13
The world into which the storms had thrown them was now a cold gray world, a motionless world, a world devoid of shapes or sounds beyond the murmurings of the ship herself. The fog, when it descended, blotted out everything. Even the rain, which alternated with light snow, was invisible until it struck some man-made surface. As long as the fog lay upon them, they would have warnings of neither weather nor icebergs nor rocks. The fog seemed to obliterate time itself, and every moment became a moment of fear. Blinded, they worried north.
At last a westerly wind on Saturday morning, May 20, blew some of the fog away, and the men of Shenandoah were able to comprehend how far they’d wandered from Dixie—or even from Australia. They had reached latitude 49.04 north, longitude 155.40 west. They were now north of Seattle, albeit over 3,000 miles due west. In the fog they had been sailing toward a dangerously narrow gap, one of the North Pacific’s most inhospitable passages. Finally a landfall some thirty-five miles to the northeast revealed its low, smudgy contours to the lookouts high in the masts, and navigator Bulloch identified it as Ounkatan.
Ounkatan: an island near the top of the Kuril archipelago—thirty-one volcanic islands that stretch like a tripwire in a 600-mile southwesterly line from tip of the vast Kamchatka Peninsula down to the island of Hokkaido. Far beyond them lay the whaling grounds in the Sea of Okhotsk, and before them were the Kurils, a picket line of semi-submerged, semi-active cones that gave rise to the deep tectonic vents of the “Ring of Fire.”
Kamchatka was a part of Russia. Hokkaido was one of the Japanese home islands. The Confederates were looking at Asia.
To their north, for nearly 2,000 miles, the Bering Sea washed against Kamchatka’s long eastern coast. Far to the east across the Bering Sea lay Alaska. And beyond, even farther north, the Bering Strait, the narrow passage between Alaska and Russia, gave entry into the Arctic Ocean. It was to be somewhere within this remote, wintry region, universes removed from the Potomac, the Mississippi, the sunlit killing fields of Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg, that Shenandoah would fire the last shot of the American Civil War.
All of the island was covered with snow, and as we got the wind from it, it was as cold as anything. We commenced to steam, and as we could not carry our square sails, we furled them and set all fore and aft sail. We found it fresh through the Amphitrite passage blowing too much, and never would have gotten through but for our steam.
By noon, they were safely in the Sea of Okhotsk, the enormous bay that separates Kamchatka from Russia’s Siberian coast. Okhotsk, an arm of the North Pacific, was nearly half the size of the Gulf of Mexico. Whittle’s resilient spirits soon rebounded again. “This has been a delightful day,” he wrote on May 22, as Shenandoah at last crossed the 50th parallel, “and most charming weather. It is a great relief after the weather which we have had.”
The raider loafed northward across the great bay for a couple of days, its lookouts scanning the horizon for Yankees. Okhotsk was famous for its whaling grounds; but Shenandoah was as much prey as predator now, and her enemy was not gunships, but Neptune. His most terrifying weapons were the ice floes that laced this shallow sea, and the blizzards that came roaring across the frigid water to toss the ship toward them. Southeasterly winds, up from Japan, and westerlies out of Siberia, pushed the raider eastward almost against its will, toward Kamchatka. A vicious snowstorm struck her on May 24, and another followed in its wake on the next day. Yet the calming of winds and sea brought no relief, only peril of another kind. The dense fog returned, setting nerves on edge as visibility receded; and paralyzing ice claimed great reaches of the placid waters’ surface.
The bay’s depth increased abruptly as the ship picked its way northward, and now to the west. “Cast the lead finding no bottom at 100 fathoms [600 feet],” Whittle wrote on May 25. “Very foggy.” “Very foggy and disagreeable,” he added the following night, at latitude 54.55 north.
The fog pursued Shenandoah stubbornly as she turned away from Kamchatka and felt her way ninety-six miles to the northwest, into open sea and toward Siberia—and toward God knew what mortal hazards of ice and rocks. And then, on Saturday, May 27, after fiftysix storm-ridden days of futility, a strike.
Course north northeast, a quarter east. Barometer 29.5–29.54. Winds southwest and calm. Filled away under close-reefed topsails. As soon as the fog cleared up, we saw a large quantity of floating ice in the port beam. Very soon we saw a sail on the other side of the ice. Made sail standing around the ice for the sail. Made her out to be a barque standing for us. No doubt to “yarn.”
