There were eight other ships in port at the time, and their captains, who used the Butler residence as an informal clubhouse, visited her and the baby and brought gifts:
“Oranges, Lemons, several kinds of Preserved Fruits, some Arrowroot, a nice Fan made on one of the Islands . . . and a bottle of currant wine.”
Several of the captains had their wives and children with them, one of these a ten-month-old boy who had been born in the Butlers’ house. Eliza was also comforted by the piety of the Butler household. Captain Butler was an Episcopal minister and conducted daily services in his house.
She spent only two weeks ashore before the
Florida
left New Zealand for the “Japan grounds.”
It was almost a year before Eliza referred to her son by his name in her journal. Until then, he remained “the Baby,” a noun, like “my Husband,” whose small adventures were duly recorded.
“The Baby is well and healthy and sleeps a good deal,”
she wrote on February 24, 1859.
“He is a very pleasant Baby.”
In addition to mastering the pull of gravity, like all babies, Willie had to acquire gyroscopic skills to accommodate the nearly constant roll and pitch of a ship through his first years.
It has been a very unpleasant day, blowing a gale all day and the Ship rolling very badly. I can’t keep the Baby in one place, and he gets a good many bumps. . . . The Baby likes to be on deck most all day. He goes about the deck by taking hold of things but does not go alone yet. . . . He will climb a good deal for such a little fellow. . . . We have been making a real Sailor’s Cot [hammock] for the Baby to sleep in. The motion of the Ship keeps it in motion all the time. The Baby is delighted with it. . . . Willie [past his second birthday now] has met with a bad accident this afternoon. He was playing in one of the Staterooms and fell off from a Chest and cut his lip open very badly—with his teeth, we suppose. It bled a good deal. His Pa sewed it up. The poor little Fellow bore it better than I thought he would.
Melville’s Ishmael said that “a whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard.” For Willie it was his nursery and his kindergarten.
THOUGH THE
FLORIDA
SET OFF from New Zealand, heading for the remotest regions of the globe, Eliza was to find more female company wherever they went. Whaleships invariably sailed the same routes from commercial hubs like New Zealand or the Hawaiian (then the Sandwich) Islands to the whaling grounds, and from one whaling “ground” to another, and there they would find other whaleships, increasingly in greater numbers, all competing for the same whale stocks. Far out in the lonely, still primitive, barely discovered, and to a large extent still unspoiled Pacific, along routes as well defined as air routes 150 years later, whaleships would routinely see and often “speak”—sail within speaking range of—other ships. On the Brazil Banks, in the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and crowding the narrow channels between ice and land in the Arctic, whaleships met other whaleships. A small number of these were, like the
Florida
, “lady ships,” which carried a captain’s wife and sometimes their children aboard. These supernumerary passengers formed a floating community that preserved a strong fabric of home. Wives and children visited other wives and children as they might have on any afternoon in New Bedford, except that here they were rowed back and forth by whaleboat crews instead of traveling by carriage. They gathered aboard nearby ships for Sunday services. An active social life, which included cultural and religious visits, was a vital part of what made an isolated life at sea bearable.
The journals kept by some of these captains’ wives give an indication of this cozy society of satellites, virtually a floating annex of New Bedford neighbors and their families that existed wherever whaleships sailed.
In the Sea of Japan, Eliza wrote:
APRIL 23RD.
This morning it rained quite hard and was rather foggy. As soon as I was up, I heard that there was a Ship ahead, and I was in hopes that it was the South Boston. . . . To my Joy it proved to be. My Husband came to the skylight and told me that I might expect to see Mrs Randolph, for he was going to speak the Ship in a few moments. Very soon he came down and told me to hurry and get ready to go on board. I was not long getting Willie and myself ready. We went aboard before breakfast and stayed till evening. We had a nice gam and spent the day very pleasantly.
The
South Boston
also had letters for the Williamses, picked up in Hawaii five months earlier, but written six months before that:
“We got our letters—one of them from home—and feel very thankful to hear that our Dear little Boys, Father, Mother and all were well at that time, which was in June.”
