Chapter Nineteen

ICE CRUSH

THIS PRINT, BASED ON A PAINTING BY BENJAMIN RUSSELL AND TITLED ABANDONMENT OF THE WHALERS IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN, SHOWS THE HEAVILY LOADED WHALEBOATS BATTLING THROUGH THE WAVES JUST SOUTH OF ICY CAPE, TRYING TO GET TO THE WHALESHIPS WAITING TO RESCUE THEM, IN SEPTEMBER 1871.

THE 1871 BOWHEAD HUNTING SEASON STARTED OFF IN THE USUAL fashion. Forty whaleships headed north in the early spring on their way to the frigid waters off Point Barrow in the Arctic Ocean. The captains of those ships, most of them seasoned veterans of Arctic cruises, knew that many potential dangers lay ahead. Whaling was difficult and harsh work no matter where it was conducted, but whaling in the far north was the most unforgiving of all. It wasn’t the whales that caused most of the problems; bowheads were far less aggressive than sperm or even right whales, although they did their fair share of damage. Rather, it was the Arctic weather that whalemen feared the most. Between the ice floes, the bitter temperatures, the freezing water, and the unpredictable and often violent gales, the margin between life and death was hair-raisingly thin. Each season the captains had to balance the desire to catch more whales with the need to respect the elements and turn back before it was too late. In 1871, as the northern fleet slowly edged northward, troubling signs abounded, yet the captains pressed on. They decided to gamble against the weather and they lost, leading to the greatest single disaster in the history of American whaling.

Ever since Capt. Thomas Welcome Roys led his frightened crew through the Bering Strait in 1848, whaleships had ventured to the Far North in search of bowheads. The first few years were a tease. The weather was relatively mild and the catches were phenomenal, leading a Honolulu newspaper in 1850 to paint a most flattering picture of whaling in the Arctic. “We doubt so much oil was ever taken in the same period, by the same number of ships and attended with so few casualties. In fact, a cruise in the Arctic Ocean has got to be but a summer pastime, as is proved by the fact that the wives of some half dozen of the captains accompanied their husbands in the last cruise, with the same willingness that they would have gone to Saratoga or Newport.”¹ But this image was shattered the next year, when catches plummeted and inclement weather and heavy ice conspired to destroy seven ships. Never again would anyone, and certainly no self-respecting whaleman, view whaling in the Arctic with such insouciance. One New Bedford whaling captain in 1852 went so far as to wonder whether men should whale there at all, writing, “I felt as I gazed upon the great frozen ice-fields stretching far down to the horizon that they were barriers placed there by Him to rebuke our anxious and overweening pursuit of wealth.”² Despite the potentially lethal weather, or even the possibility of displeasing God in their search for lucre, whaleships returned to the Arctic each year. And in 1871 dozens of whaleships of the northern fleet, bound by this tradition, began their journeys hopeful that this season would be a good one.

The fleet made it to the lower reaches of the Bering Sea in early May, and finding the ice tightly packed and more southerly than they had expected, hunted for right whales. Slowly the fleet inched north and by June, they were off Cape Navarin on the Siberian coast, where six whales were taken. Shifting currents, strong winds, and dense fogs, however, made navigating through the large and very mobile ice floes exceptionally difficult, and the captains and their crews had to be on guard constantly to avoid collisions. But no matter how vigilant they were, collisions did happen, as the men on the Oriole learned. Toward the end of June, their ship was stove in by ice, and when the captain ordered the pumps manned, it quickly became apparent that the wounded ship was beyond repair. The pumps were no match for the flood of freezing ocean water rushing in below the waterline. The men were barely able to keep the Oriole afloat until it could be brought into Plover Bay, where it was sold for parts to the captain of the Emily Morgan. The northern whaling season of 1871 already had its first victim.

