The Shining Sea (23 page)

Midshipman John Cowan and eight men were placed on board the
Barclay
to supplement Randall's crew, and both ships steered toward the
Peruvian port of Paita, 625 miles north of Lima. Porter intended to look into Paita for any British vessels before sailing to the Galapagos Islands, where he expected to find a substantial portion of the enemy's whaling fleet. Randall assured Porter, as everyone else had, that the Galapagos were the principal fishing grounds of British whalers.

The following evening, April 4, gunner's mate James Spafford, who had lingered on in great pain since his accidental shooting on the Island of Mocha, died. Before burying him, Porter ordered an inquest to satisfy the crew, and to relieve Lieutenant McKnight. Lieutenants Downes, Wilmer, Wilson, and marine lieutenant John Gamble were appointed to the board of inquest. After considering the matter carefully, they held the grief-stricken McKnight blameless for shooting Spafford, declaring it to have been an accident.

A short time later, a mournful cry, “All hands, bury the dead, ahoy,” brought the men to the weather deck. With heads uncovered, they listened in respectful silence as Chaplain David Adams read the traditional service for the burial of the dead. At the conclusion, he pronounced the baleful words, “We therefore commit his body to the deep,” and poor Spafford, who had been sewn up in his hammock with two cannonballs attached to his feet, slid down a tipped board placed at the gangway and splashed into the sea.

A
FTER QUITTING THE VICINITY OF
C
ALLAO, THE
E
SSEX
AND THE
Barclay
stood WNW toward Paita. They kept an eye out for the
Nimrod,
but they never saw her. She seemed to have vanished. On April 6 at three o'clock, a lookout at the mainmast cried out a sail. Porter steered toward the stranger, but soon discovered that the sail was the Rock of Pelado. An hour later a lookout saw another sail and Porter again gave chase. He brought her to at seven o'clock. She was a Spanish brig out of Callao. Believing the
Essex
to be an English frigate, the captain and one of his passengers told Porter that Peru considered Britain an ally and the United States a neutral that could soon become an enemy. It went without saying that Peru considered itself part of Spain. The passenger suggested the Galapagos Islands as the best place to find American and British whalers.

The next morning, April 7, the
Essex
and the
Barclay
continued north toward Paita. In order to search as much of the ocean as possible, they
kept apart during the day and could barely see each other's signals. At night they came together. In their journey north they passed near the small islands of Lobos de la Mare and Lobos de la Terre. Fifteen miles apart and well off the coast, they were devoid of vegetation, but the variety and volume of marine and bird life were astounding. Exotic birds covered the barren hills, while seals in great numbers cavorted in the nearby waters. Fish of all kinds were active, pursued by birds, seals, boneters, and porpoises. The same scene was repeated as they entered the Bay of Paita, where the sea boiled with aquatic life. Large fish and seals chasing small fish, were seen with flocks of birds hovering overhead. There may have been whales in the vicinity below the surface, but Porter did not see any.

On April 11, the
Essex
and
Barclay
approached the harbor of Paita with the majestic saddle of Paita mountain in the background. Two crude catamarans approached and their skippers talked with Porter, telling him there were no vessels of interest in the harbor. He took them at their word, turned around, and shaped a course for the Galapagos Islands.

CHAPTER

12

F
ORTUNE
S
MILES IN THE
G
ALAPAGOS
I
SLANDS

T
HE
G
ALAPAGOS
I
SLANDS STRADDLE THE
E
QUATOR MORE
than 500 miles off the Peruvian coast. The south equatorial, or Humbolt, current runs directly to the islands. Sweeping up the west coast of South America from approximately the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, the famous current curves west at the Equator. In the Age of Sail, together with the prevailing trade winds, the current carried ships comfortably to the archipelago. It was said that it ran more than fifteen miles every twenty-four hours, but Porter suspected the actual rate was much higher, since he frequently met with violent ripples in the sea. The current was darker than the surrounding water, and easily identified. It created a unique climate in the waters around the Galapagos, causing the temperature of the water to rise higher than one might expect and the climate to be milder and drier. Upwelling along the current's route caused the waters around the Galapagos to be remarkably rich in marine life.

Porter used dead reckoning to navigate. The chronometer that had served him so well early in the voyage had been useless since they left St. Catharine's. And he had no good opportunity to correct the dead
reckoning by lunar observation since he was traveling in the warmer season (December to May), when rain was frequent—often coming daily—the skies cloudy much of the time, and the water temperature conducive to swimming.

As the
Essex
progressed through the benign sea, Porter prepared the crew and the ship for combat. He put the magazine in good order, and anticipating calms around the islands, he organized seven boats to attack the enemy, assigning ten men to each boat. He assumed that seventy men in seven boats would be more than enough to capture any armed whaler. Lieutenant Downes was in charge of the attack force.

On the morning of April 17, the
Essex
and the
Barclay
arrived off Chatham (San Cristobal) Island, the easternmost of the larger Galapagos. Porter thought it was Hood (Española) Island, but soon discovered that Hood was to the south and steered for it. He was in uncharted waters and had to be careful. Dangerous reefs, irregular, violent currents, as well as heavy swells that could throw a ship on the rocks, were constant hazards. Often the water was so deep near the shore that it was almost impossible to bring a vessel up by her anchors, leaving her at the mercy of a strong current or adverse wind. There were men aboard who had been to the Galapagos before, however, and they helped Porter navigate. He also had British Captain James Colnett's charts (the only ones that existed), although he often found them to be inadequate, and in places dangerously misleading.

