Epilogue

FIN OUT

PEOPLE GATHER ON THE SHORE OF CUTTYHUNK ISLAND TO SEE THE WANDERER, WRECKED IN THE SHALLOWS. PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM H. TRIPP.

AFTER APPEARING IN DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS, THE WANDERER remained tied to the dock until its owners decided to attempt another voyage. Thus it was that on Sunday, August 24, 1924, hundreds of people gathered at the edge of New Bedford harbor to send the Wanderer on its way.¹ They crowded onto the pier and the Wanderer’s main deck. Some of the more nimble among them climbed into the rigging to get a good view of the proceedings. Following a long-held tradition of sending off whalemen with the blessings of their Maker, Chaplain Charles S. Thurber of the Seamen’s Bethel used the twenty-sixth verse of the 104th Psalm—“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein”—as the basis for his sermon. “While these men are absent,” Thurber intoned, “we will pray God to preserve and keep them, in the hour of danger as well as in the hour of joy.”² The Bethel’s organist, Miss Henrietta Humphrey, whose instrument had been brought down to the pier in a wheelbarrow, played familiar hymns such as “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “Pull for the Shore,” and “The Lifeboat at Sea,” while those in attendance, adorned in their Sunday New England finery, sang along.

It was a solemn and historic occasion. Capt. Antone T. Edwards had announced that this would be the Wanderer’s final voyage, and that he did not believe that New Bedford would ever send another whaleship to sea. Thus, many of the people on the pier, including a large contingent of sightseers, thought that they were witnessing not merely the beginning of the Wanderer’s last trip, but also the end of an entire era. As the New York Herald Tribune noted, “The departure of a whaleship has already become…one of the rarest of events; and when a year or so from the present the Wanderer’s topsails are again sighted coming up Buzzard’s Bay it will very probably be the closing page of one of the greatest chapters in that kind of American history which is so inadequately written.”³ The Wanderer was oddly being viewed not so much as a ship but as “a bit of the past,” as the New Bedford Mercury noted, “a left-over that seems out of place at the present time.”⁴

The Wanderer, built in 1878, in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, boasted an impressive whaling résumé. It had hunted in three oceans, with one trip yielding an astonishing 6,200 barrels of whale oil.⁵ At forty-six the Wanderer, well beyond middle age, was still in good shape. Some people claimed whaleships lasted so long because oil, which sloshed around on their decks, preserved the wood and made them more resistant to the ravages of age. If this was true, then all of the Wanderer’s well-lubricated trips had added to its longevity. And now, having been refitted, repaired, and restocked in anticipation of its final cruise, the Wanderer was ready to go.

On Monday morning the tugboat J.T. Sherman towed the Wanderer out of New Bedford harbor. Given the unfavorable winds and the imperative to recruit men to add to his understaffed crew, Edwards anchored the Wanderer off Dumpling Rocks in Buzzard’s Bay, and returned to New Bedford on the Sherman, leaving his first mate, Joseph A. Gomes, in charge of the ship. The winds shifted and dramatically increased that night as a northeasterly gale bore down on the Atlantic coast, catching the region off guard. By the next day the Wanderer was being lashed by eighty-mile-per-hour winds and tossed about in a raging sea. In the face of this tempest, the ship began moving, dragging its massive anchor along the bottom. No sooner had Gomes let out a second anchor to arrest the Wanderer’s advance then the first anchor’s chain broke, and the ship continued to be pushed into open water and across the bay. Gomes attempted to get the Wanderer under way, but failed, as the wind ripped through the sails and “the rudder head snapped clean off” under the strain.⁶ Gomes and the fifteen others on board abandoned ship in two whaleboats and, after a harrowing time at sea, finally made it to shore. A short while later the hapless whaleship crashed into the Middle Ground Shoal, just over a mile from the western tip of Cuttyhunk Island, and with the winds and waves beating down on it, it bounced along the sand and rocks, ultimately coming to rest about one hundred feet from the beach.⁷

As soon as he awoke on Tuesday morning and saw the storm raging, Captain Edwards sought to return to the Wanderer, but the Sherman, the tug he relied on, was not able to leave the harbor until late in the afternoon, and by the time it reached Cuttyhunk, “the spray was so thick where the surf was breaking on the reefs,” wrote a local reporter, “that it looked like black smoke.” Edwards and all the others on board could discern through the storm that the Wanderer was wrecked.⁸ Realizing that he could do nothing else, Edwards headed back to New Bedford for the night and then returned to Cuttyhunk the next morning to assess the damage. It was nearly a total loss. The keel was crushed and the bow crumpled. The rudder had been ripped free and was found a quarter of a mile down the beach. As Edwards stood there, looking at his crippled ship, Gomes ran up to him crying, “Capt’n, I couldn’t save the ship if I went to hell!” Despite Gomes’s protestations, there were some who faulted him and his relatively inexperienced crew for the disaster, but most knowledgeable observers thought that the men had done all they could under the circumstances and should not be blamed. One New York reporter cheekily declared that the ship’s demise was “a plain case of ship suicide. The Wanderer plunged to her death, the victim of a broken heart!”⁹

Over the next few days, under a clear blue sky, the crew and a smattering of Cuttyhunk residents salvaged what they could from ship.¹⁰ The lower decks were awash in floating debris, and one man who ventured into the hold found himself “waist deep in spaghetti.”¹¹ Casks of beef, belaying pins, flags, whaleboats, harpoons, and other whaling implements were brought to shore, as crowds of curious onlookers visited the site and watched the men, as if part of a maritime dirge, perform their depressing task.

A poignant story resulting from the Wanderer’s ignominious end involved one of its Cape Verdean crew members. For months he had been scrimping and saving his money, planning to take it back to his family when the Wanderer docked in the Azores to drop off a few passengers and pick up supplies and crew before continuing on its way to Argentina for the whaling season. But he and the other men abandoned ship so quickly that they didn’t have time to gather any of their belongings, jumping into the whaleboats with little more than the clothes on their backs. So when the ship crashed, all of that crewman’s hard work and his hopes of making the lives of his relatives a little better literally washed away. Although this crewman lost everything, at least one person profited from the disaster. While people were busy salvaging the wreck, the ship’s whaling guns were retrieved. They made it to shore, but then they simply disappeared.¹²

It’s ironic that the Wanderer, in the end, didn’t wander very far. There would have been some poetic justice had it, with its star-crossed name, been the very last of America’s wooden whaleships to head, symbolically as it were, out to sea on a whaling cruise. But, still, the Wanderer, slowly disintegrating in the surf, provided a fitting final image for the great era of American whaling, which had now become part of America’s mythic past.¹³