Final Voyage (4 page)

But Matthew made the showier of the two brothers’ marriages, landing what could only be called a trophy wife in terms of the Quaker community. Rachel Collins Smith was a great beauty—dark hair, a pale complexion, fine features, and huge dark eyes, “wondrous beautiful” according to Massachusetts governor John Andrew, who met her at a reception in New Bedford during the Civil War—and of significant pedigree: she was related to William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, and came from a family that was much concerned with politics and the abolition movement. “The Smiths were a contentious family—” wrote Rachel and Matthew’s descendant Llewellyn Howland III, a hundred years later in a family history, “evangelists, crackpots, faddists.” They were also fighters for just causes. This energy was a marked contrast to Matthew’s plain, insular lifestyle, and the narrow focus of his concerns. Rachel, too, presumed she had made a stellar connection: a fabulously rich Howland brother, of a most pious, observant line. Until she married him, Rachel did not know that Matthew was an epileptic, and probably a depressive. There must have been a considerable curve of adjustment early on in the marriage, but it became a strong one. Matthew continued in his stolid, almost shut-in habits, the daily commute to and immersion in the Howland counting house, a preoccupation with prices, barrels of oil, pounds of whalebone. Rachel, a strident woman who was “inclined to tyranny,” according to Llewellyn Howland III, became a firebrand Quaker minister, the queen of New Bedford society, a mover and shaker pushing for social improvement and charitable causes throughout the American Quaker community, and one of the most powerful women in the country. She was intelligent—probably much more so than Matthew—and passionately outspoken. She fought against slavery with her contemporary and friend Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, when she felt it necessary, visited President Lincoln in the White House to offer him her views on the subject.

Matthew’s fortune was the earning machine and springboard for Rachel’s social works, and her philanthropic deployment of the prodigious wealth generated by whaling.

 

 

EVIDENTLY, the precise and careful numbers from Matthew’s counting house were in line with George Jr.’s bully optimism. In 1866, after the return to port of the
Corinthian
and the
George Howland,
R. G. Dun noted that they had “made money very fast lately in the whaling business.” So confident were the two brothers that year of the long-term prospects for the whaling industry that they decided to add a tenth vessel to their fleet of whaleships. They commissioned the shipyard of Josiah Holmes and Brother, of neighboring Mattapoisett, with the building of the new ship. The selection of the Holmes brothers by the Howland brothers says everything about the quality of product expected from them. “The bark’s frame is of pine and oak . . . all timbers carefully selected and cut in the vicinity of Mattapoisett,” reported the
New Bedford Mercury
. The Holmeses, or their master carpenters, would have spent considerable time in the woods looking at great numbers of trees, observing their aspect to the sun and the prevailing winds and the winter cold—all of which affected the density of the cellulose—noting the health of the bark, examining the crooks of the boughs that would make the knees that would knit together deck and hull. Such men saw in a tree what a sculptor sees in a piece of marble, knowing the shape he wants to bring out of it and how the material’s grain and properties will help or hinder him. The shipbuilders were keenly aware of the stresses and hardship their vessels would be subjected to, and every aspect and detail of the ship’s construction was given the highest degree of forethought and artisanal craftsmanship. The shipbuilding businesses that had developed around New Bedford during a century of continued growth of the whale fishery had been like the concentrated tooling-up of industry that comes with a great war—and the heyday of whaling was indeed a hundred years’ holy war that saw untold losses of men’s lives. The men building the ships they sailed off in understood this. Shipbuilding techniques were developed, improved, and refined with economy and ingenuity. Whaling historian Everett S. Allen wrote this about the whaleship builder’s method of fastening plank on frame:

