American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

W >> Willis J. Abbot >> American Merchant Ships and Sailors

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

When a slaver was overhauled after so swift a chase that her master had no
opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw
sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal. To look into her hold,
filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight
that one could see once and never forget. The effluvium that arose
polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened the breeze for
miles to windward. The first duty of the boarding officer was to secure
the officers of the craft with their papers. Not infrequently such vessels
would be provided with two captains and two sets of papers, to be used
according to the nationality of the warship that might make the capture;
but the men of all navies cruising on the slave coast came in time to be
expert in detecting such impostures. The crew once under guard, the first
task was to alleviate in some degree the sufferings of the slaves. But
this was no easy task, for the overcrowded vessel could not be enlarged,
and its burden could in no way be decreased in mid-ocean. Even if near the
coast of Africa, the negroes could not be released by the simple process
of landing them at the nearest point, for the land was filled with savage
tribes, the captives were commonly from the interior, and would merely
have been murdered or sold anew into slavery, had they been thus
abandoned. In time the custom grew up of taking them to Liberia, the free
negro state established in Africa under the protection of the United
States. But it can hardly be said that much advantage resulted to the
individual negroes rescued by even this method, for the Liberians were not
hospitable, slave traders camped upon the borders of their state, and it
was not uncommon for a freed slave to find himself in a very few weeks
back again in the noisome hold of the slaver. Even under the humane care
of the navy officers who were put in command of captured slavers the human
cattle suffered grievously. Brought on deck at early dawn, they so crowded
the ships that it was almost impossible for the sailors to perform the
tasks of navigation. One officer, who was put in charge of a slaver that
carried 700 slaves, writes:

"They filled the waist and gangways in a fearful jam, for there were over
700 men, women, boys, and young girls. Not even a waistcloth can be
permitted among slaves on board ship, since clothing even so slight would
breed disease. To ward off death, ever at work on a slave ship, I ordered
that at daylight the negroes should be taken in squads of twenty or more,
and given a salt-water bath by the hose-pipe of the pumps. This brought
renewed life after their fearful nights on the slave deck.... No one who
has never seen a slave deck can form an idea of its horrors. Imagine a
deck about 20 feet wide, and perhaps 120 feet long, and 5 feet high.
Imagine this to be the place of abode and sleep during long, hot,
healthless nights of 720 human beings! At sundown, when they were carried
below, trained slaves received the poor wretches one by one, and laying
each creature on his side in the wings, packed the next against him, and
the next, and the next, and so on, till like so many spoons packed away
they fitted into each other a living mass. Just as they were packed so
must they remain, for the pressure prevented any movement or the turning
of hand or foot, until the next morning, when from their terrible night of
horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then,
after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps,
men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of
this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the
confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn
its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and
thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this
experience writes also that it was thirty days after capturing the slaver
before he could land his helpless charges.

No great moral evil can long continue when the attention of men has been
called to it, and when their consciences, benumbed by habit, have been
aroused to appreciation of the fact that it is an evil. To be sure, we,
with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors and our minds filled with
a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were
slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps
our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended,
present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so
looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it
could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the
character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful
days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, that they regarded
the negro as we regard a beeve. If in some future super-refined state men
should come to abstain from all animal food, perhaps the history of the
Chicago stock-yards will be as appalling as is that of the Bight of Benin
to-day, and that the name of Armour should be given to a great industrial
school will seem as curious as to us it is inexplicable that the founder
of Fanueil Hall should have dealt in human flesh.

It is, however, a chapter in the story of the American merchant sailor
upon which none will wish to linger, and yet which can not be ignored. In
prosecuting the search for slaves and their markets he showed the
qualities of daring, of fine seamanship, of pertinacity, which have
characterized him in all his undertakings; but the brutality, the greed,
the inhumanity inseparable from the slave-trade make the participation of
Americans in it something not pleasant to enlarge upon. It was, as I have
said, not until the days of the Civil War blockade that the traffic was
wholly destroyed. As late as 1860 the yacht "Wanderer," flying the New
York Yacht Club's flag, owned by a club member, and sailing under the
auspices of a member of one of the foremost families of the South, made
several trips, and profitable ones, as a slaver. No armed vessel thought
to overhaul a trim yacht, flying a private flag, and on her first trip her
officers actually entertained at dinner the officers of a British cruiser
watching for slavers on the African coast. But her time came, and when in
1860 the slaver, Nathaniel Gordon, a citizen of Portland, Maine, was
actually hanged as a pirate, the death-blow of the slave-trade was struck.
Thereafter the end came swiftly.

