The first walrus struck promptly drove his tusks through the side of the boat, tearing out a piece of plank large enough to have sunk us in minutes if the crew had not been used to such experiences. The walrus was promptly dispatched by a thrust of the lance, the boat pulled to the ice, hauled out and a canvas patch tacked over the hole in about the time it takes to tell it. [Canvas and tacks were routinely carried aboard whaleboats on walrus hunts.] After enough walrus had been killed to make a boatload they were hauled on the ice, skinned, and the blubber packed in the boat, when we returned to the ship.
Willie spent long days in the boats and on the ice through late June and most of July, watching the
Monticello
’s crew go about their work. The scale of the slaughter, and its pragmatic purpose, quickly eliminated any sensitivity another boy of twelve, even of his era, might have felt for these creatures.
While an old walrus will weigh over 2000 pounds [older bulls may weigh up to 4,000 pounds], you are not properly impressed by their size even when they are in full view on the ice, because having no legs they are always apparently lying down. In the water their size is still more deceptive, as you only see their heads and a small part of their back. Their movements, too, are so clumsy, that it is extremely funny to see them on the approach of a boat get off the ice, the females fairly shoving their young overboard in their anxiety to get them out of danger, and all the bellowing and barking as though bedlam had broken loose. At times, the water around the boat was fairly alive with young and old walrus; but as no one else seemed alarmed I took it for granted that there was no danger, although at first my nerves got a few bad “jars,” when upon hearing a terrific bellow at my back I would turn to find myself almost within arm’s length of a rather vicious looking combination, of a round head, wicked black eyes and a pair of long drooping white ivory tusks, but I soon learned that he was the most frightened of the two and promptly escaped if possible, either by diving or swimming away from the boat. Now and then a female walrus separated from her young, or an old bull walrus slightly wounded, would make a rush for the boat, sometimes causing an accident to some member of the crew, although I do not recall any that were fatal. The boats, however, were frequently stove so much so that it usually took about a week after the walrusing period was over, to put them in proper repair.
In less than a month, the
Monticello
’s men killed over 500 walruses, netting 300 barrels of oil. This full-time occupation for the ship and its men coincided with the summer solstice and allowed for great productivity:
It was no uncommon occurrence to see thousands of walrus upon the ice within an area of easy vision, and as the sun never set during this period, the hours of work were only limited by the physical capacity of the men, and that was tried to its utmost.
But Willie was writing of the last year or so, when walrusing was a mere addendum to whaling, practiced with whaling’s tools and methods. Within a very few years, the walrus harvest had become a main event in the Arctic, more dependable than whaling, and its efficiency was greatly boosted by the use of Sharps or Henry buffalo rifles. Captain Calvin Hooper described how the effectiveness of this was maximized by killing the first animal with a single shot to the temple:
At the first sound of the rifle they all raise their heads, and if one has been wounded and goes into the water the rest all follow; but if the shot has been effective, they soon drop their heads and go to sleep again. This is repeated a few times, until they become so accustomed to the firing that they take no notice of it. Then they are approached within a few feet and dispatched as fast as guns can be loaded and fired.
New Bedford captain Leander Owen, originally from Maine, was an expert at this. By himself, he once killed 250 walruses that lay on a single slab of ice. In one forty-eight-hour period in 1877, Owen shot 700 walruses.
Once the killing was finished, a boat’s crew began the grisly job of butchering the walruses, stripping the carcasses of their blubber, and using axes to chop the tusks out of their jaws. Though considered inferior to elephant ivory because of their more granular core, walrus tusks were readily sold for shipment to ivory markets in New York, London, China, and Japan.
As the whales grew shyer and scarcer in the Arctic, more walruses were taken. John Bockstoce, the preeminent historian and authority on American whaling in the western Arctic, estimates that of about 150,000 walruses caught by the whalers in the years 1849-1914, 85 percent of these were killed during whaling’s waning decade of the 1870s. “As appalling as the size of this catch was, the damage to the population was almost certainly greater,” writes Bockstoce. “The total kill was probably more than twice the size of the catch. Mortally wounded animals often escaped from the whalemen and, at times, the warm blood flowing from the slaughter broke up the ice floes, resulting in the loss of part or all of a particular harvest.”
