Months later, in late July, eight thousand miles north of Tasmania, at the extreme top of the Pacific, the
Superior
was nosing past the Dio mede Islands into the Bering Strait. Aboard his ship, Roys had kept his intentions entirely to himself. His crew and officers had no idea he had sailed without permission, where he had brought them, or how far he was intending to go. They certainly knew they were in the far north—from the weather and glimpses of the coast; probably somewhere “on Kamchatka [grounds],” they supposed—but when they saw seven native
umiak
canoes filled with more than 250 Eskimos paddling toward them from the low shore, they lost their composure. Eskimos in walrus-skin boats were not found at sea off the Kamchatka peninsula. At that moment, the
Superior
was becalmed, unable to move, unable to avoid the oncoming native flotilla, and Roys’s men were terrified—he recorded that his first mate broke down in tears. Roys himself didn’t know if the natives, in such large numbers, outnumbering his crew by many times, had friendly or hostile intentions. Apart from harpoons, the only weapon aboard the
Superior
was “one Blunt & Sims revolver that would not go unless you threw it.” But before the Eskimos got close enough for that, a breeze came across the water from the southwest. The men clapped on sail and the ship pulled slowly away—still to the north, and soon into an icy fog. Roys’s crew remained so frightened that many of them “never expected to see home again.”
When the fog cleared away a day later, whales were breaching the surface of the sea around the
Superior
in all directions, in numbers none of them had ever seen before. They appeared huge; the mates thought they were humpbacks, but Roys now believed he had found something new to commercial whaling: the polar whale the Russian naval officer and Captain Sodring had spoken of. The boats were lowered, although Roys’s spooked whalemen “were not inclined to meddle with ‘the new fangled monster’ as they called him.” Yet the will of the captain was rarely opposed, especially one as forceful as Roys. And despite their fears, the men were as keenly motivated as their captain: big fat whales meant money for all. The men did as they were told, got into the boats, and pulled off into the long arctic twilight.
It was midnight but still light when the boatsteerer in Roys’s boat threw his first harpoon. It stuck fast and the whale sounded immediately. It swam along the bottom (only 25 fathoms, or 150 feet, deep here in the Bering Strait), towing Roys and his men in their boat for fifty minutes until Roys “began to think that I was fast to something that breathed water instead of air and might remain down a week if he liked.” The mates were now convinced, by its size and lung capacity, that it was a humpback. Then the whale rose to the surface and was quickly and easily lanced and killed. Only when the whalemen began to “cut in” the whale alongside the ship were they finally persuaded they had caught something quite unusual. The baleen—the long, curved, keratinous fronds that hang in the whale’s mouth like a dense curtain to filter out the plankton and shrimp from great mouthfuls of seawater—was twelve feet long, almost twice the size of right whale baleen; and the immensely thick blubber evolved for such cold seas produced 120 barrels (3,780 gallons) of oil, far more than the yield of most other whales.
Roys sailed the
Superior
and its unwilling crew another 250 miles north into the Arctic Ocean. They caught whales all the way, yet despite the sudden astonishing success of the voyage, in which every man would share, Roys’s officers and crew remained spooked, “living in hourly expectation of some unforeseen calamity and almost beside themselves with fear,” he remembered later. “I actually believe if they had any hope that open mutiny would have succeeded they would have tried it to get away from this sea.”
Over the next month, Roys and his men caught eleven whales north of the Bering Strait, yielding 1,600 barrels of oil—several years’ haul on a normal voyage—stopping only when the ship was full and could take no more. On August 27, the
Superior
turned south and sailed for Hawaii.
FROM HIS CONVERSATIONS with Russians in Petropavlosk, Roys would have known the likely intentions of the seven boatloads of Eskimos: they were hoping to trade. The exchange of iron, tobacco, and knives for the natives’ seal, fox, and sea otter furs was already a well-established commerce. But the fears of his crew were not misplaced, and the hackles on the back of Roys’s own neck would also have told him that the Eskimos were opportunistically prepared for any possibility, including taking over the whaleship by force—which, with his broken pistol and cowering crew, would have been a pushover if the ship hadn’t conveniently sailed away.