Shortly thereafter the ice retreated farther north, allowing the fleet to pass through the Bering Strait, with all the ships arriving in the Arctic Ocean by the beginning of July. Faced with an impenetrable wall of ice ahead of them, and the bulk of the whales still many hundreds of miles away, the men began walrus hunting. This was not an idle pastime but an alternative way of making money. Walrus oil was as valuable as whale oil, and sometimes even a bit more remunerative, and the ivory tusks were prized as well. So, year after year, while waiting for the ice to recede and the serious whaling to commence, the whalemen turned to harpooning and shooting walruses. The tusked pinnipeds didn’t have a chance. Docile to begin with and easily approached, both on the ice and in the water, the walruses were killed by the tens of thousands. A whaling captain, even in an age which countenanced animal cruelty with barely a thought, called the walrus hunt “one of the most cruel occupations that I know of,” and claimed that “many a humane whaleman has felt guilty and turned aside as he did it.” While the bounty of walrus oil and ivory was good news for the whalemen, it was devastating to the local natives, who depended on walrus meat and blubber for sustenance. The whalemen were literally taking food out of the Eskimos’ mouths and forcing them to travel in ever widening arcs to hunt for walrus or risk starvation. Many whalemen knew that this was happening, but only a few spoke out against it. “I wish to say to the ship agents and owners in New Bedford and elsewhere,” began one whaling captain’s epistle, “that the wholesale butchery of the walrus pursued by nearly all their ships during the early part of each season will surely end in the extermination of this race of natives…. If this is continued much longer, their fate is inevitable, as already this cruel persecution had been felt along their entire coast.”³ During the 1871 season the walrus hunt, while not as good as in years past, went well enough. The Monticello’s four whaleboats, for example, killed five hundred walrus in less than a month, which yielded three hundred barrels of oil and many hundreds of pounds of ivory.⁴

At the end of July favorable winds drove the ice away from the Alaskan shore, and the whaling fleet took advantage of this opportunity and began sailing toward Point Barrow, which lies just above the seventieth parallel and is the northernmost spot in Alaska. In the early years of the Arctic fishery, when Roys and his peers were active, whalemen didn’t have to travel that far because there were more bowheads, and they could be found in and around the Bering Strait and even farther south. But over the next couple of decades, as the bowhead population dwindled, the whalemen were forced to travel ever northwards in search of large concentrations of whales. Now that the conditions were right, the northern fleet crept up the coast, following a narrow ribbon of water just a few miles wide, with the land hard on their right flank and a massive shield of pack ice on their left, whaling when they could and doing their best to keep from grounding on the shoals. On August 11 the winds shifted, pushing the pack ice toward the shore, causing many of the ships to scramble to avoid being caught or crushed. Whaleboats that were on the hunt were suddenly marooned in the ice or stove in, and their crews had to haul their boats many miles to their ships over the jagged and bobbing ice floes. On August 13 the ice pack ground to a halt and the wind died down, but a couple of days later another strong wind took its place and the ice was driven closer to the shore. The fleet was pinned down in the vicinity of Point Belcher, spread out along a twenty-mile sliver of open water that was less than a mile wide in places, and only fourteen to twenty-four feet deep.

Although the situation was increasingly precarious, none of the whalemen panicked. In seasons past strong northeast winds had usually come to their rescue, pushing the pack ice offshore and allowing them to finish hunting and leave the Arctic before ice swallowed up all the open water and cut off their escape route. The men expected that this would happen again, and in the meantime whaling continued, with a twist. Hemmed in by the shoal water and ice, the whaleships could not get to the whales, so the whaleboats were sent out on hunting expeditions. Provided with food and all the implements for whaling, the whaleboat crews sailed off in search of prey, traveling many miles from their ships, and setting up temporary base camps on the ice floes. When they harpooned a whale they would tow it back to the camp and start cutting in, turning the edge of the ice floe into a cutting stage. While one whaleboat towed the severed slabs of floating blubber back to the ship for processing, the other whaleboats kept hunting. The men continued this bone-wearying task for days at a time, sleeping fitfully on the ice floes and using their propped-up sails for protection from the cold and wind.⁵

Every day the men prayed for wind from the northeast. On August 25 it came. The men’s spirits lifted as they watched the ice move four to eight miles offshore. In short order they were back to traditional whaling, and the whaling was good. Perhaps this would be a saving season after all. The only hint of doubt came from the Eskimos, who visited the ships to trade for goods. They told the whalemen that they should leave, and soon, because this was going to be a bad winter, and when the ice came back the ships would be stuck. The whalemen, generally lacking respect for the wisdom and knowledge of the natives, disregarded this advice. They had been sailing these waters for years and were confident that the worst was past. They would not let the warnings send them packing, especially now that the whales were plentiful and the weather so fine.⁶

