing. Barker went below to gather his ship’s papers and logbook, but as he emerged from the cabin, a breaking wave swept over the deck and tore everything from his arms. Drenched, in clothes instantly growing stiff with ice, he descended to his cabin, again to change. Although the
Japan
was now pounding in the shallows, the ship’s position had stabilized somewhat. Knowing he would probably not have another chance, Barker spent a further three hours below-decks, attempting to collect clothing and provisions for his men.