The
Superior
was probably the first whaleship any of the Eskimos had seen, although it would have looked no different to them from the other square-rigged sailing ships whose appearance in arctic and subarctic waters was, just then, beginning to be not uncommon. Contact between Russian and European explorers, traders, and the native peoples of the Bering and Chukchi sea coasts was already more than a century old. Roys would have learned in Petropavlosk and elsewhere of Russia’s longtime interest in the Arctic, begun in 1648, when a band of Cossacks, traders, and hunters looking for new plunder sailed out of the Kolyma River into the Arctic Ocean. Eighty years later, Czar Peter the Great appointed a Danish captain serving in the Russian navy, Vitus Bering, to lead an expedition from Kamchatka east to explore the North American coast. In 1728, Bering’s two ships sailed north up the Siberian shore, through the strait that now bears his name, and then back again as far as Okhotsk. Many Russian expeditions followed, all bent on securing trade, fur, mining rights, and sovereignty on the coast of America, only fifty-nine miles from the easternmost tip of Asian Russia.
Roys would certainly have known of Captain James Cook’s exploration of the Arctic seventy years earlier—Cook’s surveys were the basis for many of the charts carried by American and British navigators throughout the Pacific. Cook was already famous, promoted to post-captain and a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, when he left England for the last time, on his third voyage, in 1776. Two years later, his ships
Resolution
and
Discovery
passed through Bering Strait and pushed as far north as 70’ 41” N, the latitude of Wainwright Inlet, less than a hundred miles from Point Barrow, before being stopped by a “moveable mass of . . . heavy loose ice.”
THE NEWS OF ROYS’S VOYAGE, radiating outward from Hawaii around the globe through the press, but most powerfully and quickly by word of mouth, was as electric and galvanizing to the whale fishery as the
Emelia
’s first voyage around Cape Horn. Roy’s discovery of the western arctic grounds was the most important in the whole history of whaling. His men’s fearful reaction to what they saw there was entirely reasonable: the Arctic was, by all seaman-like criteria, no place for an unwieldy wooden ship. Yet soon fleets would flock there in a feeding frenzy. Over the next fifty years, more than 2,700 whaling voyages were made to the icy wastes north of the Bering Strait. More than 150 whaleships were lost there. More than 20,000 bowhead whales, as Roys’s big whale with the bow-shaped mouth full of baleen came to be called, were killed, hunted to near extinction.
In 1853, only five years after Roys’s voyage, the anonymous whaling captain publishing his letters in the
Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript
, described what had happened since:
Then the great combined fleet moved northward towards the pole, and there the ships of almost all the whaling ports in the world are and have been for several seasons lending their united efforts to the destruction of the whale—capturing even the young. These polar whales were most easily captured, at first, but . . . his nature [has] been entirely changed by constant and untiring pursuit. He is no longer the slow and sluggish beast we at first found him. Particularly at the latter part of the season, they are very shy. I have often noticed, after one or two whales were struck in the morning, after the fog cleared, that the entire body of whales would be stirred up, so that it would be almost impossible to strike [another] one during the whole day. Within a space of from ten to twelve miles there would be from fifteen to thirty ships, all doing their best, but the greatest number were to be seen without any smoke [i.e., no tryworks burning, hence no whales caught]. On the 4th of September I counted fifty-eight ships, and only twelve of them were boiling. . . . I know that the whales have diminished since I was here two years ago, and that they are more difficult to strike. How can it be otherwise? Look at the immense fleet, stretching from Cape Thaddeus to the Straits! By day and by night the whale is chased and harassed—the fleet perpetually driving them, until they reach the highest navigable latitudes of the Arctic. The only rest they have is when the fogs are thick, and the wind high. There could not have been less than three thousand polar whales killed last season, yet the average of oil [for each ship in the fleet] is only about half as great as it was two years ago.
It is impossible now to read such a lamentation of the decline of nature in any but ecological terms. But the writer above, and the audience he was addressing, never thought about ecology. It would be a century before the work of Rachel Carson and others tipped the public consciousness into that direction. The shipmaster’s last line reveals the true focus of his concern: “[These facts show that] it will not long be profitable to send ships to the Arctic.”
