By ten in the morning, six hours after leaving Mili, the Dolphin had covered the sixty-five miles to Arno (“South Pedder’s Island” as it was known to the Dolphin’s officers) and, looking for a landing place, had reached its northeastern point, the right claw of the crab-shaped atoll.
The Dolphin had come to the isles of love. Lightheartedly related by modern Marshallese raconteurs is the enchanting legend that Arno at one time was the site of a university of love-making in which young girls were trained to give pleasure to their men. For all the amusement that the discussion of that pedagogy causes today, anthropologists familiar with Arno have found that the school, whatever it was, was not a myth. Paulding does not name the island of the atoll at which Captain Percival went ashore, but if his description is correct, the island was Lonar, the very one on which the sex school reportedly flourished. Doubtless Percival and Paulding and their translators did not know this, but they did observe that the young women were being kept out of sight on another part of the island for the full time that the Dolphin party was ashore, something that could have happened on almost any island, but which may have been the result of a heightened sensitivity on Lonar to what happened when the sexes were together.
Captain Percival’s reason for the stop at Arno was not to visit the university but to meet Labuliet, the powerful chief, whose domain covered at least the three most southern atolls of the Ratak chain, Majuro, Arno, and Mili. The Dolphin officers had learned about him on Mili and knew that he was Luttuon’s father-in-law (or perhaps grandfather-in-law) and that he enforced, with threats of war, his demand for regular tribute. The captain, accompanied by Hussey as translator, landed on the beach in front of a village and was met by a few natives, who led him to the high chief. They found Labuliet seated on a mat in front of his hut. According to Paulding he was very old with a long white beard; according to Lay he was about seventy. He was composed and unexcited by the surprise visit; he was able to distinguish the captain as the main dignitary in the group and addressed his message, delivered mainly by signs, to him. The language of Arno, Hussey knew once he heard it, if he did not already know, was the same as that spoken on Mili. Captain Percival had ordered Hussey not to let on that he spoke the language but to listen to what was being said by Labuliet and those around him and to report. What he heard Labuliet say was, “Don’t disturb them yet. Wait until to-morrow, and see what they are going to do. They will look round here to see what they can find, trade a little, and go on board of their vessel, to sleep, and to-morrow they will come again.” The captain then told Hussey to speak in their language. The effect of his words was pure shock; the natives were astonished and rattled at hearing their language come from Hussey—and so was Labuliet. When the chief managed to collect himself, he asked where Hussey had learned the language, and Hussey told him. So you are one of the white men I had heard about, Labuliet said; he was interested in what he had heard and was planning to travel down to Mili to see them. Was the other one on the ship, he wanted to know. He was sorry to see that the two men were back now with their own people, for he had planned to bring them from Mili to his island; he would have treated them well, he said.
The captain had a major gift for Labuliet, a battle-axe, so major a gift that the chief was almost unwilling to accept it because he had nothing of comparable value to give in return. He did, however, give the captain some mats, coconuts, and bob. The captain would gladly have acquired more food from the island than the small amount in the chief’s gift, but Labuliet explained that food was not abundant on the atoll and that there was just enough for its people. But, he suggested, a few miles to the west was another group of islands where there was plenty of food and a small population; that would have been Majuro, today the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which was only about twenty miles away but which Percival declined to visit.
When Percival asked Labuliet if he had ever seen white men before, the old man said, yes but long ago; it was a large vessel and the men on it did something memorable, they brought their forge ashore. No device could have been more fascinating to the natives, given their fixation on iron, than the one that actually worked the metal. No wonder that the visit was remembered. That forge, designed to produce heat for the smith, may have also produced some light for the historian: the big ship that Labuliet saw may have been the Rurik, commanded by Otto von Kotzebue on his 1815–1818 voyage of exploration, and the atoll where the forge was put ashore may have been Wotje. Adelbert von Chamisso, in his chronicle of Kotzebue’s explorations, says that the Rurik’s forge was set up on that atoll January 24, 1817, nine years before Percival’s meeting with Labuliet on Arno. If Wotje was where Labuliet saw the ship, what was he doing so far from Arno? The answer is suggested later in Chamisso’s chronicle: Labuliet, who was already an old man in 1817, was lord of Maloelap Atoll (“the Kaven group” to western explorers), about eighty miles north of Arno, and resided on the atoll’s Airik Island. Some time in the nine years between Kotzebue’s visit and the Dolphin’s Labuliet’s realm must have changed from the northern Ratak islands to the southern ones, possibly because of the role of Luttuon during the period of exile that he had told Percival and Paulding about back on Mili. Luttuon’s task, Paulding speculates, must have been to move from island to island consolidating the power of the great chief, who needed a unified base of support for any war that he might have to conduct; the forces that could be raised on any one island would not have been adequate for a major battle. Luttuon could have been so effective in subjugating the southern islands for Labuliet that Labuliet transferred his kingdom’s center to Arno.