Instead of a friendly chaw and a chat, the stranger found herself greeted by cannon fire.
[We] Hove to and she came right for us. Fired a gun. She hove to, hoisting the Yankee flag. Sent a boat, bringing aboard the Captain (Nye) Ebenezer, and all his mates.
This proved to be the barque Abigail, out of New Bedford. The Confederates set briskly to work on their latest victim: “We soon condemned the vessel, put a prize crew on board, and commenced to transfer the personal effects of the officers and crew, and remained by her all night.” Lieutenant Scales was placed in charge.
Abigail ’s cargo featured a disturbing quantity of liquor, which proved an insurmountable temptation for the raider’s parched crew, and a grave distraction from the mission. “This has been a terrible day for me,” Whittle moaned the next day. “We brought off a great deal of liquor, and many of our men and two officers got drunk. Put all [not officers] in irons, gagged and triced up right and left. I never had such a time.” Among the party-boys was the esteemed Lieutenant Scales himself. Whittle suspended him from his rank. Less fortunate was Mr. Lynch, the second carpenter, who made the combined mistake of drunkenness (not for the first time) and insolence to the lieutenant. Whittle clapped him in irons and muzzled him.
“Our men have heretofore been so clear of any such thing,” Whittle mused—drawing on a somewhat selective memory—“that it comes as something new…. But I am determined that they shall not repeat it.” On the brighter side, the prize crew transferred five hogs “and many valuables” to Shenandoah, along with thirty-five prisoners, whom they paroled. Then, matter-of-factly, they set Abigail on fire. Whittle put the quarry’s value at $22,000. “Saturday is our lucky day,” he noted tersely.
And then the drab gray world closed about the Confederates again. Another gale hit them on Monday, with fierce winds and swirling snow. They were now high up in the Okhotsk, forbidding Kamchatka on the starboard bow, and the snowy Siberian peaks visible off the port bow. A kind of sickly daylight filtered through the fog for most of every day: “It is never dark and you can read on deck all night. The sun rises at 3:00 a.m. and sets at 9:00 p.m.” Prospects for further prizes seemed imminent. “We learn from one of the prisoners whose sympathies are with us that all the whalers are out at Saint Iona’s Islands in the ice and we will remain here until they come up to enter the NE bay and pick them up there.” Whittle had slightly misidentified Iony Island, a tiny heap of rock near the middle of Okhotsk, where thousands of whales gathered to feed.
But no whalers came along to be picked up. The taking of Abigail proved a fluke. Routine took hold of Shenandoah once more, chill-laden routine—the long, empty days made to seem even longer by the near-constant presence of the arctic sun. Lieutenant Scales was restored to duty. The crew chopped up one of the longboats taken from the New Bedford prize; concern had arisen about the stability of a deck now crowded with plunder.
Clear skies, balmy temperatures, and calm winds ushered in the month of June; Shenandoah now sat at latitude 58.28 north, just off Tausk Bay. “I never saw a more beautiful day than the last day of May and I trust it will continue.” It didn’t. Tausk Bay, another reputed haven for whalers, proved to be entirely closed by ice. Skunked again. Now Shenandoah began a course change; she attempted what amounted to a sweeping portside U-turn, trying to make her way back over 700 miles southwest, and quit the Okhotsk altogether. Her goal, if the hunting stayed poor, was to round the tip of Kamchatka and then head north once more, even farther north this time. This time into the Bering Sea, and across it, and even farther thereafter. They were heading for the Arctic Ocean.
The elements massed against her. The barometer, subject of Whittle’s frequent nervous attention, plunged from 29.48 to 29.20 in a few hours on June 3, and freezing rain laced with hailstones pelted the becalmed Shenandoah. Ice coated her sails, ropes, masts, deck, yards, and rigging, “and the ship had the appearance of being made of glass.” Her braces and gear were immobilized. “The sight was certainly beautiful & grand but was most severe [dangerous].”
With the crew shivering and trying to protect their extremities against frostbite, Shenandoah managed to crunch through the icecrusted waters for thirty-five miles that day. Then trouble: with her sails frozen in place, the wind freshened. Frozen pulleys and ice-caked rope prevented crewmen from hauling in the foretopsail, and on Saturday night, June 3, Shenandoah, her propeller now useless in the iceclotted water, was suddenly being blown helplessly toward an immense floe, “which without our knowledge was on the lee bow.”