**Transcriber's Note: Page 91: changed preeminance to preeminence

CHAPTER IV

THE WHALING INDUSTRY--ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN NEW ENGLAND--KNOWN TO THE
ANCIENTS--SHORE WHALING--BEGINNINGS OF THE DEEP-SEA FISHERIES--THE PRIZES
OF WHALING--PIETY OF ITS EARLY PROMOTERS--THE RIGHT WHALE AND THE
CACHALOT--A FLURRY--SOME FIGHTING WHALES--THE "ESSEX" AND THE "ANN
ALEXANDER"--TYPES OF WHALERS--DECADENCE OF THE INDUSTRY--EFFECT OF OUR
NATIONAL WARS--THE EMBARGO--SOME STORIES OF WHALING LIFE.

In the old "New England Primer," on which the growing minds of Yankee
infants in the early days of the eighteenth century were regaled, appears
a clumsy woodcut of a spouting whale, with these lines of excellent piety
but doubtful rhyme:

Whales in the sea
Their Lord obey.

It is significant of the part which the whale then played in domestic
economy that his familiar bulk should be utilized to "point a moral and
adorn a tale" in the most elementary of books for the instruction of
children. And indeed by the time the "New England Primer" was published,
with its quaint lettering and rude illustrations, the whale fishery had
come to be one of the chief occupations of the seafaring men of the North
Atlantic States. The pursuit of this "royal fish"--as the ancient
chroniclers call him in contented ignorance of the fact that he is not a
fish at all--had not, indeed, originated in New England, but had been
practised by all maritime peoples of whom history has knowledge, while the
researches of archeologists have shown that prehistoric peoples were
accustomed to chase the gigantic cetacean for his blubber, his oil, and
his bone. The American Indians, in their frail canoes, the Esquimaux, in
their crank kayaks, braved the fury of this aquatic monster, whose size
was to that of one of his enemies as the bulk of a battle-ship is to that
of a pigmy torpedo launch. But the whale fishery in vessels fitted for
cruises of moderate length had its origin in Europe, where the Basques
during the Middle Ages fairly drove the animals from the Bay of Biscay,
which had long swarmed with them. Not a prolific breeder, the whales soon
showed the effect of Europe's eagerness for oil, whalebone and ambergris,
and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the industry was on the
verge of extinction. Then began that search for a sea passage to India
north of the continents of Europe and America, which I have described in
another chapter. The passage was not discovered, but in the icy waters
great schools of right whales were found, and the chase of the "royal
fish" took on new vigor. Of course there was effort on the part of one
nation to acquire by violence a monopoly of this profitable business, and
the Dutch, who have done much in the cause of liberty, defeated the
British in a naval battle at the edge of the ice before the principle of
the freedom of the fisheries was accepted. To-day science has discovered
substitutes for almost all of worth that the whales once supplied, and the
substitutes are in the main marked improvements on the original. But in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clear whale oil for
illuminating purposes, the tough and supple whalebone, the spermaceti
which filled the great case in the sperm-whale's head, the precious
ambergris--prized even among the early Hebrews, and chronicled in the
Scriptures as a thing of great price--were prizes, in pursuit of which men
braved every terror of the deep, threaded the ice-floes of the Arctic,
fought against the currents about Cape Horn, and steered to every corner
of the Seven Seas the small, stout brigs and barks of New England make.