The whalemen’s confidence, however, quickly faded. On August 29 the weather changed precipitously. With the wind blowing from the southwest, it started snowing, and the ice crept closer to the shore. Open water was vanishing fast, and many of the whaleships had to work hard to keep from being crushed or run aground, and a few of them had to slip their cables to get out of the way of the oncoming ice. On August 31 Timothy Packard, the captain of the Henry Taber, took in the ominous scene and wrote in his journal, “Oh how many of this ship’s company will live to see the last day of next August? God only knows. I will trust to his all wise hand.”⁷ The following day the mate of the Eugenia observed, “some twenty-six sail in sight. All jammed in the ice close into the beach. Things look bad at present.”⁸

While the men of the Roman were busy cutting into a whale on the first day of September, the ship got trapped between ground ice and a massive floe that descended on it from offshore. The floe crushed the Roman’s hull “like an egg-shell” and lifted the ship partway out of the water.⁹ As the sound of cracking timbers filled the air, the Roman’s crew managed to lower three whaleboats and pull them a safe distance away from the ship, where the petrified men watched as the ice relaxed and then tightened its grip three times, turning their once-proud ship into a splintered wreck. Within forty-eight minutes the Roman, or what was left of it, sank out of sight. The orphaned men walked and then sailed until they reached other ships in the fleet, which welcomed them on board. The next day a similar scene unfolded, but this time it was the Comet’s turn to be crushed and its crew orphaned. Amazingly, even after these two disasters, many of the whaleships continued whaling. The captains still believed that the weather would turn and release them from its icy grip. Then, on September 8, the Awashonks succumbed to the ice, and yet another crew had to be rescued. Now survival, not whaling, became the major concern.¹⁰

On September 9 the captains met to consider their options. The situation was bleak. Winds from the southeast and southwest continued to push the ice toward the shore, slowly closing the already narrow open-water channel that provided the ships with their only refuge. “Offshore is one vast expanse of ice,” wrote William Earle, a mate on the Emily Morgan. “Not a speck of water to be seen in that direction. All but three of the northern fleet have come down and anchored near us. There are twenty ships of us lying close together. There seems to be but little hope of our saving the ship or any of the other ships being saved.”¹¹ The weight upon the captains’ shoulders was immense. Their deliberations would determine the fate of their ships and their men. “We felt keenly our responsibility,” wrote Capt. William H. Kelley of the Gay Head, “with three million dollars worth of property and 1,200 lives at stake. Young ice formed nearly every night and the land was covered with snow. There was every indication that winter had set in.”¹²

The captains knew that they and their men could not survive the winter. There were just a couple of months’ worth of supplies on board. Their only hope lay in contacting the whaleships that they thought might still be farther south beyond the ice in open water. To do this, the captains ordered the smallest ships of the fleet, the Kohola and the Victoria, to be lightened as much as possible, believing that they might then draw so little water that they could snake their way down the coast and reach the whaleships. But even after every conceivable item was removed from the ships, they still did not ride high enough to make it over the nearby shoals. Fortunately there was a backup plan. At about the same time that the ships were lightened, three whaleboats, under the command of Capt. D. R. Frazer of the Florida, headed south, and on September 12, after a round trip of 141 miles, this expeditionary force returned with good news. Seven whaleships were still south of Icy Cape, and they were ready to remain there to assist in the rescue. “Tell them all,” said Capt. James Dowden of the Progress, in a flourish that would become legendary, “I will wait for them as long as I have an anchor left or a spar to carry a sail.”¹³

When Frazer shared this intelligence with the other captains, they decided that the time had come to abandon their ships and head south. To defend their decision to others who might question it, the captains drafted a letter on September 12: “Know all men…that we, the undersigned, masters of whale-ships now lying at Point Belcher…have all come to the conclusion that our ships cannot be got out this year,…and not having provisions enough…and being in a barren country, where there is neither food nor fuel to be obtained, we feel ourselves under the painful necessity of abandoning our vessels, and trying to work our way south with our boats, and, if possible, get on board of ships that are south of the ice.” The masters briefly recounted the recent destruction of the whaleships, and claimed that if the members of the fleet were forced to overwinter, “Nine out of ten would die of starvation or scurvy before the opening of spring.”¹⁴

