Final Voyage (3 page)

Melville cleverly appropriated Jonah, perfect for his story, but one may wonder what other tales from the mighty cable of the Scriptures Father Mapple would have read from on the remaining fifty-one Sundays of the year. He would soon have turned to the Book of Isaiah, which proclaimed, with less of a fish story, a truth that everyone in New Bedford held sacred: they were doing the Lord’s work. The slaying of whales was a holy directive, unambiguously ordered by God Himself in Isaiah 27:1-6:

The message was clear: slay whales and prosper. Every man, woman, and child in New Bedford knew that the whale was a divinely created oil reserve, placed floating in the sea by God so that His Children might secure it for themselves. And in so doing, whaling had anointed its practitioners with unmistakable signs of the Lord’s blessings. The merchants who controlled the whaling industry in New Bedford in the mid-nineteenth century had grown wealthy to the point of embarrassment, beyond what appeared seemly. The only possible conclusion they could draw was that they were doing the Lord’s work, His pleasure evinced by the otherworldly scale of their rewards, which they struggled to accept with modesty and disperse with responsibility. And the sailors who etched scenes, on sperm whales’ teeth, of men battling the leviathan in small boats, were responding to the same urge that led early man to draw scenes of the hunt on cave walls: they believed they had experienced a partnership with the divine. God had given them dominion over the earth and all it contained. Father Mapple and all New Bedford knew the truth in Psalms 107:23-24: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”

WHILE HERMAN MELVILLE’S TALE was too gothic and obscure for his contemporaries, the popular imagination of his day was thoroughly hooked by the money to be made in what was universally known as the “whale fishery.” This first industrialized oil business found its most successful form as a paradigm evolved by a tightly knit cult of religious fundamentalists on Quaker Nantucket. It realized its apotheosis of worldly reward when this paradigm was enlarged in Quaker New Bedford, which became the world’s first oil hegemony, the Houston and finally the Saudi Arabia of its day. Yet so fanatically and narrowly held—by some—was the religious faith that powered this great design, that it could not countenance or accommodate change, diversification, reappraisal, or compromise. The oil business of the second half of the nineteenth century was overtaken so swiftly by new paradigms created in the petroleum industry that New Bedford’s most hidebound merchant tycoons, and the world they had created, were swept away like sand castles in a hurricane. They vanished as fast as the new oil barons appeared to replace them. And New Bedford lost its preeminence as God’s Little Acre for merchant princes, though it would rediscover itself in the less exalted role of a Massachusetts mill town where the flotsam and jetsam of the whaling business—Azorean and Hawaiian seamen, freed and runaway black harpooners and their families, and poor young men and women from all over New England who had come to New Bedford to find a place aboard its ships and in its ropewalks and oil refineries—found steadier and far safer employment as cotton mill workers.

The rise and fall of the American whale fishery in New Bedford is a classic Darwinian story of the fitness of a group for a specific environment; of the failure by some of that group to adapt when their world changed, and how they withered and disappeared from the world, while others evolved and lived on.

That change was most abrupt for the 1,219 men, women, and children aboard the fleet of whaleships in the Arctic that summer of 1871. For them it would be a season of unparalleled catastrophe.

For the oil merchants and shipowners back in New Bedford, the change that overtook their lives would be more profound and longer-lasting.

“The Dearest Place in All New England”

S
even years earlier, on September 14, 1864, New Bedford’s preeminent whaling merchant, George Howland, Jr., then fifty-eight years old, gave a speech to an assembly of citizens and merchants on the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, of which New Bedford had once been a part. The whaling business was still suffering the depredations of the Civil War, which had seen the loss of many whaleships and severely affected the town’s economy; quantities of whale oil brought home by whaling voyages had fallen in recent years, and the market price of whale oil was softening. Yet Howland’s message was unequivocally optimistic:

Howland’s boosterism was genetic. His father, George Howland, had made a fortune in the whale fishery. When he died, in 1852, he left an estate including: $615,000 in cash; a fleet of nine whaling vessels; a wharf with a countinghouse sitting on it; a candle factory; property and acreage in New Bedford, Maine, western New York, Michigan, and Illinois; an island in Pacific; and charitable bequests of $70,000. This was great wealth in the mid-nineteenth century, the highest tier of any Fortune 500 equivalency of the day. Yet Howland’s success had been duplicated forty or fifty times over by other New Bedford whaling merchants during his lifetime. Half of these successes had been forged by men named Howland, descendants of Henry Howland, brother of John Howland, who had arrived in America aboard the
Mayflower
. There were at least twenty Howland millionaires in New Bedford during George Howland’s lifetime, close and distant cousins. Most of them, like George, were devout Quakers.