The captain’s talk with Labuliet lasted about two hours. The subject closest to the old chief’s heart was the welfare of his daughter, who was married to Luttuon and lived on Mili. (Paulding, when talking earlier of Luttuon, suggested that the woman might be Labuliet’s granddaughter.) Was she alive and was she well? Labuliet wanted to know; it had been a long time since he had received any news of her. When told that she was indeed alive and well, the old man broke down sobbing.
It was night when the captain and his party left Labuliet’s home and went to their boat to push off for the ship. They were already a few yards from shore when some natives ran down to the boat saying that the chief had another mat that he wanted to present to the captain and that the chief wanted Hussey to go back to the village to pick it up. The captain declined the offered gift, the circumstances of which could not help but make him uncomfortable. Shortly three more natives ran down to the shore with the same message—Hussey must come up to pick up the mat—and with the additional message that the chief was returning the battle-axe, for he did not want to put himself under such an obligation to the captain. Percival told them that he never took back something that he had given. This time the messengers were left standing on shore, and the captain’s boat headed out through the surf to the ship. Paulding leaves his readers to make sinister inferences about Labuliet’s intentions; those intentions were frustrated in any event, and the Dolphin was able to sail without rescuing Hussey twice.
On December 12, after leaving Arno and making another fairly brief passage—about seventy miles—the Dolphin came to Aur Atoll (“Ibbetson’s Island”). The ship was selectively moving up the Ratak chain: Mili is the southernmost; Arno and Majuro, side by side, are the next atolls to the north; then little Aur and large Maloelap. After that come seven sizable atolls, which the Dolphin turned away from as it headed east to Hawaii in keeping with its original sailing orders. Since the Ratak chain is not straight north-south but northwest to southeast, the Dolphin would have been moving farther and farther west if it had stayed with the chain all the way to Bikar in the north, and its course to Hawaii would have become circuitous.
The neat and pleasant village on Aur where Paulding went ashore might just as well have been in Mili or Arno. But the landing party found no one in sight until, poking through the bushes, they came upon a few old people in hiding. They were very shy of the visitors—they said that they had never seen white people before—but they came forward when offered a few simple gifts, and they reciprocated with the familiar presents of mats, coconuts, and bob.
Similar as the people were to those on Mili and Arno, they differed in one way that struck the visitors at once: the population seemed mainly old and not as healthy as their counterparts on the other islands. Paulding had never seen toothless old people among other groups of natives and had never seen natives disabled with crippling disorders. He asked why there were only old people to be seen and got the answer through his translator: the girls had been sent away to another part of the atoll lest any of the visitors try to give them gifts. Where the young men were was not explained.
Captain Percival had put his boat ashore on one of Aur’s islands different from the one Paulding had landed on and had the same experience of finding only old people left to meet him while most of the inhabitants had gone into hiding. Percival had a low tolerance for people avoiding meeting him, and as he had done on Mili when the chiefs did not show up for a meeting he had ordered, he commanded the old people to send out word that everyone was to return home or fear his “displeasure.” The village was repopulated in short order. By 5 P.M. Percival and Paulding returned to the ship from their respective islands, each in boats laden with fruit.
The passage to Hawaii took a month and included some surveying of the ocean for reefs noted by whaleships—erroneously noted, the Dolphin concluded; it also included a delicious Christmas dinner of fat bob-fed turtle, which had been with the Dolphin for thousands of miles, crawling across the deck. On December 12 Aur lay behind the ship in the west, and so did all of Micronesia. Lay and Hussey disappear from Paulding’s Journal at this point and become absorbed into the crew. As the Dolphin’s route curved around to the northeast, it passed into Polynesia; the language of the Marshalls was not spoken here, and the officers could no longer call on the two new crewmen for translating.