The whale came to the New Englander long before the New Englanders went
after him. In the earliest colonial days the carcasses of whales were
frequently found stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island. Old
colonial records are full of the lawsuits growing out of these pieces of
treasure-trove, the finder, the owner of the land where the gigantic
carrion lay stranded, and the colony all claiming ownership, or at least
shares. By 1650 all the northern colonies had begun to pursue the business
of shore whaling to some extent. Crews were organized, boats kept in
readiness on the beach, and whenever a whale was sighted they would put
off with harpoons and lances after the huge game, which, when slain, would
be towed ashore, and there cut up and tried out, to the accompaniment of a
prodigious clacking of gulls and a widely diffused bad smell. This method
of whaling is still followed at Amagansett and Southampton, on the shore
of Long Island, though the growing scarcity of whales makes catches
infrequent. In the colonial days, however, it was a source of profit
assiduously cultivated by coastwise communities, and both on Long Island
and Cape Cod citizens were officially enjoined to watch for whales off
shore. Whales were then seen daily in New York harbor, and in 1669 one
Samuel Maverick recorded in a letter that thirteen whales had been taken
along the south shore during the winter, and twenty in the spring.

Little by little the boat voyages after the leviathans extended further
into the sea as the industry grew and the game became scarce and shy. The
people of Cape Cod were the first to begin the fishery, and earliest
perfected the art of "saving" the whale--that is, of securing all of
value in the carcass. But the people of the little island of Nantucket
brought the industry to its highest development, and spread most widely
the fame of the American whaleman. Indeed, a Nantucket whaler laden with
oil was the first vessel flying the Stars and Stripes that entered a
British port. It is of a sailor on this craft that a patriotic anecdote,
now almost classic, is told. He was unhappily deformed, and while passing
along a Liverpool street was greeted by a British tar with a blow on his
"humpback" and the salutation: "Hello, Jack! What you got there?" "Bunker
Hill, d----n ye!" responded the Yankee. "Think you can climb it?" Far out
at sea, swept ever by the Atlantic gales, a mere sand-bank, with scant
surface soil to support vegetation, this island soon proved to its
settlers its unfitness to maintain an agricultural people. There is a
legend that an islander, weary perhaps with the effort of trying to wrest
a livelihood from the unwilling soil, looked from a hilltop at the whales
tumbling and spouting in the ocean. "There," he said, "is a green pasture
where our children's grandchildren will go for bread." Whether the
prophecy was made or not, the event occurred, for before the Revolution
the American whaling fleet numbered 360 vessels, and in the banner year of
the industry, 1846, 735 ships engaged in it, the major part of the fleet
hailing from Nantucket. The cruises at first were toward Greenland after
the so-called right whales, a variety of the cetaceans which has an added
commercial value because of the baleen, or whalebone, which hangs in great
strips from the roof of its mouth to its lower jaw, forming a sort of
screen or sieve by which it sifts its food out of prodigious mouthfuls of
sea water. This most enormous of known living creatures feeds upon very
small shell-fish, swarm in the waters it frequents. Opening wide its
colossal mouth, a cavity often more than fifteen feet in length, and so
deep from upper to lower jaw that the flexible sheets of whalebone,
sometimes ten feet long, hang straight without touching its floor, it
takes a great gulp of water. Then the cavernous jaws slowly close,
expelling the water through the whalebone sieve, somewhat as a Chinese
laundryman sprinkles clothes, and the small marine animals which go to
feed that prodigious bulk are caught in the strainer. The right whale is
from 45 to 60 feet long in its maturity, and will yield about 15 tons of
oil and 1500 weight of whalebone, though individuals have been known to
give double this amount.

