Hetty (2 page)

As the sleigh reached the lower portions of the city, near the waterfront, the aromas of winter air and tobacco were overwhelmed by something baser and more pungent. Whale oil, spilled and leaked a little at a time from untold thousands of casks, coated the piers that poked into the Acushnet River, the streets along the waterfront, the sidewalks, the steps of shops and factories. Under the summer sun the rotting oil gave off a funk that permeated everything. In winter the odor was more muted, perhaps, but it never went away. One backstreet leading to the wharves earned the name “Rose Alley” when some optimist planted rosebushes in a vain attempt to mask the smell left by wagons carrying casks of oil. But if the rancid smell offended delicate nostrils, the residents of New Bedford were savvy enough to recognize that whale oil smelled like money.

Within a few blocks of the waterfront, blacksmiths made whaling irons and harpoons, rivets, and nails; coopers made casks; boatwrights fashioned sturdy whaleboats from local timber. The air rang with the clank of hammers on metal and the rip of saw blades through wood. Outfitters stocked dried apples, codfish, corn, tobacco, paint, canvas, and rum in quantities needed for voyages that often lasted three or four years. An equally furious and busy industry dedicated itself to converting oil and whalebone delivered by returning ships into lamp oil, watch oil, candles, hairpins, and corsets. Language in this part of town was coarse, direct, and loud. Robinsons voice could be heard above the din, shouting at dockworkers to speed up, to load and unload faster. Hetty loved to follow her father here, when he would permit. It was her favorite part of town.

The headquarters of Isaac Howland Jr. and Company were in a three-story building at the foot of Union Street, next to the wharves. It was a serious, sturdy building of simple architecture,
made of stone and brick. On the first floor was a store for outfitting the company’s ships with supplies. On the third floor, artisans fashioned sails and rigging. But the second floor was the financial heart of the company—the counting room. Here, Robinson and a small staff of managers and clerks tabulated profits and losses, expenses, insurance costs, and wages, and kept track of the ever-changing price per barrel of oil. Here, all of the blood, violence, romance, lore, and adventure of whaling on high and distant seas were reduced to a pure essence of dollars.

Perhaps the only thing about Black Hawk Robinson that could be described as weak was his eyesight. And so from a young age Hetty read the financial news to her father, and to her maternal grandfather, Gideon Howland, a partner in the firm. She read shipping statistics, tariff news, currency debates, the latest on securities and investments, and trade news from New York. She absorbed everything. By the time she was fifteen, by her own reckoning, she knew more about finance than many financial men. Occasionally she would detect in her father’s stern face something like approval, some faint signal, almost akin to forgiveness, for her double sin of having been bom a girl instead of a boy, and for having been healthy and strong and full of life when her infant brother died. Looking back on her childhood many years later, Hetty would recall, “My father taught me never to owe anyone anything. Not even a kindness.”

Here, then, was New Bedford during the 1830s and ‘40s, when Hetty was a child. The first great oil fortunes in the United States were established not by Texans poking into the hard-baked earth, but by New England mariners roaming the seas in search of whales. The original whaling capital, the island of Nantucket, faded in the early 1800s when newer, larger ships outgrew the limitations of Nantucket’s shallow harbor. The industry moved west to the mainland and New Bedford. By 1839, 212 of 498 American whaling ships called New Bedford or neighboring Fairhaven home.

The prime quarry was the sperm whale, which had the biological misfortune to possess the best oil. Not only was the oil derived from its blubber superior to other whales’, but the sperm whale had another feature that hunters found irresistible. Located at the top of its enormous head was a case containing up to 500 gallons of pure, fine oil just waiting to be scooped up. In a business where almost nothing came easy—from stalking and killing an animal the size of one’s ship to “trying out” book-sized chunks of blubber over a deck fire belching black, greasy smoke—baling the case provided a sort of orgiastic release for crewmen. They clambered up the enormous head, carefully split it open so as not to spill any of the precious fluid, and dipped round-bottomed buckets, affixed to the ends of poles, into the cavern. Whalers called the oil spermaceti because, exposed to air, it thickened to the consistency of human seminal fluid (hence the sperm whale’s name). As the case emptied, a crewman or two would slide in to obtain the last precious drops.