A month after leaving Aur, the Dolphin reached Nihoa, one of the more western of the Hawaiian islands, then Niihau, Kauai, and finally, on January 12, Oahu. On January 16 it anchored at Honolulu. What Lay and Hussey were seeing was probably more familiar to them than to anyone else on the Dolphin; while on the Globe they had had a considerable amount of time in Honolulu, but the place was totally new to the navy: the Dolphin was the first United States naval vessel to enter the port.
The Dolphin announced its arrival by firing guns and, not surprisingly, was greeted by a quickly assembled crowd ashore. Part of the turnout was the American merchants and part was the ragtag mob of natives, several hundred in number, some of them completely naked, some partly clad in tapa, cotton shirts, old trousers, or an old jacket and nothing else. They mobbed the visitors, and the officers who went ashore had to push their way through the crowd. The descriptions of Hawaii as one of the newly and notably civilized parts of the Pacific did not prepare Paulding for the barbaric panorama he was facing. “In appearance,” he writes, “a comparison of [the Hawaiian natives] with the natives of the Marquesas or Mulgrave Islands, would have been greatly to their disadvantage.”
Fifty years earlier all these islands were unknown—they did not appear on any chart. If the Dolphin had come then, it would have been received as Captain Cook’s Resolution and Discovery were, and Captain Percival, if he had wanted the honor, would have been revered as the prophesied god Lono. It was in 1778 that the world learned that the Hawaiian chain existed (and a year later that Captain Cook was killed at Kealakekua on the big island). In 1786 the first Europeans after Cook visited the islands, and in 1789 the first American ship, the Columbia, arrived. Twenty years later, in 1819, the first American whalers, the Equator and the Balaena, reached Hawaii, and a few months after them, in March 1820, so did the missionaries. Hawaii was developing fast and was being changed by forces that would only later—or never—reach Micronesia.
During the Globe’s four-month stay in Hawaii the port was crowded with ships. One of them was the Lyra, the very ship that had been sailing in company with the Globe on the night of the mutiny. It was still under the command of Captain Reuben Joy and was on its first voyage after the one on which it had been near the mutiny. When Captain Joy arrived back in New Bedford in May 1825, the news of the Globe was being talked about everywhere, and the Globe itself had been back in Nantucket for six months, so it would not have been hard for him to find out what happened the night that the Globe showed a light to tack but disappeared by sunrise. Lay and Hussey could have met Captain Joy, but for all of them renewing memories of that night might have been too sensitive; Captain Worth had been a good friend of Captain Joy.
Also in port was the Winslow, the captain of which, Owen Chase, had been first mate on the Essex in 1820 when it became the first ship sunk by a whale; his Narrative of the wreck of the Essex, published in 1821, was to spread that unprecedented story far and wide. There is a coincidence suitable for framing in the coming together in the same port of the author whose Narrative of disaster and survival made the Essex story a classic with the authors whose Narrative of disaster and survival made the Globe story a classic.
One person that Lay and Hussey met in Honolulu was the Reverend Hiram Bingham, the head of the Hawaiian mission. Mr. Bingham wanted instruction in the language of the Marshalls, with a view toward extending his mission into Micronesia, and the two rescued seamen were probably the first potential instructors to have come his way. The results of this meeting are described in Appendix C.
The islands were being changed by forces from within, and before it left Honolulu, the Dolphin would have become a player in these changes. In 1819, with the death of Kamehameha, the elaborate system of kapu or taboo (which included such bans as that on men and women eating in the same room) was dismantled, leaving a bewildering moral void in the lives of the people. The void began to be filled a year later by the arrival of Hiram Bingham and his missionary establishment. By 1823, with the conversion to Christianity of Kaahumanu, the most powerful woman in the islands, a new and rigorous moral code, as coercive as kapu, was installed.
The Hawaii that the Dolphin had arrived in was Kaahumanu’s new moral creation, and the Dolphin was soon in conflict with it. The issue was hookamakama, prostitution. Sexual morality was a part of the moral package that Kaahumanu had imposed, but interpretation and enforcement were loose and inconsistent. The weeks around the Dolphin’s arrival were times of reexamination of the degree to which the civil authority should be an overseer of private morality. It seems that the pleasures of women were available easily enough to seamen ashore on liberty and most easily to officers housed onshore. What was turned into the issue of the day, though, was the long-standing tradition of visitation of local girls on board ships in the harbor. This was suddenly banned.
