Final Voyage (24 page)

Exactly one year earlier, in August 1870, the
Elizabeth Swift,
the
Seneca,
the Howlands’
Concordia
, the
Hibernia
(with Thomas Williams and family aboard), the
Japan
(with Captain Barker and his crew aboard), and at least thirty other whaleships had all been sailing off this same stretch of coast, tacking north in strong northeasterly winds, often blowing at gale force. There had been
“quite a quantity of ice about,”
according to the
Swift
’s logbook, but the strong—
“vary ruged ”
—winds blowing off the land had kept the sea channel open all the way to Point Barrow and beyond, and all these ships had chased and caught great numbers of whales, unimpeded by ice. Since the coastline here trended in a northeast-southwest direction, it might be supposed that the northeasterly winds of 1870 would merely have pushed the ice in a south-westerly direction, paralleling the shore. But the earth’s spin creates a deviation, the Coriolis effect, making sea ice move at an angle of thirty degrees to the right of, or clockwise to, the wind direction in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, the northeasterlies of 1870 had actually pushed the ice west, to seaward, opening the channel between the pack ice and the land.

That August of 1870, ships had remained in the vicinity of Point Barrow, steadily catching whales until late in September. For most of that time the wind had continued blowing strongly from the northeast, what the whalers took to be the prevailing conditions that they were now, in August 1871, expecting to return at any time. These were “favorable” conditions that, a year ago, had kept all these ships, and the unlucky
Japan
, whaling far north of the Bering Strait until they were overtaken by the great storm of October 4-10.

 

 

 

AS LIGHT WINDS BLEW through the middle of August and the ships lay pinned inside the ice, Eskimos, of the Iñupiaq tribes, appeared on the low shore. They were drawn by the spectacle of so many ships held captive and the opportunity to trade.

Captain James Cook and his men had met and traded for fur with Eskimos in the Bering Strait; later, after Cook’s death in Hawaii in 1779, his crew sold the sea otter furs they obtained here to Chinese buyers in Macao for fabulous prices. In 1826, the British explorer and surveyor Captain Frederick Beechey managed to sail his ship
Blossom
a few miles beyond Cook’s farthest northerly point before being stopped by ice, but members of his crew reached Point Barrow in the ship’s boat, the first Europeans to do so. By the time Captain Thomas Roys pushed the
Superior
and her reluctant crew north of the Bering Strait in 1848, not only trade but Russian Orthodox missionary activities were well established south of the strait. But apart from the rare exploratory expeditions of Cook, Beechey, and the Hudson’s Bay Company agent Thomas Simpson, who reached Point Barrow with a small party in 1837, the Iñupiaq Eskimos of the northwestern coast of Alaska, north of the Bering Strait, remained in virtual isolation from Russians, Americans, and Europeans.

The native coastal peoples
⁶
from the Bering Strait to Point Barrow had long been accomplished whalers. Organized whaling, as opposed to windfall beachcombing, had been practiced intermittently by the inhabitants along the northwest coast for more than three thousand years. In a landscape of treeless, permafrost tundra, the coastal Eskimos had evolved a mystically close relationship with the sea, the ice, and the sea mammals who, like themselves, inhabited essentially the same forbidding environment. Their world and spiritual views were defined by the sea and its animal realm, and the social and spiritual culture of the coastal Iñupiaq was rooted in the whale hunt. While natives inhabiting Alaska’s interior drew from a wide range of fauna to supply their needs—caribou, wolves, bear, mountain sheep, foxes, wolverines, waterfowl, and fish—the whale and the walrus provided almost everything to coastal peoples, and they concentrated their efforts on the hunting of these mammals. The arrival of the spring dawn, coming later every day, and the opening of the ice leads that soon followed, marked the start of the whaling season.
Umiaks
, the open fifteen-to-twenty-foot-long whaling boats fashioned from driftwood and bone, and covered with skins, were repaired and rebuilt; the long-evolved, beautifully intricate native harpoons, with wooden shafts, ivory sockets, toggle points, finger rests, gut lashings, and leather ropes were refashioned or made from scratch. Lookouts were posted along the shore. These activities were carried out by the whalers, always male, aided by their wives and children, effectively involving the entire community. The head whaler, the
umialik
, a man of great experience, skill, and, consequently, wealth, sought out and enlisted his crews by gift-giving and wife-exchanging. The social alliances of whaling crews—several to each community—were virtually tribes within tribes, involving tremendous prestige and importance. Tribal shamans (generally schizoid, compulsive, and/or hysteric individuals, according to social anthropologist Ernest S. Burch, Jr., an authority on the Iñupiaq Eskimos) sang songs, blessed the whaling crews and their preparations, and read auguries for success.