This slaughter—far in excess of anything Captain Barker had seen or imagined during his hungry winter with the Eskimos—had devastating repercussions for his hosts. Though predictions of starvation for the natives had been made for some years, reports of a widespread tragedy were carried aboard ships sailing out of the Arctic after the winter of 1878-1879. “Fully one-third of the population south of St Lawrence Bay perished the past Winter for want of food,” Captain Ebenezer Nye wrote to the New Bedford
Republican Standard
,
and half the natives of St Lawrence Island died, one village of 200 inhabitants all died excepting one man. Mothers took their starving children to the burying grounds, stripped the clothing from their little emaciated bodies, and then strangled them or let the intense cold end their misery. . . . The people have eaten their walrus skin houses and walrus skin boats; this old skin poisoned them and made them sick, and many died from that. They also ate about all of their dogs and there are but three boats and three dogs left at what was once the largest settlement of Plover Bay.
A wishful story spread among the natives left alive that a Russian warship would come in the summer and destroy the whaleships for killing the walruses, but no Russian ship came. The American whalers, however, did what they could to provide aid to the native villages, feeding Eskimos who came aboard the ships and taking tons of their own food supplies ashore, though this was too little and too late.
The U.S. Revenue Service cutter
Thomas Corwin
discovered the extent of the disaster at St. Lawrence Island, at the southern end of the Bering Strait, where at least 1,000 of the island’s population of 1,500 had starved to death.
By the 1890s, the walruses had gone the way of the whales, their numbers shrunk to scarcity that finally made hunting them unprofitable, which was all that saved both species from total extinction.
IN LATE JULY OF 1871, with the fleet stretching from St. Lawrence Island in the south to the north end of the Bering Strait, a strong northeasterly wind began to blow across the Chukchi Sea. The ice that had blocked the strait was pushed south, through it, opening the passage to the north; and the ice that had clung to the Alaskan shore began to break up as the wind pushed it out into deeper water, creating the start of a channel of clear water between the ice and the land. This was what the fleet had been waiting for. The whalemen hoisted their boats aboard and beat toward the northeast, leaving the blood-soaked killing floes behind. Men were sent aloft to the crow’s nests and began again to look for the whales, which would also follow the opening channels in the ice.
Six
The Nantucket Paradigm
O
ne morning in the fall of 1659, before they were apprehended and hanged for not taking off their hats, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, along with Edward Wharton, took shelter from a rainstorm in the house of a farmer, Thomas Macy, in Salisbury, north of Boston. Macy himself had been caught in the storm and was soaked to the skin when he arrived home, moments before the Quakers knocked at his door. He found his wife sick in bed, so he was too busy to entertain his guests beyond allowing them to stay until the weather improved. He spoke few words with them, though he admitted later that because of their speech and “carriage” (hats on), he thought they might be Quakers. Macy was a Baptist, not a Quaker, but his notions of hospitality were as plain to him as the weather. His guests stayed about three-quarters of an hour, until the rainstorm passed, then thanked him and left.
Nevertheless, the Boston court took exception to this minimal act of hospitality and fined him five pounds. Macy was outraged, and his outrage made history.
“He could now live no longer in peace, and in the enjoyment of religious freedom [i.e., the freedom to extend Christian hospitality to anyone of his choice],” wrote his descendant, Nantucket historian Obed Macy.
He chose therefore to remove his family to a place unsettled by the whites, to take up his abode among savages, where . . . religious zeal had not yet discovered a crime in hospitality. In the fall of 1659, he embarked in an open boat, with his family and such effects as he could conveniently take with him, and . . . proceeded along the shore to the westward. When they came to Boston bay, they crossed it, passed round Cape Cod . . . thence they crossed the sound and landed on Nantucket without accident.