Percival got an earful from his men about the denial of the services of the mermaids who had been frequent visitors to the ship. It did not take long for the captain to become the advocate of his men. The hookamakama crackdown in Percival’s eyes was denying his men one of the necessities of life. How he first communicated this view to the Hawaiian authorities and the missionaries is unclear, but on February 21, Elisha Loomis, a member of the mission, recorded the following in his journal:
It is with feelings of shame and regret that we have witnessed the conduct of Capt. P. since his arrival at these islands. Nothing that I know of has ever happened here, which will have such a tendency to degrade the American name in the eyes of this government. Soon after the arrival of Capt. P. we learned that he was exceedingly displeased with the chiefs for prohibiting females from visiting the ships and . . . called upon [Governor] Boki, Kaikioewa, and others and inquired who gave the orders to prevent females from visiting ships. He was told, the King and his guardian, Kaahumanu. He declaimed with great violence against the Missionaries—said they trade upon Kaahumanu but he would come and tear down their houses. This evening was appointed to have a talk with the Government. Boki said it was the desire of the chiefs to have their public business transacted in writing—but Capt. P. swore he would not—he would come and talk with them and if they did not come to his measures and remove the prevailing restrictions, he would open a fire upon them. His vessel was small but it was like fire. If Mr. Bingham should come to the talk he would shoot him. If he should see a native attempt to take a native [girl] from one of his men he would shoot him” etc etc. Some of the chiefs were very much alarmed for our safety.
Of the two fires in the passage, the one attributed to Percival as meaning that his ship was on fire with lust was too good not to be popularized, as it was in several accounts.
The meeting scheduled for that night was canceled because of a heavy rainstorm and rescheduled for the next day, the twenty-second, at noon. More than one account of this meeting exists; Loomis says that Percival “appeared unusually pleasant” and talked reasonably about interfering with females serving the ships or punishing them. One of the arguments that Percival favored—and that the missionaries were intent on refuting—was that a year before when Lord Byron (cousin of the poet) brought the Blonde to Honolulu, his ship was allowed to take females on board. Another account of Percival’s meeting with the chiefs is that recorded by Bingham (whom Percival excluded from attending) as taken down from Kaahumanu’s report to him of what had been said. From the various accounts historian Linda McKee, an authority on Percival and the missionaries, has reconstructed the essence of the most heated part of the argument:
Percival: “Who governs the Islands?”
Kaahumanu: “The young king.”
Percival: “And who governs him?”
Kaahumanu: “I do.”
Percival: “And who governs you?”
Kaahumanu (piously): “My God.”
Percival (pointing a finger scornfully): “You lie, you damned old bitch! Mr. Bingham governs you!”
Four days later, Sunday, February 26, the usual number of sailors from the Dolphin, according to Paulding (Bingham said twice the usual number), were given shore leave. Some of the Dolphin men met crewmen from whalers, probably in taverns, and in time the expanded group headed toward the house of Kalanimoku where Sunday services, led by Bingham and attended by Kaahumanu, Governor Boki, and others, were about to begin. The sailors called out threateningly for a lifting of the prostitution ban, and some of them began to smash windows in the house. Bingham, solicitous for his family, he said, ran to his own nearby house and found that his wife, aware of the disturbance, had locked the door to keep out the demonstrators and in so doing had locked her husband out. He tried to make his way back to the house where his congregation had been meeting and was grabbed, narrowly escaping a beating. Seeing some of his native converts nearby, Bingham called out to them, “Aole anei oukou malama mia ia’u?”—Aren’t you going to take care of me? They did and attacked the sailors so violently that one was almost killed. The riot ended quickly when Percival, who had been summoned at its outbreak, waded into the crowd with his cane, beating and arresting the demonstrators from his ship.
Percival apologized to Bingham, promised repair to the damaged houses (Bingham’s windows had been broken like those in Kalanimoku’s house), brought Bingham on board to identify the miscreants, and sent a letter to other captains in the harbor suggesting that they reduce the number of men released for shore leave.
