Final Voyage (12 page)

Such a man was Joseph Rotch. His father, William Rotch, born in Salisbury, England, in 1670, came to America around 1700 and became a prominent citizen in Provincetown. Joseph was born in 1704, and lived first in Braintree, then Falmouth. At some point he moved to Nantucket, where he married Love Macy, a descendant of Thomas Macy, and became a successful whaling merchant. Rotch was a Quaker, his sons were born on the island, and the Rotches became one of Nantucket’s leading families. Yet perhaps because of a background more cosmopolitan than most of his neighbors’, Joseph Rotch became restless on Nantucket. At the relatively advanced age of sixty-one, rich and secure by every measure of his time, he left Nantucket in 1765. Where he went indicates the scope of his ambition, and his appetite for renewal.

“Well Cut Up”

F
orty ships pushed through the scree of heaving ice in July 1871, trying to outmaneuver each other up the narrow, shifting, seasonal waterway now opening between the pack ice and the Alaskan shore. At no point along its entire length from the Bering Strait to Point Barrow was this channel wider than the broadest reaches of Long Island Sound.

It resembled the end stage of a gold rush: too many miners jammed elbow to elbow, scrabbling over the remaining crumbs of a once fabulously rich vein. Yet still they came on, ignoring every sign of the vein’s exhaustion, for there was nowhere else to go, and they knew nothing but mining.

This was the last profitable whaling ground on earth. The whalers had virtually exhausted the whale stocks of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, eastern Arctic, and Southern oceans. It had taken less than a hundred years.

IN AUGUST 1788, the British whaling ship
Emelia
sailed from London for what was then the most exploited known whaling ground in the world: the relatively shallow banks off the coast of Brazil. The tropical waters teeming with organic effluent from the Amazon and other rivers made a rich soup of nutrients and sea life, an ecosystem that drew great numbers of whales. This fabulous offshore repository of wealth had become known to seamen as “the Brazils” or simply “the banks.” But the
Emelia
’s whalemen found few whales there, and those that remained had become wary of ships and men.

Already by the late eighteenth century, whale populations everywhere in the Atlantic had noticeably decreased. Even after the Revolution had destroyed or bottled up in port most American whaleships, those that still cruised the Brazil banks, mostly British ships, noticed a change.

The
Emelia
was owned by the premier English whaling merchants of the day, Samuel Enderby & Sons, who had long been engaged in business with merchants in Nantucket and had a strong connection with the island. A number of the sailors on British ships at the time were Nantucketers, the acknowledged world experts on whaling. Their island home had remained neutral throughout the Revolution, and Nantucket’s whalemen found ready employment in the British fishery after the war. The
Emelia
’s captain, James Shields, and first mate, Ar chaelus Hammond, were both Nantucketers. Along the docks and in seamen’s taverns in London before the voyage, they had met the captains of British merchant vessels sailing home across the South Pacific from China, and many of these had spoken of the great numbers of sperm whales they had seen in that ocean. So, late in 1788, off the disappointing coast of Brazil, Hammond—so the story goes— persuaded Shields to sail the ship south and around Cape Horn into the Pacific.

This was no small decision aboard a ship fitted out to cruise the tropics. Cape Horn was already well known as a graveyard of ships and sailors, a place of consistently ferocious weather and abnormally large seas that could overwhelm the best-managed, best-equipped vessels. There was another route into the Pacific some miles north of Cape Horn, through the strait discovered by Magellan more than 250 years earlier, but few ships carried charts for the strait—or the waters around the Horn, for that matter. The only recommended tactic for getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific—if a ship wasn’t going to sail east around the bottom of Africa and across most of the world—was to sail south, well offshore, before turning west somewhere below South America (there was no more precise instruction) and hope for the best.

The
Emelia
successfully rounded the Horn early in 1789—summer in the Southern Hemisphere—and sailed into an edenic new world where large ships were still relatively unknown and the whales cruising the vast ocean had never been hunted and knew nothing of men. In March, off the coast of Chile, sperm whales were sighted and boats were lowered to give chase. Mate Hammond’s reached the pod first, and he became the first man (that is, of the history-writing American and European cultures) to harpoon a whale in the Pacific. The
Emelia
quickly filled all its barrels, turned south, and once again rounded Cape Horn. Heading north, in the middle of the Atlantic, she met the Nantucket ship
Hope
, owned by William Rotch. As the two ships passed within a few hundred feet of each other, Captain Thaddeus Swain aboard the
Hope
heard Shields on the
Emelia
shouting the information that he had come from “round Cape Horn with 150 tons sperm oil.” Rotch, who in the aftermath of the Revolution was based temporarily in Dunkirk, France, and running a small fleet of his whaleships out of that port to supply the European market, soon sent four more of his ships to the Pacific by way of Cape Horn. Word spread fast. The first whaleships to head for the Pacific from American ports were the
Beaver
, from Nantucket, and the
Rebecca
, from New Bedford, both sailing in 1791. Both returned to port after seventeen months with their holds filled with sperm oil.