Most of the vessels which put out of Nantucket and New Bedford, in the
earliest days of the industry, after whales of this sort, were not fitted
with kettles and furnaces for trying out the oil at the time of the catch,
as was always the custom in the sperm-whale fishery. Their prey was near
at hand, their voyages comparatively short. So the fat, dripping, reeking
blubber was crammed into casks, or some cases merely thrown into the
ship's hold, just as it was cut from the carcass, and so brought back
weeks later to the home port--a shipload of malodorous putrefaction. Old
sailors who have cruised with cargoes of cattle, of green hides, and of
guano, say that nothing that ever offended the olfactories of man equals
the stench of a right-whaler on her homeward voyage. Scarcely even could
the slave-ships compare with it. Brought ashore, this noisome mass was
boiled in huge kettles, and the resulting oil sent to lighten the night in
all civilized lands. England was a good customer of the colonies, and
Boston shipowners did a thriving trade with oil from New Bedford or
Nantucket to London. The sloops and ketches engaged in this commerce
brought back, as an old letter of directions from shipowner to skipper
shows, "course wicker flasketts, Allom, Copress, drum rims, head snares,
shod shovells, window-glass." The trade was conducted with the same piety
that we find manifested in the direction of slave-ships and privateers. In
order that the oil may fetch a good price, and the voyage be speedy, the
captain is commended to God, and "That hee may please to take the Conduct
of you, we pray you look carefully that hee bee worshipped dayly in yor
shippe, his Sabbaths Sanctifiede, and all sinne and prophainesse let bee
Surpressed." In the Revolution the fisheries suffered severely from the
British cruisers, and when, after peace was declared, the whalemen began
coming back from the privateers, in which they had sought service, and the
wharves of Nantucket, New Bedford, and New London began again to show
signs of life, the Americans were confronted by the closing of their
English markets. "The whale fisheries and the Newfoundland fisheries were
the nurseries of British seamen," said the British ministry to John Adams,
who went to London to remonstrate. "If we let Americans bring oil to
London, and sell fish to our West India colonies, the British marine will
decline." For a long time, therefore, the whalers had to look elsewhere
than to England for a market. Nevertheless the trade grew. New Bedford,
which by the middle of the nineteenth century held three-fourths of the
business, took it up with great vigor. For a time Massachusetts gave
bounties to encourage the industry, but it was soon strong enough to
dispense with them. By 1789 the whalers found their way to the
Pacific--destined in later years to be their chief fishing-ground. In that
year the total whaling tonnage of Massachusetts was 10,210, with 1611 men
and an annual product of 7880 barrels sperm and 13,130 barrels whale oil.
Fifteen years earlier--before the war--the figures were thrice as great.

[Illustration: "SENDING BOAT AND MEN FLYING INTO THE AIR"]

Before this period, however, whaling had taken on a new form. Deep-sea
whaling, as it was called, to distinguish it from the shore fisheries, had
begun long ago. Capt. Christopher Hursey, a stout Nantucket whaleman,
cruising about after right whales, ran into a stiff northwest gale and was
carried far out to sea. He struck a school of sperm-whales, killed one,
and brought blubber home. It was not a new discovery, for the sperm-whale
or cachalot, had been known for years, but the great numbers of right
whales and the ease with which they were taken, had made pursuit of this
nobler game uncommon. But now the fact, growing yearly more apparent, that
right whales were being driven to more inaccessible haunts, made whalers
turn readily to this new prey. Moreover, the sperm-whale had in him
qualities of value that made him a richer prize than his Greenland cousin.
True, he lacked the useful bone. His feeding habits did not necessitate a
sieve, for, as beseems a giant, he devoured stout victuals, pieces of
great squids--the fabled devil-fish--as big as a man's body being found in
his stomach. Such a diet develops his fighting qualities, and while the
right whale usually takes the steel sullenly, and dies like an overgrown
seal, the cachalot fights fiercely, now diving with such a rush that he
has been known to break his jaw by the fury with which he strikes the
bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms; now raising his enormous bulk in air,
to fall with an all-obliterating crash upon the boat which holds his
tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious
blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his
assailants between his cavernous jaws. Descriptions of the dying flurry of
the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of
them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by
Frank T. Bullen. I quote one of these:

"Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all--starn all! Oh, starn!' and the
oars bent like canes as we obeyed--there was an upheaval of the sea just
ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the
air. Up, up it went while my heart stood still, until the whole of that
immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell--a
hundred tons of solid flesh--back into the sea. On either side of that
mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which
fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell
like a chip in a whirlpool. Blinded by the flying spray, baling for very
life to free the boat from the water, with which she was nearly full, it
was some minutes before I was able to decide whether we were still
uninjured or not. Then I saw, at a little distance, the whale lying
quietly. As I looked he spouted and the vapor was red with his blood.
'Starn all!' again cried our chief, and we retreated to a considerable
distance. The old warrior's practised eye had detected the coming climax
of our efforts, the dying agony, or 'flurry,' of the great mammal. Turning
upon his side, he began to move in a circular direction, slowly at first,
then faster and faster, until he was rushing round at tremendous speed,
his great head raised quite out of water at times, slashing his enormous
jaws. Torrents of blood poured from his spout-hole, accompanied by hoarse
bellowings, as of some gigantic bull, but really caused by the laboring
breath trying to pass through the clogged air-passages. The utmost caution
and rapidity of manipulation of the boat was necessary to avoid his
maddened rush, but this gigantic energy was short-lived. In a few minutes
he subsided slowly in death, his mighty body reclined on one side, the fin
uppermost waving limply as he rolled to the swell, while the small waves
broke gently over the carcass in a low, monotonous surf, intensifying the
profound silence that had succeeded the tumult of our conflict with the
late monarch of the deep."

[Illustration: "SUDDENLY THE MATE GAVE A HOWL--'STARN ALL!'"]

Not infrequently the sperm-whale, breaking loose from the harpoon, would
ignore the boats and make war upon his chief enemy--the ship. The history
of the whale fishery is full of such occurrences. The ship "Essex," of
Nantucket, was attacked and sunk by a whale, which planned its campaign
of destruction as though guided by human intelligence. He was first seen
at a distance of several hundred yards, coming full speed for the ship.
Diving, he rose again to the surface about a ship's length away, and then
surged forward on the surface, striking the vessel just forward of the
fore-chains. "The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had
struck a rock," said the mate afterward, "and trembled for few seconds
like a leaf." Then she began to settle, but not fast enough to satisfy the
ire of the whale. Circling around, he doubled his speed, and bore down
upon the "Essex" again. This time his head fairly stove in the bows, and
the ship sank so fast that the men were barely able to provision and
launch the boats. Curiously enough, the monster that had thus destroyed a
stout ship paid no attention whatsoever to the little boats, which would
have been like nutshells before his bulk and power. But many of the men
who thus escaped only went to a fate more terrible than to have gone down
with their stout ship. Adrift on a trackless sea, 1000 miles from land, in
open boats, with scant provision of food or water, they faced a frightful
ordeal. After twenty-eight days they found an island, but it proved a
desert. After leaving it the boats became separated--one being never again
heard of. In the others men died fast, and at last the living were driven
by hunger actually to eat the dead. Out of the captain's boat two only
were rescued; out of the mate's, three. In all twelve men were sacrificed
to the whale's rage.

Mere lust for combat seemed to animate this whale, for he had not been
pursued by the men of the "Essex," though perhaps in some earlier meeting
with men he had felt the sting of the harpoon and the searching thrust of
the lance. So great is the vitality of the cachalot that it not
infrequently breaks away from its pursuers, and with two or three
harpoon-heads in its body lives to a ripe, if not a placid, old age. The
whale that sunk the New Bedford ship "Ann Alexander" was one of these
fighting veterans. With a harpoon deep in his side he turned and
deliberately ran over and sunk the boat that was fast to him; then with
equal deliberation sent a second boat to the bottom. This was before noon,
and occurred about six miles from the ship, which bore down as fast as
could be to pick up the struggling men. The whale, apparently contented
with his escape, made off. But about sunset Captain Delois, iron in hand,
watching from the knight-heads of the "Ann Alexander" for other whales to
repair his ill-luck, saw the redoubtable fighter not far away, swimming at
about a speed of five knots. At the same time the whale spied the ship.
Increasing his speed to fifteen knots, he bore down upon her, and with the
full force of his more than 100 tons bulk struck her "a terrible blow
about two feet from the keel and just abreast of the foremast, breaking a
large hole in her bottom, through which the water poured in a rushing
stream." The crew had scarce time to get out the boats, with one day's
provisions, but were happily picked up by a passing vessel two days later.
The whale itself met retribution five months later, when it was taken by
another American ship. Two of the "Ann Alexander's" harpoons were in him,
his head bore deep scars, and in it were imbedded pieces of the ill-fated
ship's timbers.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25