At the end of a long voyage, a fortunate ship might groan back toward home port bulging with 4,000 barrels of oil—worth more than $100,000—destined to grease the nation’s machines and illuminate its nights. America ran on the by-products of slaughtered whales. Their oil lubricated watches, clocks, and guns. Wealthy young women wore corsets of whalebone and perfume containing ambergris, a waxy substance found in the whale’s intestines.

Located on the western banks of the Acushnet River, about forty miles south of Boston, New Bedford was a curious amalgam of refinement and roughness. Oil revenue didn’t just enrich individual whaling families; it also loaded municipal coffers—through personal estate taxes, real estate taxes, and poll taxes levied at $1.50 per voter—with enough money to turn New Bedford into a model of civic pride. In an age when one could expect to sink to one’s ankles in mud, muck, and filth just to cross a busy New York City street, several of New Bedford’s prominent thoroughfares were paved and their sidewalks flagged.

The central part of New Bedford was laid out in a neat grid of wide, tree-lined streets set on ground that rose rapidly away from the riverfront. In 1840, New Bedford spent more than $66,000 for highways, street lighting, and other civic improvements. The town’s population increased fourfold from 1830 to 1840, from a little over three thousand to more than twelve thousand. The city boasted a membership library with more than five thousand volumes, a lyceum that offered winter lectures by out-of-town dignitaries who received honoraria to speak, two medical societies, and an athenaeum. New Bedford had an active abolitionist movement, supported by both black and white residents, and was the terminus for hundreds of slaves, including Frederick Douglass, escaping the South via the underground railroad. Although Quaker families—Hetty’s included—often shipped their children off to private Quaker schools—many of the city’s three thousand school-age children attended good public schools. Benjamin Evans, boys’ principal at the Charles Street School, earned $600 per year. His counterpart, girls’ principal Julia H. Haskell, received $300.

“There were two New Bedfords in this early day,” local historian Zephaniah Pease wrote, “one a fair and dignified village on the hilltop, where were patrician mansions, with opulent gardens, the homes of the whaling merchants and captains. The other was made up of squalid sections where the sailors and those who preyed upon them [lived], the saloons, where delirium and death were sold, the boarding houses, the dance halls and houses where female harpies reigned and vice and violence were rampant.” Returning sailors could relieve years of pent-up lust and thirst at brothels and saloons that flourished in red-light districts with colorful, Dickensian names such as Hard Dig and The Marsh.

Herman Melville stayed in New Bedford briefly before shipping out aboard the
Acushnet
in January 1841—the voyage that provided the raw material for his masterpiece, Moby
Dick.
In the book, he noted New Bedford’s contradictions. “A queer place,” he called it. “Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in
New Bedford.” And yet a few blocks away at the bustling waterfront, “actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.” In addition to cannibals, Melville might well have seen Edward Robinson, shouting at sailors and dockworkers to pick up the pace. He might have seen Hetty, just past her sixth birthday, padding along at Robinsons heels.

Hetty Howland Robinson missed by one thin branch of the family tree the right to call herself a
Mayflower
descendant. Her direct ancestor, Henry Howland, was born in Essex County, England, and arrived in the New World with his brother, Arthur, aboard either the
Fortune
, in 1621, or the Ann, in 1623. Their brother, John, landed shortly before them aboard the
Mayflower.
The brothers settled in Plymouth, acquired land, and for more than twenty-five years prospered as farmers.

In 1648, a new type of Christianity, Quakerism, originated in England and spread quickly to the New World. The name was first given to the group as an insult, because followers of founder George Fox trembled when filled with the word of God. They refused to doff their hats to other men, saving this as a sign of respect for God, and dressed in conspicuously plain garments. These habits made the Quakers seem exotic and strange, but at heart theirs was a rather simple and lovely idea—that God lives within each person. They sought a closer communion with their Maker by stripping away the bureaucratic layer of priests, bishops, ministers, and other holy middlemen represented by organized religion. They met as “Friends,” each individual sharing his or her experiences with God. Detractors misconstrued this as a Quaker claim that every individual
was
God, hence free to ignore Scripture if so moved. In fact, Quakers adhered closely to the established scriptures, and members could be evicted for straying too far in their personal beliefs.

The Howlands must have been extraordinarily moved by this new religion, for converting involved heavy risks. Quakers
were persecuted on both sides of the Atlantic, and nowhere with more fervor than by New England Puritans. The irony of Puritan intolerance—given their own history of persecution at the hands of others—is well known. They harassed Baptists, Episcopalians, suspected witches, and anyone else whose faith deviated, or seemed to deviate, from their own. But they harbored a special distaste for Quakers. The first Quakers to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, were arrested and jailed, their trunks searched, books confiscated and burned in the public market. Other Quakers were whipped, imprisoned, or even hanged, or else tied to the back of a cart and paraded from village to village for public ridicule.

The Howlands, prominent figures in Plymouth, were stripped of public positions and fined for attending and hosting Friends meetings and refusing to pay taxes for the militia. When the pressure became too intense, they pushed southward. In 1652, Henry Howland, Hetty’s direct ancestor, became an original purchaser of the Dartmouth settlement, forerunner to New Bedford.

In a more congenial and accepting environment, away from the Puritans, New Bedford’s Quakers excelled first at farming, then at fishing, and finally at whaling. As their fortunes rose, they lived a peculiar contradiction of their own making. They believed in humility, thriftiness, hard work, plain dwellings and furnishings, and modesty in both dress and behavior. They had no idea what to do when, applying these godly virtues to whaling, they found themselves becoming as rich as sin.

Hetty was never devoutly religious, but traditions of Quaker living filtered down to her and collected in concentrated form. It would be an oversimplification to suggest that she was solely a product of Quakerism taken to extremes. And yet those aspects of her personality that so confounded and fascinated the public during her years of great celebrity—her toughness and piousness, her accumulation of money and her seeming inability to enjoy spending it, her arch disapproval of those who
did
spend their money, her ability to claim poverty and humility while hording a fortune of epic proportions—all of these things can be traced back to that small world, at once drab and colorful, of the New Bedford Quakers.

Hetty’s father, Edward Robinson, was born in Philadelphia in 1800 to a prominent old Quaker family with long roots in Rhode Island. His ancestors, as Hetty always loved to tell people, included a former deputy governor and landholder, William Robinson. Edward Robinson started his career manufacturing cotton and wool in Rhode Island with his brother, William. But he soon became involved with the more profitable oil trade and around 1833 moved to New Bedford to be closer to the center of things. By nature an ambitious, aggressive man, Robinson determined to get ahead however he could. He naturally gravitated toward the most powerful whaling firm, Isaac Howland Jr. and Company.

For several generations, Howlands had turned to the sea for their living. It was Isaac Howland Jr., born in 1755, who laid the groundwork for the whaling fortune that would accrue to Hetty and give her the starting point for her own financial empire. Isaac started modestly in business, but exhibited a thriftiness and an eye for opportunity. He noticed that sailors returning from the West Indies often wore silk stockings purchased on the islands. Isaac bought the soiled stockings off the sailors’ legs, gave them a good, careful wash, and sold them at a profit to wealthy gentlemen of the town.

A tiny man, said to weigh less than 100 pounds, but with uncommon energy and drive, Isaac started Isaac Howland Jr. and Company in the late eighteenth century as a merchant shipping business. He also ran a store selling goods imported from Europe and the West Indies, as well as local produce. But as the whaling trade shifted center from Nantucket to New Bedford, Isaac recognized the potential and began investing in whaling ships about 1815. Isaac Howland Jr. and Company would grow into one of New Bedford’s most active and successful whaling companies, with more than thirty ships.

In addition to the usual hazards associated with extended sea voyages during the early nineteenth century (storms, navigational error, malnutrition, potentially violent natives), hunters chasing sperm whales faced still another danger. The sperm was the only whale known to aggressively defend itself, including attacking whaleboats or even the mother ship by turning its massive head into a battering ram. Such cases, while relatively rare, were the stuff of legend. The ordeal in 1820 of the Nantucket whale ship
Essex
, rammed by an enraged whale, her surviving crew reduced in starvation to eating dead comrades, was lodged in the consciousness of every sailor. In a business fraught with dangers, both physical and financial, Isaac Howland Jr. and Company went to extraordinary lengths to protect its ships. They were outfitted with only the best rigging and supplies, often produced in their own New Bedford stores. And while the company lost its share of ships and men, most stories told about Isaac Howland Jr. and Company were of successful voyages and fantastic takes on the high seas.