Final Voyage (30 page)

There would have been little visible weather to report from inside a train in the very early hours of a November morning, but Ransom’s arrival in New York on November 14 did involve a short passage by boat, since the Pennsylvania Railroad line terminated at Jersey City, on the western shore of the Hudson River. The passengers boarded ferries to a Manhattan riverside terminal and from there took trains to the Grand Central Depot—none of which he had time to note, because he temporarily lost his bags:

It’s no wonder his bags were misplaced. The recently completed Grand Central Depot (not the present structure, which was built between 1903 and 1913) had been open only a few weeks, and combined four lines, the New York Central, the Hudson River, the New York and Harlem, and the New Haven railroads, creating much chaos and confusion with luggage.

Ransom must have hurriedly written this last entry (above) in the
John Wells
’s logbook somewhere inside the depot—after sorting out his baggage problem, but before learning that he would in fact be out of New York and on his way to Massachusetts that afternoon. He was part of a large group from the shipwrecked fleet that was making its way from San Francisco to New Bedford together. Their progress was reported on November 16 by the
Republican Standard
of New Bedford, where many families eagerly awaited them:

While the returning sons and husbands of New Bedford, Mattapoisett, Edgartown, New London, and elsewhere were welcomed and embraced by their families, second-guessers in whaling ports everywhere began to voice suggestions—just as the captains had anticipated—that the fleet had been abandoned too hastily.
The Friend
, the whaling community’s newspaper in Honolulu, quickly responded strongly to these critics:

With so many lives at stake, the whaling captains had undoubtedly made the prudent decision. And yet, they may in fact have left too soon.

Thomas Williams had moved his family from Wethersfield, Connecticut, to the San Francisco Bay area after the Civil War, and on their return from Honolulu, Eliza and the younger children settled back into their home in Oakland. But Thomas immediately began making plans to return to the Arctic. With Samuel Merritt, the former mayor of Oakland, and others, he formed a salvage company. They bought and outfitted the whaleship
Florence
, and with a large crew that included his oldest son, Stancel, Williams sailed north again in May of 1872.

Others had the same idea, and a number of salvage ships joined the smaller but undeterred fleet of whaleships again trying to push through the ice in the Bering Strait in early summer. As they neared the whaling grounds, the whaleships and the salvors were met by Eskimos in their
umiak
s with great quantities of baleen for trade. They presumed these cargoes had been plundered from the abandoned whaleships.

Thomas Williams and his crew beat all the competing salvors to the fleet by traveling ahead inside the ice in whaleboats—a reversal of their escape. Near Wainwright Inlet they came upon the wrecks: ships lying on their sides in the shallows, their masts and spars broken, hulls crushed, timbers, rigging, barrels, boats, sea chests, and supplies littering the shore. Most of the ships were readily identifiable, even in their scattered pieces: Williams found parts of the
Monticello
’s bow and stern half a mile apart. A number of the ships, including the Howlands’ beautiful
Concordia
, had been burned.

Astonishingly, there was a witness to the aftermath of the fleet’s abandonment waiting to tell Williams and others what had happened after they had left. A boatsteerer from one of the ships had not gone with them in the whaleboats. He had stayed behind, planning to spend the winter inside one of the ships, to salvage what he could from them. His identity was not recorded, but what he told the men who met him on the shore in 1872 was soon known from Honolulu to New Bedford: two weeks after the whaleboats had escaped to the south, a heavy northeasterly gale—what everyone had been hoping and praying for—had sprung up and pushed out to sea most of the ice, freeing the ships. The greatest damage had then occurred from their being unmanned, smashing and grinding into each other and the leftover ice. The natives had subsequently looted what they could. Although many of the departing crews had smashed their liquor bottles so the Eskimos wouldn’t find them, they had not thought to destroy their medicine chests. These had been found and opened, and some of the Eskimos had died after drinking the contents of their medicine bottles. These ships the Eskimos had burned. The winter appeared to have been a mild one, for the whalers and salvors found only small scattered ice. But the boatsteerer, who had felt his life in danger from the Eskimos, said $150,000 would not tempt him to spend another winter in the Arctic.

