Final Voyage (9 page)

The purchasers paid Massasoit and Wamsutta “thirty yards of cloth, eight moose skins, fifteen axes, fifteen hoes, fifteen pairs of breeches, eight blankets, two kettles, one cloth, £22 in wampum, eight pairs of stockings, eight pairs of shoes, one iron pot, and ten shillings in another commodotie.” Both sides were pleased. (Only twenty-six years before, Peter Minuit, a leading official of the Dutch West India Company, bought the far smaller, twenty-three-square-mile Manhattan from local Indians for a similar pile of cloth, metal, goods, and trinkets worth sixty guilders.)

Twelve years later, in 1664, this large and bountiful area of woods, meadow, wetland, river, and shore was incorporated as the township of Dartmouth. It was named after the port town in Devonshire, England, which occupies a similarly favorable site at the sheltered mouth of the deepwater river the Dart. Like that river, the Acushnet—as the purchasers called and transcribed the Indian “Cusenagg”—proved sweetly accommodating of the development of seagoing affairs. It ran straight inland between sheltering arms of good land, wide and deep enough for the maneuvering of large ships.

The settlers of this New World Dartmouth built small houses, farmed, and developed peaceful relations with the local Indians. But elsewhere in Plymouth, the Indian chief Metacom, or “King Philip,” was selling every available scrap of the mainland under his control to Plymouth settlers in an effort to raise cash to buy firearms with which to drive those same purchasers off that land and kill them. When an Indian favorite of Governor Josiah Winslow, who was feeding Winslow information about Philip’s plans, was murdered by Philip’s men, the murderers were quickly caught and hanged, and, in June 1675, war erupted.

As Philip and the Pokanokets launched attacks with the aid of the Narragansetts, other tribes, long bristling under the inevitable breakdown of relations between whites and Indians, took the opportunity to attack settlers in their own neighborhoods of Swansea, Middleborough, Taunton, Rehoboth, and other towns. Unlike most Puritans, who lived in townships, the early settlers of Dartmouth had shown their preference for independence by dispersing themselves over a wide swath of country, separated by streams, rivers, and woods. This scattering of farms and homesteads had the added advantage that it didn’t appear to conform to the sort of recognizable community structure to which the General Court at Plymouth would have insisted on sending a minister of their own Puritan persuasion. But it was too open to allow for any cohesive defense. Early in July 1675, a renegade sachem named Totoson and a group of Wampanoags ran through the woods and meadows of Dartmouth, burning nearly thirty houses and killing many people, “skinning them all over alive . . . cutting off their hands and feet. . . . Any woman they took alive they defiled, afterward putting her to death.” Families were too far apart to group together and fight off attackers. They could only try to defend their homes, and those who weren’t killed escaped to the soldier-enforced garrisons on the Ap ponagansett and Acushnet rivers.

Henry Howland’s forty-year-old son, Zoeth Howland, was killed in an Indian raid. But by the following year the English had prevailed, and the Indian rebellion had been efficiently put down. Most of Philip’s allies had deserted him, and his wife and son had been taken prisoner (according to one account, they were transported as slaves to Spain). On August 12, 1676, fleeing white and Indian pursuers, King Philip was shot through the heart by a Pocasset Indian named Alderman, using an elderly musket.

It was years before Dartmouth recovered. As a result of the war, the Plymouth General Court ruled that all future settlements be built with homes located close together for mutual protection, and slowly Dartmouth was rebuilt as a small village along the river.

One of its first communal buildings, erected in 1699, was a “meeting house for the people of God in Scorn Called Quakers.”

The Killing Floes

A
s the
Monticello
and thirty-nine other whaleships gathered, pushing at the melting ice still blocking the Bering Strait in June 1871, they began killing walruses. Vast herds of the brown, wrinkled, elephantine creatures lay on the floes in full view of the whale ships, grunting, bellowing, or asleep in the sun, as the ice drifted slowly northward on the current with the advancing fleet. When the wind was in the right quarter, their strong smell carried for miles across the clean ice to the whalers.

The walruses were part of the same ecosystem that brought the plankton and the whales to these rich arctic waters. Their diet of clams and other shellfish lay in the silt beneath the floes in the shallow, mineral rich waters of the continental shelf between Alaska and Siberia. More localized in their habitat than the pelagic, migrating whales, the walrus herds spent the winters at the southern edge of the pack ice in the Bering Sea and moved north on the melting floes through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea during the spring—exactly in tandem with the whaleships. Although they had long been hunted by the Eskimos, this predation had been so small that when the whalers first encountered them in the 1840s, the walruses showed no fear of the men or their ships, but approached them out of curiosity. And in those early years of arctic whaling, faced with an abundance of their primary prey, the whalers had left the walruses unmolested. But in just four years, between 1848 and 1852, whalers killed a third of all the arctic bowhead whales they would catch between 1848 and 1914; by 1869, two-thirds of that overall catch had been taken. In August 1859, at the end of a dismal arctic season during which they had caught not a single whale on either side of the Bering Strait, the men of the New Bedford whaleship
Cleone
began killing walruses. The ubiquitous animals who lay around the ships on the ice “cakes” had previously been considered unworthy of the whalemen’s efforts. But the
Cleone
’s crew found that a single mature bull yielded around twenty gallons of oil (about two-thirds of a barrel), and from that moment on, the view from the deck of a whaleship in the Bering Strait was changed forever.

