Final Voyage (2 page)

Meanwhile, two of the
Japan
’s crewmen, who had reached dry land and started running up and down the shore to restore their frozen circulation, spotted fresh dog prints in the snow. They followed these to an Eskimo village, whose inhabitants immediately returned with them to the shore to help the sailors.

The Eskimos met Barker staggering out of the surf. They put him on a sled and began pulling him toward their village. On the way, he saw the bodies of many of his men, who, after safely reaching the shore, had collapsed on the ground and frozen to death. He imagined that he, too, was dying.

But there were no hot meals for the survivors. Raw walrus meat and blubber, much of it putrid and rotting, was the only food, and it was days before the whalemen could bring themselves to eat it. “Hunger at last compelled me, and strange as it may appear, it tasted good to me.”

The
Japan
had wrecked on East Cape, Siberia, the easternmost point of mainland Asia, at the top of the Bering Strait. After two months of the native diet, Barker and the healthier members of his remaining crew (others were too weak to travel) set out along the now solidly frozen shore for Plover Bay, several hundred miles away, at the southern end of the strait. This deep, protected harbor was well known to arctic whaling and trading vessels, and was the site of several large Eskimo settlements. Barker hoped he might still find a ship there that could carry him and the rest of his crew away before the onset of the long winter, or at least find better food if they could not get away. The white men had already traded their stiff salt- and ice-sodden pea-coats, canvas foul-weather clothing, wool pants, and boots to the natives, who coveted these smart outfits, for warm fur and skin Eskimo garments and boots, and these served Barker and his men well on their ten-day tramp over ice and rock.
¹
At Plover Bay they found the San Francisco whaler
Hannah B. Bowen
, which was wintering over in the bay. They were taken on board and made comfortable, but four days after they arrived, the
Bowen
sprang a leak as ice thickened around her waterline and stove in some planks, forcing all hands to move ashore. They fixed up a small hut and remained there through the winter, eating the
Bowen
’s more civilized rations. Three times over the next few months, Barker made trips overland through the brief hours of faint daylight to bring provisions to the thirteen men who remained at East Cape. Although the Eskimos there continued to show every kindness to the wrecked sailors, all but one of them, Lewis Kennedy, who was too sick to move, finally could no longer bear the grim austerity of native life and attempted to make the trek south through the strait. They got as far as Indian Point, thirty miles from Barker’s quarters in Plover Bay. One of them froze to death on the way. There they remained.

 

 

 

BARKER AND HIS FIRST MATE, E. W. Irving, told this tale to Captain Dean and the officers of the
John Wells
. The next afternoon, June 6, 1871, they boarded another New Bedford whaler, the
Henry Taber
, which had arrived in Plover Bay, and repeated their story. Both ships then sailed around the coast to Indian Point, where a third New Bedford whaler, the
Contest
, had found and taken aboard the
Japan
’s eleven crewmembers camped there. Ten days later, on June 17, the
Wells
and the
Taber
reached “Owalin” (the present-day Russian settlement of Uelen) near East Cape, where the
Japan
had wrecked, and the ship’s last shipwrecked sailor
,
twenty-four-year-old Lewis Kennedy, an Englishman, was taken aboard the
Taber
. Kennedy had been one of the men who had safely reached shore, and then almost died of hypothermia on the beach. He had never recovered enough to make the trek south, and had remained in the Eskimo settlement, where, despite the best attention and food the Eskimos could give him, he was still unwell. “We’ve now 15 of the japan’s men aboard including Captain & second mate,” wrote the
Wells
’s logkeeper, second mate Nathaniel Ransom, who hailed from New Bedford’s neighboring town of Mattapoisett. At most times, Ransom’s log entries were the usual for ships’ logs: dry, essential details of weather, course, location, and ship’s business; but on this Saturday evening, after hearing of the
Japan
’s ill-fortune, his thoughts flew to the comfort of home, and he added, “Wrote a few lines to my darling wife.”

Abram Briggs, logkeeper aboard the
Henry Taber
, was more forthcoming:

The two young logkeepers, like every other whaleman in the Arctic, readily saw themselves in the
Japan
’s luckless and lucky crew. They were not inured to the prospects that lay beyond a moment’s bad luck, and keenly understood the peril of their situation. They were almost constantly afraid, like men in combat, and devoutly believed that, but for the grace of God, any one of them might find himself shipwrecked in the same unforgivable circumstances, facing a numbing or painfully lingering death, or, at best, a season in icy hell on an Eskimo diet. They put their lives and faith almost equally in the hands of God and His closest proxy in their world, their ships’ captains.

 

 

 

THE
JOHN WELLS,
the
Henry Taber,
and the
Contest
were in the vanguard of a fleet of forty whaling vessels then nosing through the melting ice in the Bering Strait. Most were from New Bedford. Others had sailed from Sag Harbor, New York; New London, Connecticut; and Edgartown, Massachusetts; several were registered in Honolulu; and one ship sailed annually to the Arctic from Sydney, Australia. The ships’ captains and crews fully expected to encounter one another, to see perhaps ten, twenty, even thirty other whaling vessels at a time in good weather, wherever they sailed during the season. But even amid such fierce competition, there was, by 1871, no better place on earth for finding whales.

High in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 300 miles south of the permanent polar ice pack (only 1,200 miles south of the North Pole itself), these “Arctic grounds” opened only for a few months every summer. They comprised a narrow channel that ran along the Alaskan coast from the Bering Strait to Point Barrow, Alaska’s northernmost tip of land, in the shallow water between the shore and the temporarily retreating ice pack. Then, as now, a powerful ocean current pumped northward through the Bering Strait out of the North Pacific, rising from abyssal depths and sweeping over the undersea continental shelf, stirring up and carrying a rich sediment of nitrates, phosphates, and other minerals into the Arctic Ocean. In spring, as the days lengthened toward twenty-four hours of chlorophyll-producing sunlight, this earthy undersea stream mixed with the oxygen-rich surface water at the edge of the melting ice pack to produce a dense, unparalleled efflorescence of plankton in the shallow water off the Alaskan shore. And as the ice melted, the arctic bowhead whales, whose diet consisted of plankton (filtered out of the water by the fronds of baleen that filled their great mouths), came here to feed on this rich soup. And the whalemen came for the whales.

As more ships gathered and nosed through the retreating edge of the ice pack in the strait, captains and crews went visiting. They rowed about in their small whaleboats for “gams”—social visits—aboard other vessels. Barker and first mate Irving accompanied Captain Dean, of the
Wells
, and often remained for several days as guests of other captains, telling again the story of the
Japan
and her crew’s long winter in the Arctic.

One of these ships was the
Monticello
, of New London, Connecticut. Her captain, Thomas William Williams, was one of a number of whaling ship masters who sailed with his wife and children aboard his ship.

Captain Williams’s youngest son, William Fish Williams, was twelve years old when Captain Barker came aboard for a meal in the
Monticello
’s saloon in June 1871. The food served to visitors was always the ship’s finest, yet it was plain. Sailors were not adventurous eaters. Despite the monotony of scanning the horizons for whale spouts for years at a stretch, they wanted dependability in their shipboard diet. Beef, pork, codfish, cheese, bread, and coffee they consumed daily with a relish undiminished by repetition. They were not bold experimenters when it came to the exotic foodstuffs to be found ashore—except for fruit, which, like children, they prized most for its color and sweetness. (One youthful seaman, who had never in his life seen or tasted tomatoes, bought a bag in Japan. Their “sourness” was so surprising that he threw the bag away.)

What young Willie Williams remembered most from his meeting with Barker was the captain’s revolting account of going hungry and eating tallow candles salvaged from his ship’s wreckage before succumbing to the natives’ diet of raw and rotting walrus blubber and meat with the hair still on it.

This also made the profoundest impression upon the captains of the other whaleships: the threat of starvation, the unsustainability of life ashore along this coast in the event of a shipwreck. A scenario that would determine the fate of every man, woman, and child in the fleet at the end of this summer.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SHIPOWNERS, whale-oil refiners and dealers, whale-product merchants, ship captains, harpooners, whaleboat crews, coopers, and the common seamen who sailed aboard whaleships, their families, and the communities they returned home to, felt little of the Melvillean romance, of the environmental concerns, and nothing of the abhorrence that have since attached themselves to the enterprise of whaling. True, museums are full of scrimshaw carvings made by common seamen who were affected in an aesthetic way by the elemental, primordial struggle they experienced and witnessed in their work; some were genuinely enthralled by what they saw, though most of this work was occupational therapy, to stave off the stultifying boredom of life aboard a whaleship. Herman Melville’s dark, rapturous vision did not resonate with the readers of his day. His greatest book was a critical and commercial flop on publication, marking the end of his career as a popular novelist. There weren’t many fanciful types who held romantic notions about life aboard whaling ships. A shelf or two of memoirists of small or no literary merit tried (usually many years later, after the quotidian normalcy of shipboard life had given way to marveling at what they had once done in their heedless youth in the pursuit of a very few dollars) to express the astonishing, unquestioning audacity of pursuing a great whale in a small rowboat, to catch it with a hand-thrown hook, stab it to death, haul it back to a small, rolling ship, and there chop it up and melt it down for its oil. Why, what an idea.

For most of its practitioners, at every level, whaling was a rational, workaday endeavor, no more romantic than house carpentry, and far more dangerous and unpleasant. For the businessmen at the top of the trade it could mean phenomenal wealth; for the seaman in the cramped fo’c’sle, whose pay would often amount to no more than pennies a day, it was employment where none existed ashore, a path off the farm, or out of the slum, an opportunity of last resort. Very few young men, mainly delusional misfits, would have seen it as a tempting way of driving off the spleen, addressing a damp, drizzly November of the soul—Melville’s existential getaway. Life aboard a whaleship was too brutal and too dull for sensitive souls. Even Melville jumped ship, deserting the whaler
Acushnet
after only eighteen months—his only experience of whaling.

But for many, particularly those from New Bedford, there was a central tenet of whaling behind the economic rationale, an imperative that grew the industry from a part-time fishery to a holy calling, a belief that Melville nailed with bravura satire in chapter 9 of
Moby-Dick,
“The Sermon”:

“Beloved Shipmates,” cries Father Mapple, from the lofty prow of his pulpit, fashioned to resemble the bow of a whaleship,