Even before Frazer returned, the captains had begun dispatching whaleboats to place provisions along the escape route, and this process quickly sped up. The captains also sent a whaleboat with a letter to deliver to the “masters of the ships in clear water south of Icy Cape,” which informed them of the decision to abandon the ships and head south. The letter implored those masters “to abandon your whaling, sacrifice your personal interest as well as that of your owners and put yourselves in condition to receive on board ourselves and crews for transit to some civilized port.”¹⁵

Finally, on September 14, the signal was given for the mass exodus to begin, and by four in the afternoon more than one-hundred whaleboats, weighted down with people and supplies, were, in what must have been one of the most dramatic tableaus in whaling history, heading south. “At twelve noon,” wrote Earle, we “paid out all the chain on both anchors and at 1:30 P.M., with sad hearts, ordered all the men into the boats and with a last look over the decks, abandoned ship to the mercy of the elements. And so ends this day, the writer having done his duty and believes every man to have done the same.”¹⁶

Some members of the whaleboat armada chose to camp on the shore that night, while others continued sailing, frequently checking the water’s depth so as not to ground, and straining their eyes in the darkness to avoid ice floes. Either way they had a miserable time, with the wind howling and a cold rain falling. The next day most of the whaleboats reached Icy Cape, where they could see the rescue ships lying offshore. Getting to them, however, was not going to be easy. Wind was whipping across the water, white-capped waves were breaking against the ice pack “masthead high,” and three of the rescue ships had already lost anchors trying to maintain their position against the surging ocean.¹⁷ The men on shore, however, could not wait for the seas to subside, for if they did their only opportunity for salvation might be lost. They launched the heavily laden and low-riding whaleboats into open water and, as one whaling captains later recalled, “encountered the full force of a tremendous southwest gale and a sea that would have made the stoutest ship tremble.” The whaleboats were pummeled by every wave, and “tossed about like pieces of cork…requiring the utmost of diligence of all hands to keep them afloat.”¹⁸ First they bailed, then they began throwing over their prized belongings to keep the whaleboats from being swamped, and finally they made it to the ships, where, battered, and coated with a thin layer of ice, they were taken aboard. By September 16 all the whaleboats had run the same gauntlet, and a total of 1,219 passengers, including a small number of women and children, had been safely taken aboard and spread out among the seven now-very-crowded rescue ships, which hauled their anchors and promptly headed to Honolulu, arriving there in late October. “The sudden arrival of from a thousand to twelve hundred wrecked seamen in the course of a day,” reported the Honolulu Gazette on October 24, “has had the effect to make the town look lively.” But when one considered that this great influx of humanity had just passed through the most horrific of trials, and that all of the men had just lost their ships and their livelihood, the scene took on a thoroughly depressing cast, which was reinforced by the great sadness evident on every survivor’s face.¹⁹

In the States the news of the Arctic disaster—which claimed 33 ships, valued at about $1.6 million, but not a single life—was viewed as both a tragedy and a miracle. New Bedford, which was home port for twenty-two out of the thirty-three ships, was hardest hit.²⁰ The New York Times wrote, “It is reported from that city that the disaster is really almost as severe a blow to it as was the great fire to Chicago; it has prostrated its main business—that of whaling—and has seriously damaged, if not crippled, its leading insurance offices.”²¹ The owners, captains and crews, and insurers of the lost ships were not the only ones who suffered financially. The members of the rescue fleet gave up some of their whaling season to ferry their unexpected passengers to safety. Five of those ships were American, and to get back some of their forgone profits, the owners petitioned the U.S. government for compensation. It took Congress twenty years to respond, ultimately paying the owners roughly $140 for each American citizen they had rescued.²²

Soon after the rescue fleet left the Arctic in mid-September 1871, the Eskimos descended on the abandoned ships, stripping them of everything of value, including spars, cordage, whalebone, nails, guns, and tools. The Eskimos searched for liquor but found none, because before leaving the ships, the whalemen had dumped all the liquor that was on board “so that the natives would not get to carousing and wantonly destroy the ships.”²³ The whalemen forgot, however, to empty the medicine chests, and when the Eskimos opened these and began drinking the contents, they got violently ill, and a few of them were said to have died. In late September a strong gale, the type for which the whalemen had so fervently prayed, bore down from the northeast, pushing the pack ice offshore. Although some who learned of this in later years argued that it was proof that the captains should have held on and thereby escaped with their ships, it is far from certain what the outcome might have been had they pursued this strategy. And as historian Everett S. Allen points out, “In any event, soon thereafter, a second gale stormed out of the north and rendered any alternatives academic.”²⁴