In March, camps, including wives and children, were set up on the ice. When a whale was sighted, a crew of seven to ten men ran their
umiak
into the ice “lead”—the watery opening in the ice where the whale swam—and paddled after it. As many harpoon points as possible were driven into a whale; the shafts would come free while the buried toggle points were attached to long lines tied to inflated sealskin floats, which dragged behind the whale as it fled from the initial attack, tiring it and preventing it from sounding for long. (This is exactly the same method used by Native Americans along the East Coast of the United States, as described by Captain George Weymouth in 1605.) The boat would again approach the exhausted whale, and the harpooner would lance the creature repeatedly in vital spots until it was dead. When the whale was brought ashore, or to the ice camp, it was greeted by the wife of the
umialik
, dressed in ceremonial clothing, who offered it a drink of fresh water and words of greeting and thanks. The whale’s meat was highly prized and dispersed among the whaleboat’s crew and their families and the whole community. Much of it was stored in ice cellars in the permafrost. Walrus was also hunted, though more easily. Walrus meat was less prized—it was given to the community’s dogs. Late in the summer, at the end of the hunting season, the whaling communities set out for established trading centers, where they met caribou hunters from the interior and bartered whale and walrus oil for caribou skins. As the winters closed in, the men hunted seal, and inside their houses the whole community repaired and built new weapons, lines, nets, and clothing.

The Eskimos’ communion with their environment was, like that of the whale and the walrus, a complete adaptation. It was mutually beneficial in the classic Darwinian mode: the hunters would more often catch the weaker, slower, older animals, leaving food sources and procreation to the fittest whales. They might have continued in this way indefinitely, as they had done for thousands of years, if the whalers in their wooden ships hadn’t appeared in 1848, and subsequently in greater and greater numbers, destroying the natural balance of their world and invading their dreams with a host of destructive foreign passions, chief among them alcohol and tobacco. The Eskimos found themselves as poorly adapted as the walrus to meet this abrupt change.

“The natives were frequent visitors, but with very few and rare exceptions, they were to me extremely repulsive in looks and habits,” recalled Willie Williams many years later. As a forty-three-year-old man, he naturally remembered most clearly what he had noticed up close as a twelve-year-old boy:

Willie remained curiously ignorant of the Eskimos, of the realities of their life and culture, and of the incredible industriousness necessary to fashion a life in the Arctic. He evidently still believed in 1902, when he gave an address to the Brooks Club of New Bedford, what he had been told about the natives he had met as a boy:

But he was partly correct: they had indeed acquired these vices. They came to trade furs and clothing for rum and tobacco. Some exchanges were made, mostly by boat crews meeting Eskimos on the ice or ashore. Captains were leery of allowing natives aboard. There had been a few unpleasant incidents between Eskimos and whalemen, and these were always well reported. “Attack on a Whaler by the Natives” ran the headline of an article in the
Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript
of March 17, 1863. In June of that year, off Cape Bering, on the western (i.e., the Siberian) side of the strait, the whaleship
Reindeer
was approached by three “canoes with Indians on board.” They had just visited another nearby whaleship and appeared to be “intoxicated.” They wanted to trade for tobacco, and although this was produced, the Eskimos became belligerent and drew their knives, which were “two feet long and very heavy.” The whalers grabbed their own knives, belaying pins, hand spikes, and crowbars, and a short battle took place on the
Reindeer
’s deck. At the end of it, a number of men were cut, none badly, and the Eskimos were thrown into their boats and paddled away.

