Final Voyage (23 page)

Among these renegade members were Joseph Anthony’s diminutive but fashion-conscious sisters-in-law, local beauties Mary and Susan Russell, who shared his taste for worldly amusement. The Meeting’s elders formally disapproved of the girls’ comportment. Anthony recorded:

This censure by the local Society of Friends of two of its members for trivial-seeming matters was emblematic of a larger rupture then occurring in New Bedford’s Quaker community, and elsewhere. Asceticism is more easily practiced poor. While the Quaker dress code had struggled under the austerity of “the Discipline,” good money was being spent on the best imported somber-hued woolens, finest thread-count drab lawns and linens, and technically illicit gold-framed spectacles. A nineteenth-century op-ed writer who wrote under the pseudonym “Old Cribton” observed that “the Friends had . . . long been laying by money from the sheer want of opportunities of getting rid of it”; but Joseph Anthony and his generation were fast discovering and enjoying those opportunities. Many Quakers took much of this in stride, while others, the old school, reacted to such modernity with waspish admonishments.

These disagreements were most sharply and acrimoniously drawn first in the Massachusetts town of Lynn, which was suffering the effects of its own economic good fortune. From colonial times (until the late nineteenth century) Lynn was a center for tannery and shoe-making industries; the town had provided most of the boots worn by Americans during the Revolution, and after the War of 1812 its Quaker merchants were flush with cash.

In response to criticism by the elders, the “New Lights,” as the younger, worldlier Quakers came to be called, began to question the severity of the old hard-line doctrines. They claimed they represented no change from the pure Quakerism of George Fox, who had advocated a personal “inner light” relationship with God, without the need for interpretation or the intervention of others. The “Old Lights” objected to any opposition toward their guardianship of the traditional lifestyle and tenets appropriate for the Society of Friends.

In Lynn, Mary Newhall, a woman in her thirties, and an ideological descendant of Anne Hutchinson, emerged as the preeminent New Light preacher. She was said to have “a fatal facility of entering into mystical speculations and . . . great powers of language to express her thoughts.” Lynn’s old-guard Old Lights at first urged her to stop her preaching, but she refused. Her gift—evidenced by the response it provoked on both sides—was from God, she said, and she “could not decline to exercise it upon the command of men.” So she was ordered to stop. Emotions ran high at the Lynn Meeting. A New Light proponent, Benjamin Shaw, a cordwainer, appropriated one of the raised seats in the ministers’ gallery to harangue the elders. He was ordered to come down but refused. A physical scuffle ensued; Shaw held on to his seat, which broke before he was pulled away. Another New Light, Caleb Alley, raised his hands “in a fighting attitude” toward the men dragging Shaw out; Alley’s father, John, then tried to rush the ministers’ gallery and began screaming when the Old Lights tried to stop him; meanwhile, Jonathan Buffum, a housepainter known for his “ungovernable temper,” reached the high seats and began yelling: “You that profess to be Quakers, Christians, have shown forth by your conduct the fruit of your hell-born principles this day. You thirst for our blood, you want to feed upon us; this I call spiritual cannibalism!” On the following First Day (Sunday), John Alley came to the Meeting wearing a sword. He was restrained, his belt cut, and the sword removed. That afternoon he came to the Meeting again, and then he, Buffum, and Shaw occupied the gallery seats. They were hauled out, into a crowd of two hundred that had gathered to see the expected show. Cries of “Mob! Mob!” rose from around the Meeting House, until a deputy sheriff appeared and took the New Lights prisoner. They were sent to trial in Ipswich, where the court heard that Benjamin Shaw had also disrupted a recent Meeting at Seabrook, New Hampshire, by climbing into the building’s beams and acrobatically swinging into the gallery of high seats. At the Ipswich trial he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. After the trial, the Lynn Meeting disowned Mary Newhall and thirty of her New Light followers.

Mary Newhall began to appear and preach in the New Bedford Meeting. Joseph Anthony listened and approved:
“Mary Newell [
sic
] preached an excellent sermon at the afternoon meeting.”
A week later:

Mary Newhall had tea with Anthony and others at his father’s house the following day. And a day later, a Tuesday, Mary Newhall preached at New Bedford’s First Congregational Church. Anthony attended, and so did many other Quakers.

There were no swords or scuffling at the New Bedford Meeting, but feelings there grew passionate enough for genteel demonstrations:

When several Old Light elders were assigned to pay a home visit to Mary and Susan Russell, to give them a good talking-to, the girls refused to see them and, in April 1823, submitted their resignation to the New Bedford Meeting. While affirming their belief in the fundamental principles of the Society, they wrote that the “deviations from the Discipline” with which they had been charged “have long been considered by the Society, not very important in their nature; and not such, we believe, as friends have deemed necessary to lay before their meetings.” And in view of “the conduct of some of the overseers towards us; the spirit in which the report was carried forward; its reception in the meeting; and above all, the present situation of the meeting; we think it most proper to relinquish our right of membership.”

The zealous admonishment by New Bedford’s Quaker elders of two pretty girls for their deviations from the dress code didn’t rock the community, but it presaged a profounder disagreement. A year later, the Society split deeply when the Old Lights charged Elizabeth Rodman and Mary Rotch with supporting the heresy of Mary Newhall, and threatened to remove their status as elders. Both women were unimpeachable pillars of the Quaker community, members of the town’s oldest and wealthiest merchant families. In March 1824, over widespread protest, the Old Light faction disbarred the two women from the eldership. The action was widely deplored by many members. Their indignation led a large number of them away from the Society into other churches, and created a schism from which New Bedford’s Quaker Society never recovered.