 

THE ARCTIC DISASTER of 1871 did not put a halt to Arctic whaling, and the very next year another fleet, though slightly smaller than the one that sailed in 1871, headed north, along with a couple of salvage ships sent to see if they could find any valuable items among the wrecks. There wasn’t much left to recover. Crushed and mangled ships lined the coast, which was littered with debris, and a few of the ships had been torched by the Eskimos, apparently in retribution for being made sick by the contents of the medicine chests. Only one ship from the abandoned fleet, the Minerva, was brought back to the States, along with a relatively small quantity of oil and whalebone.²⁵ There was, however, another most unusual discovery made during the Arctic whaling season of 1872. As it turned out the abandonment of the fleet in September 1871 was not complete. One whaleman had stayed behind, hoping to be the first salvager on the scene, gathering whalebone from the wrecks and stockpiling it over the winter to sell the next year when the whaleships returned. Things didn’t work out the way he had planned. He sought refuge on board the Massachusetts, and had, according to his own account, managed to collect quite a bit of whalebone before the Eskimos stole it from him. Then, he claimed, “They set out to kill me, but the women saved me and afterward, the old chief took care of me. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars would not tempt me to try another winter in the Arctic.”²⁶

In the following years whalemen continued heading to the Arctic. Although they could not help but recall the disaster of 1871, they viewed it as a fluke and were willing to write it off to peculiar circumstances. According to two whaling captains who were interviewed in November 1871, “the disaster was merely one of those deviations from natural laws against which all precautions are futile. Such an event would not probably occur again in a lifetime.”²⁷ The captains were at least partly correct. The summer of 1871 was an anomalous season, or a “deviation from natural law,” if you will, when the air over the Arctic was unusually cold, the ice pack thicker than normal, and the prevailing winds such that instead of pushing the ice offshore, as most often happens, they pushed it toward the coast.²⁸ But as for the prediction that another lifetime would pass before there was a similar event, they were unfortunately wrong. In 1876, history repeated itself, but with a more tragic outcome. Once again, whaling captains bet against the ice and lost.²⁹ The oversize headline of a Boston Globe article on the disaster undoubtedly dredged up a whole range of sad memories for its readers, especially those in the whaling trade.

 

CAUGHT IN THE ICE

A WHALING FLEET DESTROYED IN THE ARCTIC SEAS

A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE

SOME OF THE CREW FROZEN TO DEATH…

 

As the disaster played out, part of the northern fleet was whaling in the vicinity of Point Barrow at the end of August 1876, when it became trapped in the pack ice. On August 29, after drifting quite some distance and fearing that there would be no break in the weather, the captains concluded that “there was no further hope of saving the ships,” and they decided to abandon them. Not all the crewman were convinced that this was the best course, and more than fifty of them chose to remain behind, perhaps thinking that the weather would turn or, if not, that they could survive the winter and salvage valuable items from the ships. So, on September 5, almost precisely five years after the last such exodus, three hundred men left the ships and began the twenty-mile trek to the shore, over the crumpled ice floes, pulling their whaleboats behind. The next day they reached a narrow strip of open water and sailed to Point Barrow, reaching there on September 9 only to find the whaleships Three Brothers and the Rainbow stuck fast in the ice. After building sleds to continue their journey, the men set out again, and in a couple of days sighted the whaleship Florence, itself pinned in the ice. The captains decided that to press on “would be madness,” and instead they began preparations for overwintering. But then on September 13 the ice began to move, and within a day’s time the Florence was floating free. All the men got on board, and the Florence began sailing south, its captain carefully dodging ice floes along the way. Soon the Florence was joined by the Three Brothers and the Rainbow, both of which had also broken free of the ice. While the Rainbow’s captain decided to continue whaling, the other two captains had had their fill of the Arctic for one year, and, dividing the displaced whalemen between them, they sailed back to port.³⁰ All told, twelve whaleships were lost during the Arctic disaster of 1876, at a devastating cost of roughly $1 million. When whalemen returned to the Arctic the following season they found only three survivors—the rest had simply disappeared.