Walrusing increasingly became a factor in the profitability of whaling, whose primary resource had been in decline for decades. As demand grew, walrus oil proved at first almost as valuable as whale oil; but eventually, as refining techniques improved and walrus oil proved easier to refine than whale oil, its price rose even higher than whale oil. Compared with rowing after a whale in a small boat, followed by a dangerous struggle at sea or amid the ice floes, walrusing was irresistibly convenient: a man could walk up to a walrus as it lay on the ice or the shore and plunge a lance into the desired spot at the back of its head. While making slow progress early in the season toward the whaling grounds farther north, a ship’s crew could kill 500 walruses, netting 300 barrels of oil, perhaps half the seasonal catch for an arctic whaling ship at this time.

The surge in this preseason hors d’oeuvre of killing was sudden and devastating as walruses were reassessed by whalers as a prized commodity: from just three walruses killed in 1855, the number rose to 35,663 during the 1876 season. At that point the walrus population collapsed. Less than half that number, 13,294 walruses, were killed by whalers the following year, and the numbers would drop into the hundreds less than ten years later.

Both the whale and the walrus had long been a staple food of the Eskimos. Before the 1850s, whales had been plentiful along the arctic coasts, easily caught by the natives—in small numbers that had no effect on the size of whale populations or on the whales’ awareness of these predators. But since the appearance of the American whaling fleets, they had become scarce, and much warier when found, and the Eskimos had shifted their dependence to the walrus, not only for food but for clothing, boots, tools, and many items of daily use in their culture. Now, with the same terrible efficiency and consequences they had brought to whaling, the New Englanders were decimating literally an ocean of walrus herds, and by 1871 the natives along the Alaskan and Siberian shores were facing starvation.

It was an act of supreme generosity by the Eskimos to feed the crew of the
Japan
. “I felt that I had been taking the bread out of their mouths,” Captain Barker told his listeners. Later he wrote to the New Bedford
Republican Standard
newspaper: “Yet although they knew that the whaleships are doing this, still they were ready to share all they had with us. The wholesale butchery of the walrus pursued by nearly all the ships during the early part of each season will surely end in the extermination of this race of natives who rely upon these animals alone for their winter’s supply of food.”

Barker returned from his winter in the Arctic a changed man. He declared that neither he nor anyone aboard a ship he commanded would ever kill another walrus. He urged the other captains to give it up, though he knew what he was asking of them.

The following year, another whaling captain, who signed his letter simply “A Shipmaster,” published a similar appeal in the New Bedford
Republican Standard
, but he was realistic about the response to this inconvenient truth: “I have seen most of the captains lately arrived home, and they all tell the same story—that the natives are or will starve if the business is not stopped. Some say, ‘I never will take another walrus,’ but several others I have talked with say they won’t take walrus if others will not, which means just this, ‘I shall take all I can.’ But it wants the condemnation of the shipowners and agents here in New Bedford, for I think their ships can be better and more profitably employed in whaling.”

But New Bedford’s shipowners and whaling merchants—the Howlands and their peers who read these entreaties—remained unmoved by such appeals. Walrus catches in 1871 were still rising, along with their significance in terms of profit. The dire predictions for the welfare of native peoples on the far side of the world meant nothing to them. What would happen was in the future, and it was going to happen to someone else. This was the way of the world—scientists from mid-century onward could now understand such apparent calamities through the wonderful new lens of Darwinism that put a fatalistic spin on misery and famine, and pious Quakers could, if they wished to, see in it the unfathomable hand of God. He had placed the walrus on the ice floes alongside their ships as surely as He had filled the seas with whales. Such explanations absolved them of moral responsibility.

By 1871, the crystalline surface of the ice stretching across the Bering Strait had become the dark, slippery floor of a sixty-mile-wide abattoir. For the Eskimos, this harvest was too great and wanton to profit from its leftovers. Years of natural stocks of this food source were butchered in a few months, most of it going to waste. Settlements along the strait were able to make some use of the meat of carcasses stripped of their blubber by the whalemen, but elsewhere the scarcity was pronounced: whalemen had seen natives on the ice thirty and forty miles from land trying to capture a single walrus.

“This cold winter,” the “Shipmaster” had written, “I have no doubt, there is mourning in many an Arctic home as the little ones cry for something to eat and the parents have nothing to give, for the walrus are killed or driven far away.”

Most of the whalemen agreed, sharing the fulsome expression of sentiments common to even the staidest newspaper writing of the day. But they had barrels to fill, and money to earn, that would be filled and earned by others if they did not, so they went “walrusing” as usual.

In 1871, most walruses were still killed by “iron”—harpoon and lance—or club. This method had the disadvantage of startling the entire herd on a floe when one of its members was attacked. The others would begin to slip off the ice into water, but the whalers still caught great numbers of them while they swam, hauling them back onto the ice to be skinned.

Ships’ logs recorded the daily tallies. Aboard the
John Wells
: June 23: “
At about 5 o’clock [p.m.] commenced walrusing.”
June 24:
“Fine weather walrusing all day & night got about 75 in number.”
June 25:
“A wild goose chase after walruses. we got 3 or 4.”
July 1:
“Light breeze from South’rd 5 boats [the
Wells
’s five whaleboats] walrusing got about 30.”
July 2:
“Light breeze boats off about 30 miles from ship walrusing got about 50.”
July 3: “
Went off after walruses came in thick fog got 15 I believe.”
July 4:
“Light breeze boats off walrusing got about 40.”

The count aboard the
Henry Taber
: June 25, 20 walruses; June 26, 40; June 27, 48; June 28, 14—before wind and rain sent the boats back to the ship that evening.

Aboard the nearby bark
Elizabeth Swift
, also of New Bedford: July 1, 41 walruses; July 3, 51; July 12, 41; July 13, 20; July 14, 41.

Captain Thomas Williams, of the
Monticello
, allowed his twelve-year-old son, Willie, to go walrusing in the first mate’s boat. It was the boy’s first view of a live walrus up close, and he never forgot what happened.