Joseph Anthony turned to the Unitarian church:

George Howland remained deeply entrenched with the Old Lights. In that straitlaced, unyielding environment he raised his sons, George Jr. (born 1806) and Matthew (1814)—younger than Joseph Anthony (1797) by a decade and more, yet living in a world whose values and prejudices had been formed a century earlier. Like their father (and Hiram Wellworthy’s father, Caleb), the boys accepted that world without question. The fact that such wealth had been created by conforming to those values and prejudices, and that the boys were the recipients of such unequivocal approbation of their Creator; the fact that Saybrook, New London, Mystic, Edgartown, and Sag Harbor (none of them Quaker towns) all competed in the whale fishery and none came close to New Bedford’s dominance (Nantucket being the only near rival), only confirmed the correctness of the Quakerism of their fathers, and of their fathers’ fathers.

While Anthony looked ahead, embraced change, and profited by it—a Darwinian outlook, though he wouldn’t have known it as such—George Jr. and Matthew Howland went to the Friends Academy, and the Friends boarding school in Providence, and finally into their father’s countinghouse, remaining studiously blinkered to the racier trends circulating at home and abroad, cleaving to the strictest tenets of their church, and maintaining an absolute belief that all that existed—including the business model worked out by their fathers, with the help of the Lord—had been set unalterably in place by Him and was surely smiled upon by Him and should not be tampered with. The Dodo principle.

Frequent Visitors

T
hrough early August of 1871, the wind remained light and the weather fair along the Alaskan shore. The fleet of whaleships continued navigating their way through the channel that lay between the low, sandy coast and the ice pack five miles offshore. This was the accepted tactic, seeking the leads through the ice that would continue to open—it was believed—as the prevailing northeasterlies pushed the floes farther and farther out into the Chukchi Sea as the summer progressed, eventually leaving open water all the way to Point Barrow. As shipmasters pushed their vessels along the traceries of open water, with men aloft shouting down what they could see ahead, the mates and the boat crews routinely continued to set out in the small whale boats to chase whales. Many were sighted and caught, for the whales, too, found themselves largely confined to the waterway, and greasy smoke from the tryworks rose into the cold air over the fleet.

But on Friday, August 11, 1871, the day after the young Englishman Lewis Kennedy, of the wrecked
Japan
, died aboard the
Henry Taber
, there was a change of wind. It now rose strongly from the northwest, a direction perpendicular to the northeasterly trend of the coastline and ninety degrees off the desired, supposedly prevailing slant, and the ice pack drifted quickly toward the land. The larger, deeper floes grounded on the offshore shoals and sandbars, forcing the ships to scuttle into their lees, squeezing into a channel that was suddenly reduced from five miles wide to a mile or less, with a bottom that was unfamiliar, lumpy with unmarked shallows, often no deeper than a ship’s keel. There was no escape from this narrowing strip of water, for the wind also compacted the smaller “cakes” of ice, closing off the open leads that had threaded through the dispersed floes. The New Bedford whaler
Seneca
, farthest to the north, found itself stuck fast in the ice while carrying full sail. Many whaleboats and their crews suddenly found miles of ice between them and their ships. Some boats were temporarily abandoned, others were dragged by their crews across the ice back to the channel and their ships.

On August 13, the wind dropped to light airs, though still from the northwest. At eight a.m., the
Seneca
once more found ice closing around her. The crew sank blubber hooks on the end of long lines into the ice and tried to haul the ship into clear water, but even carrying full sail, the
Seneca
was soon frozen in place again.

The next day the light wind moved back into the northeast. The ice loosened around the
Seneca,
and by noon she sailed into clear water and anchored in six fathoms—thirty-six feet—of water. From her deck, twenty ships could be seen stretching away to the south, all anchored or moored to ice cakes. Near the
Seneca
was the encouraging sight of the
Elizabeth Swift
with two bowhead whales tied alongside her hull, ready to be cut in. These two whales had been caught the day before, but ice moving on a fast-flowing northeast tide had come between the
Swift
and her boats, which had then spent a long day towing the whales back to the ship against the tide.

Still the crews aboard the ships continued whaling, often dragging the whaleboats hundreds of yards across the ice. Whales were caught and pulled alongside the ice floes as they would have been fastened alongside a ship’s hull, the blubber and “bone” cut off as best as conditions would allow. With the great number of ships in the area, many whaleboats chased after the same whale, some “mating” with other ships’ boats, sharing or dividing the spoils according to the whalemen’s etiquette governing who had spotted the whale first and who had helped. Many harpooned whales escaped to seaward beneath the ice, pulling the boats behind them until they fetched up against the floes and their crews had to cut away the lines leading down under the ice.

The wind continued light, though encouragingly, from the northeast, sometimes bringing dense fog, while the ice continued to pack along the shallows just beyond the narrowing waterway. By August 17, there were thirty-three whaleships pinned inside the floes along the coast, still seventy miles or so south of Point Barrow. Men continued whaling, every one of them believing the wind must soon blow more strongly from the east or northeast and push the ice out to sea. Some ships sent men in their whaleboats miles to the north to look for whales with supplies for camping out on the shore or the ice for days. Few had any success. On Tuesday, August 22, three of the
Elizabeth Swift
’s boats set out for the Seahorse Islands, beyond Point Belcher. They found the waterway completely blocked by a wide swath of ice running from the offshore pack all the way to land. The men hauled their boats across the beach into the unfrozen lagoon inside Point Franklin and rowed northeast into the wind and short chop on the water, but once beyond the tip of Point Franklin, they were stopped again by ice. They returned to the
Swift
the next day.