The Howlands’ new ship was christened
Concordia
. At $100,000, when fitted out, it was the most expensive whaleship, then and later, ever built for the New Bedford fishery. It was “bark-rigged”: square sails on the fore- and mainmasts, while setting fore and aft sails on the mizzenmast, making it more close-winded than fully square-rigged ships, and more maneuverable. At 128 and a half feet long, she was average-sized for a larger whaleship, but unusually fine in the appointments, with decorative faux graining of the pine paneling below to make it resemble curled maple, rosewood, and satinwood. This was a rare touch on a Quaker-owned vessel, including those owned by the Howland brothers, who eschewed ostentation and generally saw their ships’ interiors painted and finished in the plainest utilitarian manner. But something about the Howlands’ commitment to the building of the
Concordia
brought out a rare fulsomeness of attitude toward the endeavor. She was a beautiful ship, unlike most whalers, which were square and boxy. “She did not have to be so un-Quakerishly pretty,” wrote Everett S. Allen, “yet she was.” Never again would such prettiness or care be lavished upon the shapeliness and decoration—the unpractical, irrelevant aspects—of a whaleship.

The brothers’ plan for the lovely new ship was, however, nothing but pragmatic: she would be sent to the unforgiving Arctic, the only remaining spot on earth where such an expensive ship—or any ship in the late 1860s—might have a chance of a profitable voyage.

The Howlands built the
Concordia
with the same faith that had set Noah to building his ark. The concord between them and their God had taken George Howland, Sr., his Quaker merchant contemporaries, and all their Quaker ancestors very far. There was no basis for George Jr. and Matthew to question Him.

The
Concordia
was launched on November 7, 1867. With routine care and refurbishment, she might have lasted forever. She would have a life of only four years.

A Nursery and a Kindergarten

B
orn aboard a whaleship in the stormy Tasman Sea in 1859, twelve-year-old William Fish Williams was on his third whaling voyage with his parents as the
Monticello
sailed north in the summer of 1871.

He was three years old before he began to live ashore in San Francisco during the Civil War. Until then, land was a distant, occasional novelty, strange and wondrous as a carnival attraction, and never the same. As a baby and toddler, he was handed by strong whalemen down to his mother, who sat in a rocking boat, and rowed ashore at Russell in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, at Guam, Honolulu, Hakodate in Japan, and Okhotsk on the Siberian coast—all were brief sideshows to the little boy, whose truest home was the cramped rear cabin of a rolling, pitching whaleship and the surrounding sea in all its moods and conditions from the latitudes of New Zealand to the Arctic. His most common spectacle, and the abiding ethos of his world, was the pursuit, capture, and dismemberment of great whales.

His father, Thomas William Williams, and his family had come to America from Hay-on-Wye, the ancient border town between England and Wales, as steerage passengers in 1829, when Thomas was nine. After a year on Long Island, they moved and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The family, including young Thomas, found work in local wool mills. But this was grueling indoor labor, and Thomas’s mother, worried about his health, got him apprenticed to a Wethersfield blacksmith to learn the toolmaker’s trade. However, when he was twenty, something inside Thomas—perhaps the impression made by a transatlantic voyage on a nine-year-old boy
²
—made him lift his sights beyond the claustrophobic insularity of village life. “My father’s case was typical,” wrote his son William many years later. “I recall the stories of the captains when gamming with our ship or calling at our home in Oakland, California, they all ran away from home to make their first voyage.” These future-captain boys had a streak of ambition or a lust for adventure, and from the tidy and constrained village life of the early nineteenth century there were only two kinds of territory to light out to: the undeveloped West, or the sea. Thomas didn’t run away—he was twenty and had completed his apprenticeship when he told his mother he was going to sea—but his departure greatly alarmed his family. The sailors the Williamses had known in small towns in England were generally retirees from Napoleonic-era sea battles, contemporaries of Nelson and the fictional Jack Aubrey, whose limbs had been blown off by cannonballs and flying shards of ship timber. Thomas’s parents and grandparents were horrified and fully expected him to return, if at all, minus an arm or leg. He traveled to New Bedford in 1840, near the peak of the American whale fishery, as many other young men did, and shipped as a “green hand” aboard the whaleship
Albion
. Andrew Potter, the shipping agent who hired him, was impressed by the tall—six-foot-three in his socks—capable-looking youth. When Potter boarded the
Albion
on its return to New Bedford two years later, he again met Thomas, who was apparently suffering from “moon blindness” from sleeping on deck in the tropics beneath the full light of the moon. The young man was eager to get home to see his mother, and Potter lent him traveling money so he could leave before the voyage’s accounts were settled and the men paid off. Thomas sent Potter back his money by mail from Wethersfield. The two men were to become lifelong friends. After a month at home, his eyes healed, Thomas returned to New Bedford, and Potter found him a job as a blacksmith and “boatsteerer” (harpooner) aboard the whaleship
South Carolina
. When that ship discharged its crew in Lahaina in 1843, Thomas shipped as boatsteerer again aboard the
Gideon Howland
, which brought him back to New Bedford in 1844. From there, he sailed as second mate aboard the whaleship
Chili
; subsequently as second mate, and eventually first mate, of the
South Boston
.