The very next day, the whaleship
Harvest
hove in sight close to the
Florida
and the
South Boston
, all of them cruising the “Japan grounds,” and Eliza and Mrs. Randolph were rowed to the
Harvest
to spend the day with Mrs. Manchester.
Such visits offered a respite from the constant claustrophobia of the close quarters aboard ship. In June, the
Florida
passed through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Okhotsk. The whaling was slow, and the weather for the next week was rainy, snowy, or foggy, keeping the family cooped up in their small cabin.
“It is very dull on deck,”
wrote Eliza, with uncharacteristic complaint.
“I have been ironing for one thing and doing other little things too numerous to mention. Thomas [a rare use of his name] has been reading a good part of the day, and Willie has been through his usual course of mischief.”
A week later, Eliza sounded positively peevish:
“Have not seen a Whale and scarcely a Bird. It is dull—very dull. We have not seen a Ship since we were in the Straits [nine days earlier].”
In the same seas the previous year, Eliza had counted nineteen whaleships in one day. But soon enough company hove in sight again:
“This afternoon have been on board the John P. West and spent the afternoon very pleasantly with Mrs Tinker . . . [and] their little Boy. He is about 2 years old and a fat little fellow. . . . Capt. Tinker’s Wife and little Boy have been on board and spent the afternoon. We enjoyed it much—the Children in particular.”
THESE WHALING WIVES developed a keen, sometimes intense interest in the taking of whales, which had a direct bearing on their husbands’ fortunes. Eliza found “that odor with the smoke that comes below from the try works is quite unpleasant, but I can bear it all first rate when I consider that it is filling our ship all the time and by and by it will all be over and we will go home.”
Mary Chipman Lawrence, of Falmouth, Massachusetts, sailing with her husband, Captain Samuel Lawrence, and their daughter Minnie, aboard the New Bedford whaleship
Addison
, became obsessively involved with the ship’s search for whales.
“A whale, a whale, a kingdom for a whale!”
she moaned to her journal in July 1858, during a dismal summer of arctic whaling:
We have looked and searched in vain. . . . If we cannot find the whales, we cannot get the oil. . . . [The captain of the
Dromo
] had been to Cape Lisburne and as far north as the barrier of ice and had not seen a spout. . . . Captain Bryant came on board and stopped until dinner. He has been as far as the ice barrier . . . and has seen ne’er a whale. If we cannot get ourselves, it is a great satisfaction to know that others are not taking it in great quantities. . . . Oh, where shall whales be found?
Mrs. Lawrence recorded that her
“sorrow found vent in tears,”
until finally,
“Eureka! Eureka! We have got a bowhead at last.”
And then:
“We have been eating bowhead meat for several days. . . . It is really good eating, far before salt pork in my estimation.”
In July 1859, when she learned that a few lucky ships had, just one month earlier, found a great pod of whales and scored an enormous windfall of oil off Cape Thaddeus, where the
Addison
had cruised so fruitlessly the year before, Mary Lawrence was sick with envy:
Imagine our feelings when we were told there had been a grand cut taken off Cape Thaddeus by a few ships in June, where thirty or forty ships were hanging about for weeks in the ice last season and not a whale to be seen. . . . The Mary and Susan took 1,600 barrels, the Eliza Adams 1,400, Nassau seven whales, Omega seven, Mary six, William C. Nye six. Those are all the ships we have heard of that were there. I never felt so heartsick in my life. . . . Why couldn’t we have been one of the number? Because it was not for us, I suppose.
In the late fall, when the weather turned cold off Siberia, Captain Williams turned the
Florida
east and sailed his ship across the entire Pacific Ocean for a winter’s whaling off the Mexican coast of Baja California. This was a seasonal migration for many whaleships, and the wide bays and lagoons north of Cabo San Lucas had all the social attractions of a riviera for whaling wives and families.
At Turtle Bay, the Williamses’
Florida
shared an anchorage with four other ships, another
Florida
among them:
DECEMBER 9TH.