Thomas Williams floated and secured two ships, the
Minerva
and the
Seneca
, and filled his own and these two vessels with barrels of salvaged oil and many tons of baleen. He put his crews aboard the two ships and sailed south, the
Minerva
sailing by herself, the
Florence
towing the
Seneca
. He was forced to cut the
Seneca
free during a gale, and the ship was lost, but the
Florence
and the
Minerva
returned to San Francisco with a cargo of oil and baleen worth $10,000—all that was realized from a potential catch, had all the ships returned to port with average cargoes, worth $1.5 million.

George Jr. and Matthew Howland had lost three of their ten ships, the
Concordia
, the
Thomas Dickason
, and the
George Howland
, and their cargoes, for which they had no insurance.

“How Hard It Is to Rise, When You’re Really, Truly Down”

—LLEWELLYN HOWLAND III, “Children of the Light” (1964)

D
isasters that are more abstract, while no less damaging or terrifying, are more difficult to perceive than a crushed whaleship. Their true scale and ramifications may not be seen until they are well advanced. They take men by surprise in the middle of a normal day when they look up and find the world changed forever.

The
Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript
scarcely knew what to think about the state of its industry following the arctic disaster of 1871. It reported, in February 1872, under the headline “Review of the Whale Fishery for 1871”: “We have to record another year of poor success in the whalefishery, both as concerns oil taken and pecuniary results.” Poor results might occur in any year, but the prospects for the future had never looked so ominous: “Of the 34 vessels now in port, half are for sale.”

Also for sale in New Bedford, but not selling, despite the enormous losses in the Arctic the previous summer, were thousands of barrels of oil, covering wharves and filling warehouses. Prices were depressed, and their owners were holding on to them, hoping for an improvement in the market. “With the uncertainty in [oil] prices, partly from substitutes [petroleum], and low prices of them, only good prices can be hoped for, and not counted upon.”

Yet three weeks later, the newspaper peevishly dismissed the summary of its own reports reprinted elsewhere: “The following which we clip from the Philadelphia Commercial List, shows how near home, an idea erroneous, may be disseminated:

The
Whalemen’s Shipping List
vigorously rebutted such dire conclusions—“We don’t believe in the dying of whaling”—citing a confusing series of numbers meant to reveal the Philadelphia paper’s ignorance of the difference between the sperm and right whale fisheries, and the returns from bone and oil sales. But a month later the
Shipping List
carried the following two articles:

In New Bedford, business was down, self-medication was up. In October 1872, the
Whalemen’s Shipping List
lamented that another three New Bedford whaleships, the
Helen Snow
, the
Roscoe
, and the
Sea Breeze
, had been lost the previous August in the Arctic, and that the season there had again been a poor one, although “ships had done as well as usual walrusing.”

Joseph Grinnell’s Wamsutta Mills—four of them built and operating at a profit at the time of the disaster in the Arctic, and a fifth under construction, to open in 1875—saved New Bedford from complete economic collapse. While work along the waterfront and whaling’s attendant service and product industries slowed and ground to a halt, many whalemen, particularly the Portuguese immigrants and their families living in the shanty neighborhoods along the river, found steadier work, even a growing demand for employment, in the mills. The city’s poorer inhabitants had no investment or long family history in the whale fishery to tie them to it or keep them hoping, unrealistically, for an unlikely turnaround. They wanted only work and wages, and to get these without leaving home for years at a time was an added benefit.

No sudden, calamitous depression overtook New Bedford as a whole. Rather, there was a washing away, as if by a slow but inexorable tide, of an old order, and its concurrent replacement by a very different one. And in the course of this exchange, the nature and tone of New Bedford changed. It lost its elite position as a headquarters for a fabulously wealthy plutocracy and began to establish itself as a working-class city that was soon in the vanguard of the burgeoning textile industry. Just as whaling and the Industrial Revolution had fueled each other’s growth, the development of the railroads and the use of mail-order catalogues, like Sears, Roebuck’s, created a continent-wide market for cotton and textile goods—in the form of clothing for farmers and their families in the expanding West—while conveniently supplying New Bedford with a new industry, just as the old one withered. Workers’ homes and whole new neighborhoods sprouted up in the immediate vicinities of the proliferating mills, while the genteel center of the town began to calcify and grow brittle. Large houses that had remained in families for generations were put up for sale.