The men of Shenandoah, an isolated wooden speck on a frigid alien sea near the top of the planet, now struggled for survival against prehistoric forces of inexorable power. The arctic ice around them had carved the edges of continents across the eons, had stripped Siberia of its great coastal rocks. Now it was pressing in on the teak hull and copper plating of the raider. The jagged margins of the ice were relentlessly mobile, colliding with one another, then pulling apart in the wind, and closing again, creating phantom channels and lethal cul-desacs. Against this leviathan, the crew’s weapons were primitive, puny, pathetic. Lt. Sidney Smith Lee Jr., the officer of the deck, ordered all hands on deck to beat the ice clear of the pulleys—with belaying pins, capstan bars, anything available. The men swung into the task, climbing 40, 60, 80, 120 feet above the decks on frozen ropes, in the dark, their faces and hands exposed to sheets of freezing rain, and pounding, and pounding, and pounding again. The brutal work continued into the next watch, under the relief officer, Chew, until, at last, the pulleys began to creak and turn, and the sail-bearing ropes moved through them, responsive once more to the desperate hands of the mariners. Whittle recorded the drama.
We then braced aback, to force her out stern first, but this brought such a strain on the rudder, that we were afraid of splitting it. We filled away and forged ahead.
The goal now was to get out of the floe ice, fast, before it crushed them. To do this, they needed to turn the ship around, so they could maneuver, rudder-last, through the constantly shifting shards of ice—“Some pieces thirty feet deep and fifteen yards square,” Whittle noted. Once the rudder was engaged, of course, another peril immediately arose: its blade could easily become jammed in the ice, and fail.
Before she could even face that peril, however, Shenandoah needed to get turned around, and this was not proving easy.
Her head was southwest, and we knew we were getting further & further in. The ice, tho rotten, was very large, and but for some punch on the fore post and bows, we might have ripped off our stern copper, or stove our bows. The ship was so ticked up in the ice, that we scarcely thought it possible [to escape].
Then, toward 6:00 a.m. on June 4, a chance at salvation.
But thank God, just ahead, we saw a clear, or comparatively clear spot of about 40 feet square. This was our only chance.
The “spot” was a minuscule stretch of soft, mushy ice—a sort of nautical quicksand; but good for the rudder’s purchase. If the ship was going to turn, she would have to turn here. If she failed, her great quest would end here, or a hundred fathoms below here: ship, officers, and crew forever united under an icy shroud. Or perhaps on the frozen rocks of the Siberian coast, as food for polar bears.
We hoisted with great difficulty the fore topmast stay sail and very slowly wore to the northwest and north, and then, just using sail enough to work very slowly ahead, we finally pushed our way back the way we came. At 8 o’clock, we were out of the heavy ice, and made sail to get well clear.
“I was very uneasy,” Whittle was able to admit to his journal when the terrifying, exhausting ordeal was over, “and feared the stoving in of our bow.” His explanation for survival was his usual, simple, undeviating, utterly serene explanation for everything:
God favored us.
The narrow escape had sobered Conway Whittle, but it had done nothing to diminish his zeal for the mission. Nor had the likely fall of his South (at least not so long as he did not know officially that his South had fallen). For him, if not for the others, Shenandoah was on more than a mission now; she was on a crusade—a crusade on behalf of the Cause. Nor was it simply “the Cause” any longer. He had lately expanded and sanctified the reference in his log; he now called it the Just Cause. He, and the ship, would persevere in behalf of the Just Cause for as long as “God favored us.” If and when God ceased to favor “us,” they would accept death, however desolate, however wintry, however pointless, however far from home. The Just Cause now defined Whittle as much as his reflection in the mirror. Whether those capitalized initials had a dual significance—whether they were meant to merge this “J.C.” with the J.C. of his biblical faith—only Whittle knew.
Meeting ice here at some 200 miles [east of] St. Jonas Island proves to us that we can’t go near there for whalers, and must content ourselves in plucking them up as they go north into the bays after the ice is broken away. The sides of our ship are thin, and are in no way suited, like the bluff-bowed & sheathed whalers, to go into ice. I give my vote to keeping out of all ice, as necessary to the safety of the ship. I trust we will catch a great many before they get into the bays.
His attitude toward the ice, then, was one of calculating respect—not fear. The perilous turnaround amid the ice floes had been merely a tactical maneuver—not a retreat.
But where did his fellow officer stand on this matter?