Porter undoubtedly exaggerated the inadequacies of Colnett's charts. In fact, Colnett was an accomplished craftsman. From 1772 to 1775 he sailed with Captain Cook on his second voyage of exploration around the world in the
Resolution
. Colnett was a midshipman at the time and could not have had a better tutor than Cook, who was the world's leading cartographer.

Colnett made his charts in 1793, when Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger sent him to explore the eastern Pacific in the merchant ship
Rattler
. Pitt sent him to find harbors where bases could be established to serve the growing fleet of British whalers fishing in what were universally recognized as the richest whaling grounds in the world, containing vast numbers of highly prized sperm whales. Pitt hoped Colnett would find
ports that Britain could control, as they did Cape Town and St. Helena. Colnett was well schooled in how to keep a crew healthy on a long voyage, and he knew as much about the eastern Pacific as any officer in the Royal Navy.

During the four years prior to Colnett's voyage, the British developed an intense interest in the whale fishery along the west coast of South America and the Galapagos Islands. The demand for whale oil in Britain, especially sperm oil, was growing so fast in the early 1790s that their whaling fleet had a hard time keeping up.

The pioneering voyage of the British whale ship
Emilia
from 1788 to 1790 had confirmed the rich rewards awaiting those who braved the passage around the Horn to fish in the eastern Pacific. On August 7, 1788, London's largest whaling firm, Enderby & Sons, had sent Captain James Shields in the
Emilia
to ascertain just how plentiful sperm whales were off Chile and Peru. Samuel Enderby was a former American Tory who had fled to London before the Revolutionary War. Captain Shields traveled around Cape Horn, up the western coast of South America, and then to the Galapagos Islands. When he returned to London during the first week of March 1790, he reported that the potential for whaling in the eastern Pacific was vast. His glowing account of large sperm whales abounding in those waters started a rush to the area, led by Enderby, who immediately sent the
Emilia
back, along with the
Atlantic, Kitty
, and
Greenwich
. Other London firms sent eight more whalers.

Britain's need for sperm oil was so great that at one time Prime Minister Pitt considered recruiting Nantucket whale men—the finest in the world. He envisioned bringing them to England with their families, establishing them in a port city, requiring them to take an oath of allegiance to the king, and to carry on their vital business from British soil. Pitt talked seriously about the idea with William Rotch, a leading Nantucket whaler, who proposed building a fleet of thirty ships manned by five hundred men. Pitt liked the idea, but English whalers and economic nationalists in Parliament blocked his plans. They were more interested in building a British fleet than handing the business over to Americans. Rotch was not deterred, however. He turned around and set up his colony in Dunkirk under French auspices. Nonetheless, demand for sperm oil remained so high that in
1792 the British permitted a small colony of Nantucket whalers to be established at Milford Haven in Wales. They were required to take an oath of allegiance to the king, but they had no trouble doing it.

Not much time passed after James Shields returned to London in the spring of 1790 before English whalers fishing in the eastern Pacific needed naval bases to protect and service them. As might be expected, Spanish officials were making it difficult, as they always had, to obtain provisions and make repairs in ports along the coast of South America. Spain wanted to keep the aggressive British out of the eastern Pacific. Spanish ports in Chile and Peru were, to all intents and purposes, closed. Bribery allowed some British whalers to use Valparaiso, Calloa, and Paita, but this was an unsatisfactory arrangement from Pitt's point of view, which is why he had dispatched Colnett to find places where Britain could establish her own bases.

American whalers, operating out of ports like New London in Connecticut, Hudson and Sag Harbor in New York, and Nantucket and New Bedford, could have easily supplied Britain's needs. But their oil was kept off the British market by a prohibitively high tariff of 18 pounds 3 shillings per ton on all foreign oil—a duty passed by Parliament in 1783 at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

Captain Colnett left England for the eastern Pacific on January 4, 1793, with orders from Pitt to find places where ports could be established for the whaling fleet. Colnett doubled Cape Horn, sailed up the west coast of South America, and continued along the coast of Central America and Mexico to the Gulf of California. He also visited the Galapagos and other islands, but he did not find what Pitt wanted, and he returned empty-handed on November 1, 1794.

Pitt did not give up. Since Parliament would not reduce the tariff on American whale oil, and was determined to rely on the British fleet, he had to devise ways of making whaling voyages more successful without the prospect of having reliable bases from which to obtain succor. In 1795 Pitt tried to deal with the problem by giving shipowners substantial incentives to engage in the whaling business in the Pacific. A bonus was to be awarded to a fleet of whale ships of not less than eight that sailed into the Pacific, stayed between sixteen and twenty-four months, and returned with at least thirty tons of sperm oil and head-matter. The first ship of
the eight would receive a bonus of 600 pounds and the other seven 500. Parliament approved the scheme, and it worked well.

In 1811, Parliament extended the rewards for three years to ten additional ships that met the same requirements, then it went even further. Parliament encouraged Americans to move their whaling business to the existing community at Milford in Wales, provided they brought twenty whale ships and their crews, resided in Great Britain for at least three years, and conducted their whaling from there. The owners of these ships were allowed to import whale oil and pay the same duties as if they were British, provided the owner took an oath of allegiance to the king. In addition, the owner would be entitled to any bounties Parliament approved for British subjects.