His sons, George Howland, Jr., and George Jr.’s half brother Matthew, inherited their father’s ships, wharf, countinghouse, candle factory, and whaling business. In 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, two of their ships, the
Corinthian
and the
George Howland,
returned to their wharf in New Bedford with a total of 930 barrels of sperm oil (from the head “case,” or reservoir, of sperm whales) and 8,100 barrels of whale oil (the lesser quality made from boiling down blubber). The gross return from these two voyages was $383,433, from which George Jr. and Matthew first paid themselves back the $50,000 invested in outfitting the ships. Half of the remaining $333,433 went to the captains and crews as their share of the profits; $166,716 was the two Howland brothers’ net profit on these two voyages alone. They received additional income from their candle-making and oil-refining factories and other related businesses. Undoubtedly most of it went back into the business, for as Quakers the Howlands lived simply and modestly, but at a time when a common workingman’s annual earnings might be between $50 and $300, when a federal district judge in the East earned between $2,000 and $3,700 per year, and the president of the United States earned $25,000, the Howland brothers were netting annually around $100,000 each—with no income tax to pay.

It’s understandable if George Howland, Jr., looking back over the improvements made to his city during his own and his father’s lifetimes, could not—or would not—see beyond the incontrovertible facts of his own circumstances. During the previous one hundred years, the town had grown from a scattering of smallholdings along a riverbank to arguably the richest town in America. His father had ridden that growth to unprecedented wealth and passed it on to him and his brother, and at any time before the summer of 1871, George Jr. and Matthew could point only to the continued improvement of their personal wealth and business.

George Jr.’s walk home from anywhere in New Bedford, climbing the gentle hill that rose from the harbor, would have underscored this steadfast belief, for down the hill and as far as he could see in any direction, in tangible brick, wood, iron, and seething human endeavor, lay the whole of reality as he had always known it. Below him spread the waterfront, lined with warehouses, ship chandlers, thousands of barrels of oil, and the countinghouses of merchants whose names had been well known a century earlier. Every foot of wharf up and down both river-banks was jammed with moored whaling ships; others lay at anchor in the river waiting for dock space to unload their cargoes, or to refit and load supplies for another voyage. By any route home, Howland passed the substantial houses of other merchants and ships’ captains who had grown rich on whaling. The town was “perhaps the dearest place in all New England,” Melville had written in
Moby-Dick
. “Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent than in New Bedford. Whence came they? All these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

George Jr.’s own four-story brick mansion and carriage house on Sixth Street, occupying an entire east-west block, and half a block north-south between Bush and Walnut streets (where it still stands today), was the most solid, unassailable measure of his substance, and of the permanence of his business. He had designed the house himself, had it built in 1834, and had lived in it for more than thirty years. Barrels of whale oil and bricks and mortar were equally solid to George Howland, Jr., and his sense of security about his business and the business of New Bedford was unshakably strong. How could he not think so?

The smart money agreed with him. R. G. Dun & Co., the early credit-reporting and business-information agency, described and rated George Jr. and Matthew Howland in 1856 as being: “of the middle age both of them, men of good character and habits, and of business capacity; each with several hundred thousand dollars—ship owners, dealers and oil manufacturers. Good and safe.”

George Howland, Jr., married Sylvia Allen, a distant cousin, the grandchild of another Howland. They had three sons, but two died in infancy, and the third at the age of twenty-eight. Perhaps grief propelled him out of his house to lose himself in service to his community. A family biographer writing in 1885, when George Jr. was seventy-nine years old, noted that “he has been frequently sought for to fill public positions of trust.” He was a member of the town’s school committee; he represented New Bedford at the General Court of Massachusetts; he was twice the city’s mayor; a member of the State Senate; a trustee of the New Bedford Institution for Savings and of the Five Cent Savings Bank; a trustee of the State Lunatic Hospital; a trustee of Brown University; a trustee of the New Bedford Public Library, to which he donated his first two years’ salary as mayor ($1,600); and in 1870 he was one of the commissioners appointed by President Grant to visit the Osage Indians in Oklahoma, where he spent a few weeks living in a tepee. In New Bedford, George Howland, Jr.’s, pronouncements were as good as the Delphic Oracle’s. If he said business was good, it must be so.

Laboring in the shadow of his older half brother’s eminence, Matthew Howland maintained far less of a public profile. He was at times a director on several bank boards, and an active member, elder, and clerk of the New Bedford Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, but he wasn’t a statesman or a dignitary or a great traveler. Almost every day of his life after the age of fourteen, he walked downhill to the Howland countinghouse on the waterfront, where he busied himself primarily with the daily management of the family whaling business. While George was about great civic deeds, it was Matthew who oversaw the fitting out and repair of vessels at the Howland wharf, the sale and shipment of oil to many foreign ports, the running of the candle-making factory, the hiring of captains and crews. It was Matthew who wrote to his shipmasters a long letter at the commencement of each voyage: “We give thee the following orders and instructions which thou will attend to during the present voyage. . . .”

Matthew’s home was four deep blocks farther inland from George Jr.’s and the grander mansions on the hill above the harbor. The homes along County Street, which rode the crest of the hill north and south, and those immediately below it on its eastern flank, where George Jr.’s sat, looked down over the harbor and the Acushnet River, and were in turn seen by those below. Matthew’s house on Hawthorn and South Cottage streets offered no view and occupied an unobtrusive position in a flat, leafy neighborhood of solid but not grand houses. (It, too, is still there, today housing medical offices.)