It has been a splendid day, and my Husband, Willie and I have been aboard of the Florida, to see Capt. Fish and Wife, and spent the day very pleasantly. They have a little Son with them, 6 years old. . . .
DECEMBER 23RD.
It has been a very fine day. My Husband, Willie and I have been aboard of the Florida and spent the day very pleasantly with Capt. Fish and his Wife. Captain Hempstead and his Wife were there. I like them very much. Mrs H. is a little, small Woman and quite pretty.
Cruising along this same coast two years earlier in the
Addison
, Mary Lawrence, her husband Samuel, and their eight-year-old daughter Minnie joined a picnic in progress:
Saw a tent with flags flying onshore; concluded they were having a picnic. Soon after we were anchored, a boat came off to us with an invitation to us to unite with them, which invitation we cordially accepted. On our arrival there we found Captain Willis, wife, and three children; Captain Weeks, wife and two children . . . Captain Ashley, wife and one child of the Reindeer; Captain May of the Dromo . . . and Captain Lawrence, wife, and one child of the Addison. Made ten captains, four ladies, and seven children. We could hardly realize that we were whaling. Had a nice chowder, coffee, cold ham, cake, bread, crackers, and cookies. We also roasted plenty of oysters.
Through the winter, Thomas, Eliza, and Willie socialized their way down the Mexican coast. Eliza was still ready to party on February 26:
“I am going on board [the Cambria] to see Mrs Pease this evening.”
The next day—no mention of the approaching event appears in her journal—Eliza again gave birth.
“We have had an addition to the Florida’s Crew in the form of a little Daughter,”
she recorded, a full month later, as the ship rolled west again across the Pacific toward the Hawaiian Islands,
“born on the 27th of February in Banderas Bay on the Coast of Mexico. She weighed 6-3/4 pounds, is now one month old and weighs 9 pounds. . . . Willie is much pleased with his little Sister.”
IN THE PROCESS OF SAILING up and down and across the length and breadth of the Pacific—in some cases entirely around the world through the Roaring Forties by way of Cape Horn—Eliza, Mary Lawrence, and the other whaling wives became, each in her own fashion, champion tourists.
“It will be a pleasant sight to me to see land, even though it be a bleak, foreighn Island of the Sea,”
Eliza had written in October 1858, as the
Florida
approached the first landfall after leaving New Bedford. It was the island of Brava, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. After weeks aboard ship, and in complete ignorance of what it would take to get there, Eliza agreed to accompany Thomas ashore. It was no pleasure trip:
OCTOBER 12TH [1858].
The wind not fair to get the Ship in to the harbor; concluded to row there in one of the small boats. My Husband said I could go with him, but I most repented it before we got there. It got quite rugged, and they had to go some ten miles to get into harbor—
Any sailor will appreciate that “rugged” would be an understatement to describe a ten-mile upwind row and sail in a light whaleboat off an Atlantic island. The small boat was frequently swamped with waves that drenched Eliza, the captain, and the crew. Eliza was frightened, but Thomas told her there was no danger, and the she believed him.
They had stopped at Brava to buy food and supplies, and to recruit additional crewmen from among the fishermen in the port where their boat landed, but business kept them there overnight. The only accommodations were in “the city,” a three-mile ride by donkey up a steep mountain trail. At times on the way up, Eliza
“could hardely refrain from screaming, for it seemed to me that the poor faithful animal must fall.”
But her terror was relieved by the sight of her husband close behind:
“I would look at him once in a while and laugh in spite of my fear, for he looked so comical on that little Jackass and he so tall, with his long legs coming most to the ground.”
Eliza’s gaze at the islanders, and her description of their clothing, were clear and—rare for a New England whaling wife—without any kind of censuring prejudice. She was even capable of seeing herself through native eyes:
“I suppose we looked as strange to them as they did to us, dressed so different as we were.”
Mary Lawrence’s attitude toward natives everywhere was framed by a rigid Christian superiority. She could not see a people and their culture, only a substandard race of creatures that needed uplifting: “I confess that I am disappointed in the appearance of the natives,” she wrote from Lahaina, in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, in 1857.