In April 1851, Thomas married Eliza Azelia Griswold at Wethersfield. Three months later he sailed as captain of the
South Boston
. He was away for three years and returned to meet his two-year-old son, Thomas Stancel. His voyage aboard the
South Boston
had earned the ship’s owners $140,000, a great success, making Williams highly sought after as a captain for hire; but he might have tried to give up the sea then, to stay home with his young family, for he purchased a one-hundred-acre farm in Wethersfield, and a herd of cattle that he drove himself from Vermont to Connecticut. Yet he was back aboard a ship later that same year, in October 1854, as captain of the whaleship
Florida
. He was away on this voyage for three and a half years, returning again to meet his second son, Henry, then almost three years old.

Thomas’s wife, Eliza Williams, was born in 1826, in Wethersfield, where her family, the Griswolds, had lived and farmed since 1645. She was a small woman, weighing less than a hundred pounds, and could stand erect under her husband’s outstretched arm. Her retiring character was unsuited to the job of tending to her husband’s affairs in his absence, collecting the interest on his investments, and dealing with Thomas’s brother-in-law, who was a sharecropper on their farm and unpleasant to her. Like many whalemen’s wives, she tried at some point to get her husband to give up the sea, which may explain the purchase of the farm. Some wives prevailed, like Jane Courtney, who persuaded her husband, whaling captain Leonard Courtney of Edgartown, Mar tha’s Vineyard, to try his hand at some land-based venture in the expanding west of New York or Ohio. Whaling captains often found themselves surprisingly vulnerable outside their chosen element: on their way west, in April 1847, Captain Courtney, who had sailed hundreds of thousand of miles, driven his ship around Cape Horn, and taken many whales from small tossing boats, was killed in a stagecoach accident.

Most captains and their wives were resigned to long separations. Such men, by temperament or long habit, were not always skilled at navigating the more democratic environment of home; and his absence from it, and mutual longing between husband and wife, often kept a whaler’s marriage fresh, or allowed it to endure. Probably just as often, it made the whaleman, of any rank, a bemused stranger in his own home and propelled him to sea again.

Eliza and Thomas were an unusually devoted couple—their letters while he was away from her at sea frequently expressed how greatly they missed each other. But Thomas Williams had become a confirmed and exceptionally skilled whaleman (he tried numerous speculative ventures ashore, but none proved successful), so Eliza instead sailed with him on his next voyage. The degree of her longing to be with her husband is evident by the fact that she was somehow able to leave the two boys, ages six and three, with her family in Wethersfield.

Eliza was five months pregnant with their third child when she sailed from New Bedford with her husband aboard the
Florida
on September 7, 1858. From the first moments of the voyage—even before, on the pilot boat sailing out to the ship, hove to below Clark’s Point—she kept a journal. Her impressions were plainly and frankly recorded, yet her essentially uninvolved, supernumerary, fly-on-the-bulkhead observations of all that was new to her, and the accretion of minutiae that filled her pages over the course of three years, make for some of the most vivid and accurate descriptions to come down to us of the life and work aboard a whaleship: