USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 24
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During the first months of a whaling voyage the green hands were 'learned' the ropes with 'a rope's end, taught to row the whaleboats, and broken in generally. Their numbers were increased by a few hungry and docile 'Portygees' at Fayal or St. Iago, where the whaling vessels touched to trade liquor for fresh pro- visions and to ship home the oil obtained on the pas- sage across.1 This led to an extensive migration from
1 "We are in advance to all your crew from 70 to 80 dollars, it will therefore be necessary to obtain some oil before going into port as they
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Remarks on Friday de
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FROM THE LOG OF THE WHALER ISABELLA OF NEW BEDFORD
THE WHALERS
the Azores and Cape Verde Islands to New Bedford, until to-day the Western Islanders and Bravas are the most numerous alien element in the Old Colony, and in parts of it the sole cultivators of the soil.
Whaling vessels never returned to New Bedford or Nantucket with the same crew that they shipped. Many whalemen deserted their floating hells in the Pacific Islands. Those who kept out of debt to the ship were encouraged to desert, or abandoned no frivolous pretexts, in defiance of the law, that their lays might be forfeited.1 And once a Pacific beach- comber, a man seldom became anything better. A United States consul in the Pacific estimated in 1859 that three or four thousand young men were annually lost to their country through this channel. To replace them, Kanakas, Tongatabooars, Filipinos, and even Fiji cannibals like Melville's hero Queequeg, were signed on for a nominal wage or microscopic lay. Whaling vessels no longer returned as soon as their holds were full; a cargo would be shipped home by merchant vessels from Honolulu, and the voyage pro- longed until the old hooker crawled around the Horn with a yard of weed on her bottom and a crew that looked like shipwrecked mariners.
These three- and four-year voyages,2 touching at may be likely to desert - in which case we are losers." (Charles W. Morgan's instructions to Capt. Charles Downs of the barque President, "4th mo., 23d, 1830.") The captain of another whaler is instructed not to stop at the Westward Islands, as $100 or more has been expended for each whaleman's 'outfit.'
1 The most impressive fact in the ship's disbursement accounts I have examined is the large number of men who deserted at outlandish ports, although money was coming to them. If a deserter was appre- hended, the local police fees were charged up to him, with 25 per cent interest to boot.
2 The average voyage of fifty-two sperm whalers and fifty right whalers which returned in 1847, was respectively forty-five months, twelve days, and thirty-one months, seven days.
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no civilized port, brought out the worst traits of hu- man nature. Whalers' forecastles were more efficient schools of vice than reformatories. Brutality from officers to men was the rule. Many whaling skippers, who on shore passed as pious friends or church- members, were cold-blooded, heartless fiends on the quarterdeck. Then, having made conditions such that no decent American would knowingly ship on a whaler, the blubber barons used the character of the crews they obtained as an argument for still harsher dis- cipline. Men were hazed until they deserted, became cringing beasts, or mutinied. The ingenuity of whaling skippers in devising devilish punishments surpasses belief. Nor should one forget other ways in which these blackguards degraded the flag and the name of America. "Paying with the foretopsail" (sailing away without paying) was frequently practiced on Pacific islanders who had furnished supplies. The numerous conflicts between whalemen and natives were generally due to the meanness and rascality of skippers. Another practice, by no means uncommon at New Bedford and the Sound ports, was to fit out a whaler for a slaving voyage, unbeknown to the crew. As late as 1861 the owners of two New Bedford barques were condemned to hard labor in jail for slave-trading.
Whaling, after all, was better than most systems of peonage that flourish to-day, for it released its victims after a single voyage. Rarely, if a green hand made good with the skipper, he could be able seaman or boat-steerer (harpooner) on his second voyage; but the good 'short lays' were generally reserved for na- tive Nantucketers, New Bedfordites, and Gay Head Indians. Compensations there were, even in a whale- man's life. If his vessel ran into several 'pods' of whales in succession, he was worked until he dropped,
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THE WHALERS
and then kicked to his feet; but ordinarily he had plenty of leisure to play cards and smoke, and to carve sperm whales' teeth into marvelous 'scrimshaw work' and 'jagging wheels.' There was nothing in the merchant marine corresponding to the friendly. 'gams' or visits between whalers at sea; half the offi- cers and crew of each vessel spending several hours, even the whole night, aboard the other.1 But the great redeeming feature of whaling was the sport of it.
"There she blows! - there she breaches!" from the masthead lookout, was a magic formula that exalted this sordid, cruel business to an inspiring game; a game that made the rawest greenie a loyal team-mate of the hardest officer. First there was the bustle of sending away the boats, then the long, hard pull to the quarry, each of the four mates exhorting his crew with picturesque epithets to win the race: "Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunder-bolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys! Lay me on - lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! See that white water!" The rowers' backs are to the whale, it is bad form to glance around, they know not how near they are until the mate shouts to the bow oar, the harpooner, "Stand up, and let him have it!" A shock as bow grounds on blubber, a frantic "Starn all!" and the death duel begins.
Anything may happen then. At best, a Nantucket sleighride, waves rushing past the whaleboats with a "surging, hollow roar ... like gigantic bowls in a
1 "Endeavor to avoid those [ships] that wish to spend much time in gamming - as a lone chance is generally best," writes Charles R. Tucker, owner, to Captain Charles Starbuck in 1836.
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boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife- like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side; ... the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shud- dering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood." Finally the whale slows down, exhausted, and the crew pull up on him, hand over hand on the line, and dispatch him with a few well-timed thrusts; then pull quickly out of his death-flurry. At worst, a canny old 'sparm' sinks out of sight, rises with open jaws, directly under the boat, and shoots with it twenty feet into the air, crushing its sides like an egg- shell, while the crew jump for their lives into seething, blood-streaked foam.
Whalemen enjoyed a variety of adventures such as no other calling approached, such as no millionaire big-game hunter of to-day can command. "Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world; - neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed churned circle of the hunted sperm whale." When that moment came, no braver or gamier men could be found on blue water, than the whalemen of New England.
CHAPTER XXI OH! CALIFORNIA 1844-1850 Oh! Susannah, darling, take your ease, For we have beat the clipper fleet - The Sovereign of the Seas.
THUS roared in lusty chorus one hundred seamen on the Boston clipper ship Sovereign of the Seas, as she sailed through Golden Gate, on November 15, 1852. Before her, behind a hedge of spars and rigging, swarmed a hill of human ants, building a great city where ten years before the only signs of human life were a mission village, and a Boston hide-drogher. The refrain of that old popular song, the anthem of the Argonauts, resounds through the clipper-ship era of maritime Massachusetts.
Imagine a Yankee Rip van Winkle, who had slept out his twenty years within hailing distance of the State House dome. As he looked about him in 1853 the most astonishing sight would be - not the rail- road, not the telegraph, not the steamship - but the clipper ship. During the last half of his sleep there had taken place the greatest revolution in naval architec- ture since the days of Hawkins and Drake. Below in Boston Harbor, and setting sail for a port whose name he had never heard, were vessels four and five times as large as any he had ever seen, with canvas five and six times the utmost area that the old Boston East- Indiamen dared spread to the lightest air.
Now, before we relate this revolution, a paragraph of definitions. A ship, as old-time sailors use the word,
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and as I have attempted to use it throughout this book, meant a full-rigged ship, a three-masted vessel with square sails on all three masts. A clipper ship, as distinguished from other ships, was built and rigged with a view to speed, rather than carrying capacity or economy. Although larger, in general, than the older sailing vessels, it was the model and the rig of clipper ships that made them such, not their size. They were sharper in the ends, longer in proportion to their breadth, and more heavily sparred than the full- bodied, bluff-bowed ships of previous, and even later generations.1 For the clipper ship came all at once, and fled as quickly as she came. There had been clipper schooners and clipper brigs since 1812, the term "clipper" connoting speed and smartness; but only six or eight clipper ships had been built before 1850. Then were brought forth, like so many Cythe- reas arising from the sea, the fairest vessels that ever sailed, to meet a special need - speed to California at any price or risk.
About 1840 the rate of increase in the American merchant marine began to accelerate. The basic cause was ability of American shipbuilders and ship- owners to keep pace with the growing wealth, pros- perity, and population of America. In 1849 Parlia- ment repealed the Navigation Acts, thereby throwing open the British market to the products of New
1 Compare in the accompanying illustration the ship Mary Glover, a non-clipper built in the clipper-ship era, with the clipper ship Wild Ranger; or, better still, visit the Peabody Museum, Salem, and compare the half-models of the Flying Cloud and the frigate Constitution; or the Marine Museum at the Old State House, Boston, to compare models of different types.
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SHIP MARY GLOVER
CLIPPER SHIP WILD RANGER
OH! CALIFORNIA
England shipyards. At the same time the China trade was prospering; and competition between the ships of Russell & Co., the New York firms, and the great British houses, to market the new teas, stimulated shipbuilders.
These conditions created a demand for more ships, speedier ships, and bigger ships. Samuel Hall, of East Boston, built for the Forbes's China fleet in 1839 an unusually fast ship Akbar, 650 tons, the last word of the Medford type of 1830. New York build- ers knew how to construct the larger vessels through their experience with the North Atlantic packets; but the merchants wanted something more than size. Baltimore builders had the reputation for speed, through their clipper schooners and brigs of the long, low, rakish type beloved by slavers, pirates, and novelists. Samuel Hall had successfully copied or adapted their lines for pilot schooners, fishing schoon- ers, and small opium clippers. But the Baltimore clip- per model was as unsuitable for a vessel of one thou- sand tons, as would be a cat-boat model for a fishing schooner. For centuries, shipbuilders had maintained that you could have either speed or burthen, not both; but New York and Boston wanted both, and they got it.
Although Boston carried the clipper ship to its ultimate perfection, New York invented the type. John W. Griffeths, chief draughtsman of Smith & Dimon, produced in 1845 the Rainbow, 750 tons, the first extreme clipper ship. Her long, fine ends and cross-section like a flattened V, came from the Balti- more clipper; but the concave lines of her bow above the water-line, a characteristic feature of the clipper ships, were suggested by the model of a Singapore sampan which Captain Bob Waterman brought home.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
After some remarkable passages to China, the Rain- bow's model was imitated in five or six clipper ships of moderate burthen, built at New York between 1844 and 1848. As yet not a single vessel of this type had been launched from a Massachusetts yard. But the way was being prepared.
Donald McKay, born of Scots stock at Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1810, played about the local yards as a boy, and built a fishing boat with his brother in their early teens. Stimulated, perhaps, by a wandering Sam Slick, this youthful 'blue-nose' emigrated to New York, obtained employment at the shipyard of Isaac Webb, and quickly mastered the profession. Luckily for Massachusetts, he turned eastward again at the age of thirty, when he was ready to launch out as a mas- ter builder. At first working under John Currier, Jr., a leading shipbuilder of Newburyport, he became his partner in 1841, and produced for New York order two ships which proved wonders for finish, appearance, and speed.
In 1843 Enoch Train, a Boston merchant in the South American and Baltic trades, decided that his city must have a line of Liverpool sailing packets. He doubted whether any New England yard were capable of turning one out. Meeting by chance the New York owner of Donald McKay's first ship, he heard such praise of the young master builder of Newburyport as to give him the contract for his first packet. When he saw the Joshua Bates, this pioneer ship of his new line, glide gracefully into the Merrimac, Enoch Train recognized the genius of her builder. At his persuasion, and backed by his financial influence, Mckay estab- lished a new shipyard at East Boston. There he built in rapid succession, the Ocean Monarch,1 Daniel
1 Ocean Monarch, 178' 6" × 40' × 26' 10", 1301 tons; built 1848.
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OH! CALIFORNIA
Webster,1 and other famous packet-ships for the Train Line, and (in 1846) the New World, 1404 tons, a record in size, for a New York firm. These ships were not clippers, but they established the reputation of Donald McKay, and gave him the practice and equip- ment to astonish the world when another event created a demand for clipper ships of fifteen hundred tons upwards.
On January 24, 1848, a workman at Sutter's Mill, California, discovered a gold nugget in the raceway. When the news reached the Atlantic coast, it was re- ceived with incredulity, but by the end of the year, when reports were accompanied by actual nuggets, the gold-fever of '49 swept through Massachusetts. Farmers mortgaged their farms, workmen downed tools, clerks left counting-rooms, and even ministers abandoned their pulpits in order to seek wealth in this land of Havilah. Few Yankee Argonauts took the usual overland trail. True to type, they chose the ocean route. But like most of the 'forty-niners,' many of them went organized in semi-communistic brother- hoods. How this idea originated no one seems to know. Whether Fourierism had any influence is doubtful, and the Communist Manifesto could hardly have inspired a movement, the sole object of which was money-getting. A few companies were financed by local capitalists, in return for a guaranteed percentage of the winnings, precisely as the merchant adventurers of Old England 'grub-staked' the Pilgrim fathers. But for the most part the gold-seekers of Massachu-
1 Daniel Webster, 185' × 37' 3" × 24' (unusually long and narrow for a packet ship), 1187 tons; built 1850.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
setts journeyed West in organized groups, each mem- ber of which was pledged to serve his fellows to the best of his particular ability, and entitled to receive an equal share in the common gold production.
These emigrant companies varied in number from ten to one hundred and fifty young men, of all trades and professions. There was the Bunker Hill Mining & Trading Company, composed of thirty mechanics from Charlestown, Cambridge, and Somerville, paying five hundred dollars each; the New Bedford Company, commanded by Rotches and Delanos; the El Dorado Association of Roxbury; the Hampshire & Holyoke Mining & Trading Company; the Sagamore & Sacra- mento Company of Lynn; the Cotuit Port Associa- tion; the Winnigahee Mining Company of Edgartown; the Hyannis Gold Company; the Cape Ann Pioneers; and at least a hundred and fifty others from all parts of the state.
A few of these emigrant companies followed the transcontinental route. The Overland Company, of fifty young Roxbury men, marched in gray-and-gold uniforms, with seven wagons, thirty-one mules, four horses, six dogs, two colored servants, and four musi- cians. They arrived in Sacramento after intense suf- ferings, and heavy casualties among the mules. A few took the Panama route, but suffered great hardships crossing the Isthmus, and were charged from two hundred to six hundred dollars each for passage thence to San Francisco. But the great majority took sail around the Horn. Not clipper ships; far from it! There were few companies like the exclusive North Western of Boston, composed of Adamses, Dorrs, and Whipples paying a thousand dollars each, which could afford a crack clipper brig. Few shipowners would charter. The oldest, slowest, and most decrepit ves-
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PACKET SHIP DANIEL WEBSTER RESCUING EMIGRANT SHIP UNICORN
OH! CALIFORNIA
sels were purchased, because they were cheap. Many companies, especially those recruited on Cape Cod and Nantucket, handled their own vessels. Twelve out of one company of sixteen that left the island on Feb- ruary I, 1849, were whaling captains, as familiar with the route to 'Frisco as with "Marm Hackett's garden." The gold-fever drained Nantucket of one-quarter of its voting population in nine months. In the same period eight hundred men left New Bedford for the mines. There were one hundred and fifty clearances from Boston to California in 1849, one hundred and sixty-six in 1850, and many more from the smaller ports.