This same journey today in a well-found yacht requires precise navigation to negotiate the extreme tidal currents and shifting sandbars that lie between Cape Cod and Nantucket. Macy was not ignorant of these dangers. This hazardous voyage, of several days’ duration, risking wife and children in an obviously overloaded open boat in changeable fall weather through a stretch of the most disturbed waters off the New England coast, tells us everything about the vehemence of Thomas Macy’s feelings. He was responding to the same charges and persecution that seven years earlier had driven Henry Howland and others to purchase the land that became the settlement of Dartmouth.
A year later, ten more families from Salisbury had joined the Macys on Nantucket. They purchased the island from Thomas Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard (who had bought it from a group of absentee English aristocrat speculators).
But when these bold, independent-minded people tried to scratch a living from this place, they were at a serious disadvantage compared with settlers on the mainland. The fishing in the tidal-ripped waters around the island was good, particularly of cod, but with little to augment it from ashore, it made a thin living for the early Nantucketers.
From the earliest days of English settlement along the east coast of America, whales had been found stranded ashore, primarily along New England’s great stretches of beach on southern Long Island and Cape Cod. “Whaling” then was no more than scavenging; such flotsam was cut up and the blubber, long known to provide a useful oil, was boiled in large pots set up on the beach. But these windfalls were infrequent on Nantucket. Whales weren’t pursued and “fished” until the day, a year or two after Macy and others had moved to the island, when a live whale, of a kind locally called a “scragg”—a gray whale—appeared in the settlement’s harbor. It swam tantalizingly close, back and forth in the shallows off the town, for several days. A barbed spearhead was quickly fashioned by the local blacksmith, and a boatload of men eager to capture the whale set off with the spearhead and attacked and killed the whale. This appears to be the earliest account of a whale caught with a harpoon by the white settlers of America. The Nantucketers probably got the idea from watching the Indians, with whom they fished and were friendly, attempt the same thing.
Captain George Weymouth, exploring the New England coast and the waters around Nantucket and Dartmouth in 1605, observed of the natives: “One especial thing is their manner of killing the whale. . . . They go in company of their king in a multitude of their boats; and strike him with a bone made in fashion of a harping iron fastened to a rope, which they make great and strong of the bark of trees, which they veer out after him; then all their boats come about him as he riseth above water, with their arrows they shoot him to death.” But, as Weymouth indicates, “harping irons” were already well known. The Dutch had been whaling in open boats launched from the shore in Spitsbergen, far north of the Arctic Circle, since the late sixteenth century. A 1611 engraving of their techniques bears the description: “When the whale comes above the water, ye shallop rowes towards him and being within reach of him the harpoiner darts his harping iron at him out of both his hands and being fast they lance him to death.” And the Basques were known to have hunted whales in the Bay of Biscay since the eighth century, using this same method, which remained unimprovable for a thousand years: despite all the Yankee ingenuity brought to the business, American whalers still threw harpoons with both hands from open boats until the invention and use of the harpoon gun in the second half of the nineteenth century.
It was the Nantucketers who revolutionized whaling at two signal moments that saw the business evolve from opportunistic beachcombing into a global industry. The first was their adaptation of the Indians’ method of catching live whales from boats that encouraged them to hunt whales at sea rather than waiting for them to drift ashore. The immediate and subsequent success of this, and the infertility of their barren sandspit, led Nantucketers to put all their industry into the development of this “fishery.” They hired more whalers from nearby Cape Cod to come to Nantucket, and coopers to make barrels, offering acreage and steady work for these outside contractors. From the start, Thomas Macy and the early settlers established good relations with Nantucket’s local Indians, so these families became their partners in this early endeavor. Indian men joined the white men in their boats, and their wives were involved in the boiling of the blubber ashore. By the late seventeenth century, whaling was Nantucket’s principal business, and almost every family on the island took part.