Eight
The Newer Bedford
D
artmouth was still a quiet backwater of independent farmers, fishermen, and a few carpenters and blacksmiths, with no unifying central industry, when Joseph Rotch left Nantucket in 1765 with the intention of establishing a whaling port somewhere on the mainland. He had centered his search along the coast of Buzzards Bay, conveniently close to both Nantucket and Boston. The Acushnet River, running into the bay’s north shore from far inland, was wide and deep enough to accommodate a squadron of large ships, but arms of land at the river’s mouth formed a sheltered, landlocked harbor. There were long, straight stretches of river shoreline on which to build wharves and shipping facilities. Woods offering fine lengths of timber—completely absent in Nantucket—with which to build ships, houses, a port, and all its trimmings, lay in all directions.
Some whaling had been carried on here, though when Rotch arrived it was almost a hundred years behind Nantucket in its development. Eighty whaleships sailed from Nantucket in 1756, while “several” set out from Dartmouth at about the same time. A rough map from this period shows only one structure on the western shore of the Acushnet, the site of present-day New Bedford. This was the “try house” belonging to one Joseph Russell, who was using the place as a base from which to send out whaleships, and to process their cargoes when these vessels returned home laden with hogsheads of blubber. His ancestor, John Russell, son of settler Ralph, had been the township’s first representative at the General Court at Plymouth after Dartmouth’s incorporation in 1664. Joseph Russell—the third of that name—had acquired a large parcel of land along the Acushnet’s western bank. In 1760, he sold some of this land to John Loudon, a boat-caulker, who intended to set up his own boatyard; the next year, Benjamin Taber bought a site and erected a shed for boatbuilding and block-making; and house carpenter John Allen bought land nearby and built a house. In 1762, Elnathan Sampson, a blacksmith from Wareham, bought a site south of John Loudon’s place.
Rotch first tried to buy land on the east bank of the Acushnet—the town of Fairhaven today—but here, too, lay an existing “try house and oyl shed” whose owner was unwilling to sell. Unable to secure the shore rights he wanted there, Rotch paddled across the river and bought up a large parcel from Joseph Russell. He soon employed the skills of his neighbors, and the names Loudon, Taber, Allen, Sampson, Russell, and Rotch became hallmarks in the whaling business that grew here.
Rotch’s timing was pure kismet. He brought money and boldness to Dartmouth, but history made an alchemy with these. Whale products as illuminants and lubricants were relatively new and scarce at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Lighting and lubrication were still supplied by products that had served adequately for millennia. Sponge-like mosses soaked in animal fat placed in shells or stones were being used as lamps at least seventy thousand years ago. Palm, olive, and fish oils were used in lamps in China and Egypt long before Homeric times (though not generally in the Middle East or in Greece: torches are specified throughout the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
). Tallow was the mother of all greases. Tubs of it were at hand throughout history, to swab every moving mechanism, from chariot wheels to guillotines. Easily made from the chopped-up, boiled-down, waxy white protective suet fat packed around the kidneys and loins of cattle, sheep, and horses, tallow had long been abundant. It worked well. It made soaps and candles. There was no need for anything else until, in the eighteenth century, everything changed—first, and most profoundly, in Britain.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain’s colonies in Virginia and New England, as well as in India, the West Indies, and Australasia, were beginning to produce great quantities of raw material such as cotton, coffee, tea, sugar, spices, lumber, fur, and slaves. In return, the colonists and their growing towns and cities, and, by extension through trade, the colonies’ natives—Indians, with their desire for metal and cloth—became an insatiable market for British and European manufactured goods. At home, Britain was discovering huge deposits of coal and iron ore beneath its ancient landscape. Throughout the eighteenth century, there was a merging of these and many other things. In 1709, the process that produced pig iron by smelting iron ore with coke and limestone in a blast furnace was perfected. Pig iron was the raw material for the great clanking wheels, the blocks, the levers, the pistons, and all the wheezing, racing machinery that was about to convert Britain from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The inventions of the fly shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom transformed the discrete, homely, truly cottage industries of spinning and weaving into William Blake’s dark satanic mills and factories that sprang up like brick toadstools all over England’s pewter-gray, mineral-rich Midlands. Threshing machines made large numbers of farmworkers redundant; parliamentary acts governing land enclosure forced people off the land and into growing cities, looking for work. They lived in wretched urban warrens that shocked contemporary observers who were bold enough to look through the doorways, and they bred like rabbits. Britain’s population doubled in the eighteenth century. Light was needed in every hovel and home, shop and factory, and in the lamps of miners; and the gears and machinery of the Industrial Revolution would require millions of barrels of lubrication.