Through the 1860s there were growing reports of incidents between whalers and drunken or aggressive Eskimos on the Alaskan coast. More were to come throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as Americans sailed to the Alaskan coast in greater numbers, and the plight, and attitudes, of the native peoples inevitably changed, usually for the worse as the formerly holistic nature of their culture became contaminated by the influence of the whalers. Willie’s early prejudice was compounded by such reports, which were at variance with the kindness shown to Captain Barker of the
Japan
, and the experiences of many others, but it was an attitude shared by many whalemen, who saw only the negative aspects of the collision of their own and native cultures.

 

 

 

NOW, IN AUGUST OF 1871, the Eskimos again told the whalemen that conditions would not improve and urged them to turn their ships around and get away to the south the moment they were free. The whalers ignored them. Indeed, after weeks of light northeasterlies, the ice pack was beginning to loosen, and whales were visible. On Tuesday, August 28, the
Elizabeth Swift
was able to make sail and head to the north. Her crew saw
“quite a quantity of whales. Struck 24. Saved one.”
The remaining twenty-three harpooned whales managed to dive under the ice and escape, dragging hundreds of fathoms of rope.

The other whaleships followed, always pushing their blunt bows north into the ice they were sure would soon break up and float away.

Paradigm Shift

T
he Howlands, Joseph Anthony, and their cousins and friends were fortunate sons of New Bedford society. Other young men their age, of considerably lowlier station, flocked to the town in the 1840s and 1850s, looking for a berth aboard a whaleship. The fine captains’ houses lining the streets above the harbor were proof of the rewards and social improvement a young man with grit and luck might hope for.

Rowland Rogers, of Mattapoisett, was one of these young men. He sailed aboard a whaleship for three years, working for a 147th lay, which netted him, at the end of the voyage, $95.20, or a little under $32 per year. He decided whaling wasn’t the life for him, but saw an opportunity ashore in catering to the growing number of whalemen and sailors setting up homes in the area. He moved his family to Fairhaven and opened a grocery store.

His son, Henry Huttleston Rogers, worked in the store after school, delivering newspapers and groceries by wagon, but the boy had an outsize measure of his father’s ambition for business. Whether because of his father’s unfruitful experience or the stench of whale oil that permeated Fairhaven, and New Bedford across the river, Henry wasn’t interested in whaling. He was drawn to more modern ventures. When he left school in 1856, a tall, handsome, sixteen-year-old, he went to work as a brakeman on the new Fairhaven Branch Railroad. By the age of twenty-one he had saved about $300. He pooled his savings with those of a friend, Charles P. Ellis. With $600 between them, they managed to borrow another $600 and set out for Pennsylvania with the idea of getting into the exciting new “rock oil” business.

Two years earlier, in August 1859, petroleum oil had been extracted from the ground in Pennsylvania, the result of efforts led by a visionary entrepreneur, George Bissell. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Bissell spent ten years teaching and working as a journalist in the South before moving north again. While visiting his alma mater, he was shown a bottle of distilled rock oil, drawn from oil springs on a farm in Pennsylvania, and used as a patent medicine for cholera morbus, liver ailments, bronchitis, consumption—classic “snake oil,” the variously packaged folk remedy for any number of complaints and agues. Such oil, in its crude form, had long been known in northwestern Pennsylvania, noted by trappers and explorers along the Allegheny River, and by the Indians of the area, who believed it had curative powers. The Dartmouth laboratory professor holding the bottle told Bissell that the stuff was flammable. Then, or sometime soon afterward, Bissell—an exhausted, dispirited academic—experienced the first of his two eureka moments that have become part of the recorded history of the petroleum industry: he decided rock oil might have commercial possibilities as an illuminating oil. Other oils had appeared to rival whale oil and smoky tallow candles: camphene, which was unstable and often blew up, and kerosene, or “coal oil,” made from coal, were used in lamps that had been specially developed for them, but none of these had been produced in cheap abundance.