On June 5:
At midnight I was again aroused by thumping and hurried on deck. I found the ship in heavy ice. Grimball had relieved Scales and got her clear without damage.
Was this new near-catastrophe a result of a capricious order by James Waddell? The issue of braving the ice once more—whether it was “proper and safe”—had been vigorously debated that afternoon. Whittle had advocated for prudence. He was sure, he’d told the others, “that without any sheathing or fixings, we are entirely unfit for it, and if we did not materially endanger the safety of the ship (and all hands) we would lose our copper, thereby ruining our sailing qualities and our more important work hereafter.”
Not everyone had agreed with him. Waddell had been inclined in his direction,
but to additionally arm & secure himself against any future censure, he determined to call a consultation with Lieutenants & Master. Lieuts. Lee, Chew, Scales and I were of the same opinion, i.e., that we ought to keep out. Lieut. Grimball & Master Bulloch thought we ought to go in.
Seeking to forge a consensus, Whittle had offered up a plan both daring and contingent on the capture of a prize.
My idea was to catch one vessel, put a crew on her and let her go in the ice, fitted as she will be for the purpose, keeping our vessel out which can catch them as they come up to go into the Bays. If this vessel be fitted out as I most earnestly do and will recommend, I will try and command her.
Whittle’s offer drew on the same knightly reserves as had his legend-establishing escapade aboard Nashville. He would once again risk his life for the greater good of the mission—for the Just Cause.
The others had agreed. Shenandoah would not tempt fate by plunging into the ice floes again. The thumping that awakened Whittle at midnight had signaled a miscalculation: the ice had caught up with the ship. Luckily, she escaped damage.
God favored us.
The Siberian Arctic now stalked Shenandoah across the sea: the ice, hundreds of square miles of it, breaking loose from its solid winter freeze in the June warmth, calving scores of huge, swirling chunks, most all large and heavy enough to bat the ship into oblivion. Often the ice was joined by its own brooding confederate, the fog. A third potential predator—the gale, whose force could hurl these ice chunks as if they were snowflakes—remained a constant source of anxiety; the barometer was seldom ignored for long.
“This morning, we ran along the land between the Tauck & Babushkin Bays,” Whittle noted on June 7. “We made ice as far as we could see. This we made out to be very high and very thick…. To enter it would be folly & we determined to skirt along it.”
Shenandoah had reversed course again. Abandoning her southwesterly route toward Siberia, she was heading northeastward again, toward Kamchatka. She remained in the Sea of Okhotsk, inside the vast embrace of Russia, disdaining the thought of swinging down around the peninsula’s tip and out into the Bering Sea. Bulloch was now steering toward the enormous cul-de-sac of the sea’s northwest coast, bordered by the narrow neck that connected Kamchatka to Siberia. The water was shallow there, good whaling grounds.
Yet the ice remained a barrier. “Our only hope lies in the possibility of picking up some vessel off the entrance [to the bay] and sending her in the ice after the rest,” he wrote again. He added, “The Capt. and a majority of our officers are of my opinion, and this will be our plan.”
Once again, Whittle had assumed too much from James Iredell Waddell. The lure of the Bering Sea would not be ignored after all.
On Thursday, June 9, he wrote with tightly controlled frustration:
The Captain came to a somewhat sudden conclusion in deciding to quit the Sea [of Okhotsk] and accordingly changed the course at noon for the Amphitrite, or 50th passage. When the main object of our cruise was to do work in this sea, I can but deeply regret coming so far and destroying but one vessel. I was utterly opposed to taking this vessel into the ice…. I was, however, in favor of remaining a short time, and trying to pick up a vessel off the northeast gulf, and sending her, fitted as she would be, into the ice after the rest.
He entered the reasoning of his fellow officer and adversary:
The Captain however, thinks that this, even if successful, would cause too great a loss of time. He says he has found out, upon good authority, that while there are about twelve whalers here, there are some sixty to eighty in the Arctic and Bering seas, and by remaining here he would lose so much time as to prevent his going there.
The source of Waddell’s “good authority” was unclear. Had he learned it in Australia? The Carolines? Did a prisoner from Abigail disclose it? Was his claim of a source merely a cover to legitimize a hunch of his own? Conway Whittle, the loyal team player whenever it was remotely feasible, gave his fellow commanding officer the benefit of the doubt:
If these facts are correct he is right in going on. Whatever he decides upon, I will do all I can to assist in carrying out. So here we go for the Bering Sea, I trust with good luck ahead.