The so-called Golden Age of American whaling refers to the years between the 1820s and the 1850s, when the business, centered increasingly in New Bedford, reached its peak, but this boom truly dates from around 1790, for it was in fact powered by the discovery of the Pacific whaling grounds.

Yet such unrelenting success sowed the seeds of ruin. Sixty years after the
Emelia
’s discovery, well before the peak of the Golden Age, whaling captains were already looking back on what by then appeared to be the good old days. In 1853, a whaleship captain (he chose to write anonymously but was probably either Asa Tobey, captain of the
Lagoda
, or Charles Bonney of the
Metacom
, both ships and men from New Bedford) published a series of letters in the
Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript
charting the inevitable effect of the whalers’ efficiency wherever they voyaged:

The pioneering captains of these whaleships, like the writer above, were master mariners and navigators, among the canniest and most skillful in human history. They came to know the sea and read the oceans with instincts that bordered on the extrasensory. Good navigators in any age (but especially before the widespread use of electronic navigation devices caused these senses to atrophy) necessarily acquired this skill: something inside them that grew to fill the gap between what was demonstrably known and what they desperately needed to know in crucial moments. Thus they became aware of the great ocean currents, discrete rivers running through the wider seas—the Gulf Stream, the Benguela off Africa, the Brazil and the Falkland, the Humboldt off Chile, the Kurio Shio and the Oya Shio off Japan, the Alaska, the Aleutian, the Kamchatka. They felt—in the spray on their faces and in the air around them—the temperature gradients where the edges of these currents, some cold, some warm, met the surrounding ocean; they saw the water change colors, and they observed closely the life in the water and the air that migrated along these highways. But all this they could only know by sailing blindly ahead, in many places without charts—often through dense fogs in high latitudes. Most whaling grounds were discovered by chance married to a seaman’s intuition. As they were located, exploited, and depleted in sequence across the Pacific, ships sailed deeper into unknown and uncharted waters, looking for rich new pastures, hoping to stumble upon an epoch-making discovery like the
Emelia
’s.

One of the most curious, observant, independent-minded, and strong-willed of these pioneering whaling captains was Thomas Welcome Roys. Born on a farm in upstate New York, Roys shipped aboard a Sag Harbor whaler at age seventeen in 1833, and was a captain by the time he was twenty-five. Cruising off the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia in the North Pacific in the early 1840s, he noticed, and made careful note of, steady streams of migrating whales swimming to the north. In 1845, on his second voyage as a captain, the twenty-nine-year-old Roys was injured by a right whale off Kamchatka. The whale’s thrashing tail destroyed the boat he was standing in and dumped him into the sea, breaking two of his ribs. After this accident, his ship, the
Josephine
, of Sag Harbor, New York, sailed to the Russian coastal town of Petropavlosk, where Roys remained to recuperate from his injury while his ship continued whaling with its first mate in command.

While he was ashore, Roys spoke with a Russian naval officer who had cruised north through the Bering Strait into the Arctic and seen unusual-looking whales there. Roys supposed these must be similar to the Greenland right whales that whalers had hunted in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic. No American or European whaleship had yet sailed north of the Bering Strait, and Roys began to think of the possibilities of a voyage there. He was so intrigued that before he left Petropavlosk, he purchased a hundred dollars’ worth of Russian charts covering the waters north of the strait. Later, while still cruising in the
Josephine
on the right whale grounds off Kamchatka, Roys met and gammed with Captain Thomas Sodring of the Danish whaleship
Neptun
. Sodring told him of three strange-looking whales he had taken near Petropavlosk. He, too, had supposed at first they were right whales, until his crew began to cut them up: their blubber—evolved for colder arctic seas—proved to be extraordinarily thick, rendering enormous quantities of oil, and there was more “bone”—baleen—in their mouths than Sodring had ever seen in another whale.

After the
Josephine
returned to Sag Harbor, Roys was given command of another ship, the
Superior
. Having spent a significant sum on his northern charts, it’s likely that he shared his thoughts about whaling in the Arctic with the
Superior
’s owners, Joseph Grinnell (of New Bedford) and Robert Minturn, of the whaling firm Grinnell, Minturn & Co. They considered arctic whaling too risky, and instructed him to sail not north but to the distant south, to cruise the remote but well-known wastes around Crozet and Desolation islands in the Southern Ocean, south of the Indian Ocean, almost halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. When he got there, Roys found these once plentiful grounds, where he had successfully hunted whales before, nearly fished out. He then sailed east (the only possibility for a whaleship east of Africa in the Southern Ocean, with its frequent and fast-moving westerly gales) until he arrived in Hobart, Tasmania. Begun as a penal colony in 1804, Hobart had developed into a major whaling port servicing the South Pacific whaling fleets by the time Roys arrived there early in 1848. It was probably in Hobart where a letter reached him with the news that his wife had died only a month after he had sailed from Sag Harbor the year before, shortly after the birth of their only son. This may have made him reckless, for he sent a letter to Grinnell and Minturn from Hobart telling them that he was sailing for the Bering Strait and seas north of there.