The Mexican War had hardly disturbed Massa- chusetts; but all through forty-nine the Bay State presented the spectacle of a community preparing for war on a large scale. Prudent companies took two years' provision, and stories of 'Frisco lawlessness made every emigrant a walking arsenal. Beef-packing establishments, ship-biscuit bakeries and firearm man- ufactories were running full blast; and the Ames plow works turned from agricultural machinery to picks and shovels. "The members of a society could be told by their slouched hats, high boots, careless attire and general appearance of reckless daring and potential wealth," writes Dr. Octavius T. Howe. On the Sab- bath preceding departure each company marched in a body to hear a farewell sermon (Genesis II, 12, being the favorite text), and to receive one or more Bibles each from sympathetic and envious neighbors. Most companies took care to admit only men of good char- acter, and their by-laws usually contain prohibitions of drunkenness, gambling, and swearing, which, like all their regulations, were well enough observed until they reached California. The Boston Journal pub-
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lished a special California edition for circulation on the Coast.
When the Salem barque Eliza cast off from Derby Wharf for California, late in '48, one of the passengers sang the following words to the popular tune of "Oh! Susannah":
I came from Salem City, With my washbowl on my knee, I'm going to California, The gold dust for to see. It rained all night the day I left, The weather it was dry,
The sun so hot I froze to death,
Oh! brothers, don't you cry.
Oh! California, That's the land for me!
I'm going to Sacramento With my washbowl on my knee.
I jumped aboard the 'Liza ship, And traveled on the sea, And every time I thought of home I wished it was n't me! Oh! California, That's the land for me!
I'm off for Californi-a With my washbowl on my knee.
This song in countless versions, but with the same washbowl chorus, became the anthem of the forty- niners.
Deep-sea sailormen have always insisted that the discipline and safety of a ship can only be maintained by despotic power in the master. But democracy ruled on the forty-niner vessels. Each company, al- though composed in good part of master mariners, was a miniature soviet. The captain was elected, and some- times deposed by majority vote; and the same method
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OH! CALIFORNIA
determined ports of call, and whether the Straits of Magellan or the Cape Horn were chosen. One night off the River Plate on the little schooner Roanoke, belonging to the Boston Marine Mining Company, all the watch were below playing whist with the skipper, except a man at the wheel and another on the lookout. The latter, seeing a squall approach, called repeatedly to his captain to send up the watch, but the game was too interesting to interrupt. Finally he sang out, "Say, Captain, if you don't send that watch up to take in the flying jib, you can take it in yourself, I'll be d-d if I'm going to get wet!"
In spite of these soviet methods (or because of them some will say) it seems that every one of these small and often superannuated vessels arrived safely at San Francisco. But ship fever (typhus) took a heavy toll of their passengers, on the five to eight months' voyage.
On arrival, each member's part was provided in the by-laws. Some were to stick to the ship, guard the stores, or cook; the majority wash for gold; but all share alike what the mining members produced. What actually happened is well told in a doggerel poem by Isaac W. Baker, in his manuscript "Journal of Pro- ceedings on board the barque San Francisco, of and from Beverly for California":
The San Francisco Company, of which I've often told, At Sacramento has arrived in search of glittering gold, The bark hauled in, the cargo out, and that is not the worst The Company, like all the rest, have had a talk and burst. For 't was, talk, talk, growl, growl, talk, talk away, The devil a bit of comfort's here in Californi-a.
While on the passage all was well, and every thing was nice, And if there was a civil growl, 't was settled in a trice, . But here example had been set by companies before,
Who'd all dissolved and nothing less, so we did nothing more But talk, talk, etc.
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We'd forty men of forty minds, instead of one alone,
And each wished to convert the rest, but still preferred his own, Now in some places this might do, but here it won't, you see, For independence is the word in Californi-e.
At first the price of lumber fell, which made it bad for us, Some wished to sell and some did not, which made the matter worse,
Some longed to start into the mines and let the Barkey stay While others said it would n't do for all to go away.
Some longed to get their ounce a day, while others knew they could n't,
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