The fog, once more dense and blinding, followed them southward for the first hundred miles. The vapors were accompanied by some bad personal news that seemed to worm its way into Whittle’s soul, reminding him of loss and mortality—of family, and of nation.
I have been very sad all day. It is only now, when I have little to do, that my troubles come more heavily upon me. The sad fate of my dear uncle, Captain Arthur Sinclair [reported drowned in the Lelia near Liverpool], renders me sadder than I can express. The loss of so noble and affectionate an uncle is, of itself bad enough. But when I consider the state of poverty and grief of his dear wife and children, I am thrown into a sad state of gloom. My constant prayer is that God will be merciful to my country and dear ones. Into his hands and to him, as a just God, I am happy to trust all.
How Conway Whittle learned this, he did not say. The most likely source would have been a report in a newspaper, of uncertain vintage, brought on board by one of the captured seamen from Abigail. Such a paper could well have been circulated for several days among the prisoners, and only gradually worked its way out of the hold and through the ship’s officers before reaching the lieutenant.
Arthur Sinclair’s fate dovetailed with the fates of his nation; the paper brought more bad tidings:
The latest news, representing the taking of Savannah and Wilmington, is calculated to distress us. But at the same time, it is an incentive to me to make a greater exertion to do my full, whole, and highest duty. Our cruise thus far has been commenced & vigorously executed amid unprecedented difficulties, and we are certain, with a proper degree of energy, to come out with flying colors. God aid us I pray.
The raider, blinded again, was steering by compass, chronometer, and dead reckoning as she picked her way slowly southward through perfectly calm seas blanketed by dense fog on June 10. She made only fifty-two cautious miles. Adding a note of unwelcome irony were the abundant whales that leaped and spouted around the ship—whales, but no whalers.
And no shortage of shipboard distractions.
Today it was reported to me that Capt. Nye, late of the prize “Abigail,” had been using every argument in his power to prevent some of the “dagoes” of his crew from shipping, telling them that a Yankee man-of-war would catch us and hang them. We want men and as they are not Yanks and can haul ropes we would like to get some of them. Besides, such talk would discourage any of our men who were at all weak nerved.
Whittle dealt with Captain Nye’s loose tongue by using the same persuasion that had helped so many Shenandoah crewmen see the error of their ways.
I sent for him and told him that if he continued to talk in this way, I would put him in double irons.
Whittle enjoyed some satisfaction at Nye’s expense when a prisoner named Thomas S. Manning, Nye’s second mate, came forward to join the Confederates. Waddell rated him ship’s corporal. “I was glad to have him,” Whittle wrote, “as the more Southerners we have the better. Besides, he is an old active whaler and may prove a valuable man to us…. He is a fine looking fellow.”
The damned whales continued to frolic about the ship as breezes brushed the fog away on Trinity Sunday, June 11. “I had no idea we could see them so far…. I thought at first they were sails. The ‘spouts’ looked like volumes of smoke or steam.”
He added, “I trust we will see a sail, but I scarcely think we will catch any until we get to the Behring [sic] Sea. I trust we will succeed, and I am sure we will do our best.”
As Whittle knew well, the Bering Sea still lay more than 1,600 miles north of the Amphitrite Strait—named for the Greek sea goddess and wife of Poseidon. The Amphitrite separated Okhotsk from the North Pacific at the 50th parallel, toward the far reaches of the Kuril archipelago. Still sailing in near-zero visibility, Shenandoah, trusting herself to the skills of Bulloch, plunged through its dangerous twenty-mile gap in heavy fog on June 13, and set sail on the final leg of her epic northward journey—a leg that would take her near the top of the world. And into conquest on an epic scale.
Whittle’s mood had brightened with the “shipping,” the day before, of a dozen Abigail men—“nearly all Sandwich Islanders or ‘Kanakas.’” Their names gave him as much pleasure as did their badly needed manpower.
Among them were Jim California, John Boy &c. One’s name was from his being so tall, “Long Joe,” but someone suggested that he had better revise it, so he just put himself down as Joe Long. They are a poor looking set but they can haul on the ropes.
Whittle took quick advantage of this increase by organizing another gun crew, “which gave us four guns on a side with full crews.” That night he shipped a Prussian named Burueth, whom he made a marine. And then a final stroke of good fortune: “Also our two Frenchmen, Peter Raymond & Louis Rowe, whose terms expired on the 29th of April, resigned. This gives us upwards of 110 men exclusive of officers.”
Nine days of quiet, fogbound sailing ensued, the lull before the storm. On June 14, Whittle—perhaps intuiting the victories to come—ordered the clearing out of the after “tween decks,” “which I shall use for prisoners.” A good breeze the following day carried them 188 miles under billowing topgallant sails. The rain soon returned, and a low barometer kept all hands braced for a deadly, ice-strewing gale. By the sixteenth, Shenandoah had run three days without observation, on dead reckoning. The fog dissipated at midafternoon that day, “and had it not lifted when it did…our ship’s ribs would most certainly have been on an uninhabitable island. Surely, God is with us.” So were two more men from Abigail, who shipped on that day.
The tension of virtually blind sailing gripped Whittle as he arose groggily at 6:30 a.m. the next day. “What with the noise of the propeller and the anxiety felt as to the true position of the ship, I slept very little and awoke feeling fatigued rather than refreshed by my last night’s restlessness.” On the other hand, Shenandoah had finally crossed into the Bering Sea, “standing,” as the lieutenant wryly noted “with a gentle southerly breeze for the fishing ground with nothing to look out for [but] about 400 miles of ice.” Fog and rain the day after that, and more anxiety: “I only feel apprehensions about ice, but “on dit” [French for “conventional wisdom holds”] that we will not see any so far South…. I am growing impatient to have our work up here finished. I want to go where we can see more of the sun and the enemy’s property.”
His overwrought state revealed itself in a logbook entry nearly inconceivable given his nearly constant affirmations of his unshakable faith in the will of God.
The day I have spent in reading my prayer book given me by my own dear Pattie. Oh! how much I do wish I was a Christian.
By June 19, Shenandoah, still northbound, was carefully sailing. Caution soon mixed with dread. She had reached eleven and a half knots:
We were going too fast for this icy region and we shortened sail to single-reefed topsails. We are now in a region which will not allow us to run too fast as we might be roused up at midnight by striking floeice. This ship should never go into ice, she is too frail.
By now, Whittle had internalized James Waddell’s “good authority” prediction of a sea thick with Yankee whaling ships. “Tonight is calm,” he wrote on the twentieth, as Shenandoah breached a latitude of 60 degrees north,
and if, as is highly probable, we make some of the whalers, a calm is the very thing we would desire. There are some sixty vessels up here, and we…might see ten at one time and if there was a calm, we could, with our steam, catch the party, but if there was a breeze…two-thirds might escape.
June 21, as the ship stood toward Cape Thaddeous at the southern end of Anadyr Bay, found Whittle tangled up in trying to explain what day it was. His nerves frayed from a second sleepless night, and, no doubt from excitement over the approaching rampage, the young lieutenant threw off all thoughts military, logistical, romantic, and reverential, and abandoned himself, in his log, to a rare burst of pure wackiness.
The occasion was the ship’s crossing of the imaginary line on the globe that had provoked head-scratching cogitation among sailors, philosophers, scientists, Magellan’s navigator, Edgar Allan Poe, and countless others and since its “discovery” in the fourteenth century: the International Date Line.
Now it was Conway Whittle’s turn to dilate. He began with his usual seriousness:
If you sail from England to the Eastwards and go around the world, returning to England say on the 21st of June, you will find that if you have not kept up the necessary correcting for change of longitude, your 21st is their 20th so that you have gained a day.
From there, he careered into near-slapstick.
We today crossed the 180th meridian from Greenwich and are therefore 12 h. ahead of them or tomorrow being by our account is regularly Thursday June 22nd, it is with them Wednesday, June 21st, or in other words we will have a week with two Wednesdays, a month with two 21sts and a June with 32 days. We will also for tomorrow have to take out the same declination equation of nine &c &c as we did today. This will puzzle some of our old sailors when Sunday comes to find the day on which they expected Sunday, Saturday’s work will be done.
Presumably allowing a few moments for his head to stop spinning, he added, in a more serious vein:
We expected to see some prizes today but are disappointed and expect them further to the eastward near St. Lawrence Island. We passed a great deal of whale “blubber” showing that the whalers are not far off. I trust that tomorrow will bring them.
For once, Conway Whittle’s unquenchable trust was fulfilled. Tomorrow did bring them. The greatest spree of nautical conquest in the history of the North Pacific, if not the world, was about to commence.