Percival had been the advocate of his men seeking shipboard prostitutes and was to remain so—but he was a disciplinarian too, and the riotous conduct was nothing in his mind but a disgrace to the United States. The Dolphin’s log for the next day read:
Punished for Misconduct on Shore the following Men viz. Wm P. Smith, 19 Lashes with the Cat o nine Tails. Wm Miller 30 Lashes—Phineas Blodget—30 Lashes. . . .
Weeks later, in an April 8 entry in his journal, Elisha Loomis recounted, secondhand, reports he had heard of Percival’s words to some of the chiefs:
At a dinner given by Capt. P. a few days since to the chiefs, the former informed them that there was no one but himself here that understood what was right. Listen to me says he. He then took a bible and read something concerning David and Solomon—and observed that David was a bad man—he murdered many people etc. but Solomon was a good man—he had a thousand wives—that was right—there was no harm in having many wives—and why did the chiefs speak of marriage? Solomon was not married etc. Hannah Holmes said to me a short time since, that Capt. P. endeavored to get her sister to live with him. He said he was married to a wife in America, but when he took a journey inland he had another wife there—when he went to France, he had another there, and it would be good to have another, even herself there.
The day after the riot Governor Boki lifted the ban on the girls’ visits. A few days later Levi Chamberlain, who like Loomis was a member of the mission, wrote in his journal, “Cap. P. it is said is now maha,” a word meaning “relieved”—it would express the feeling one has on having an obstacle taken out of his path. “Rejoice not over me O mine enemy, when I fall I shall rise again. The Lord grant that the enemies of the Lord may be defeated by their own success—so that what they call their gain may prove the gain of virtue & religion & the loss of satans cause.”
What were William Lay and Cyrus Hussey doing in the midst of all this turmoil? Probably just watching. The total impression of character left by their story to date suggests that they were not among the petitioners for hookamakama. A modern native of Mili Atoll has asked if there is any evidence that Lay or Hussey fathered children while on the atoll—for there are blue-eyed Milians. The safest bet is no. And as for blue eyes, the atoll has been, since the time of the Globe, host to plenty of visitors with that trait. The missionaries relate that despite the conflict with the Dolphin’s captain and men, a number of the ship’s officers and men attended Sunday services. There, if one is illustrating the story, is the most comfortable place to sketch in Lay and Hussey.
Percival had attended to a variety of business included in his orders—more official and important than prostitution—including acting for American commercial interests that were owed a considerable amount of money in the islands. He had seen to the ship’s repair, and on May 11, 1826, the Dolphin sailed from Honolulu heading directly south until it reached the Austral Islands and the island of Rapa, where it made substantial visits, being well received by natives and collecting a sizable amount of provisions for the last leg of the trip, the long passage to South America. On June 14, as it approached Tubuai, the Dolphin encountered the Nantucket whaleship Loper and passed on the news that it had the Globe survivors, Lay and Hussey, on board. The Loper carried this report back to Edgartown, where it arrived October 19, 1826. Two days later, the Inquirer reported:
THURSDAY, [October] 19. Ar. a lighter from Edgartown—reports the arrival there this day of ship Loper, Starbuck, of and for this port, 4½ months from Otaheite, with a full cargo of sperm oil to Levi & Jos. Starbuck. The Loper left at Otaheite, in June, ship Lima, Swain of this port, with 1500 bbls oil. The Lima reported . . . Globe, Swain, 350. . . . The U.S. schoonor [sic] Dolphin was at Otaheite when the Loper left, having on board two of the surviving crew of the Globe.
Although the story erred in placing the Dolphin at Tahiti, which it skirted far to the south and did not touch at all, it contained the last bit of news that Nantucket was waiting for about the fate of the Globe people. For Lay and Hussey the most striking news picked up from the meeting with the Loper was probably the report that the Globe was sailing in the same seas that they were. One can only guess how a sight of their old ship would have affected them—or what they would have felt if they realized that so much time had passed since their adventures on the fateful whaler that the Globe was now out for a full year on this subsequent voyage.
On July 23 the Dolphin arrived at Valparaíso, mission accomplished. Paulding, who has not even alluded to the Globe in his narrative of the preceding half-year, ends his journal, “[Our cruise’s] beneficial effects will long be felt by our countrymen, who are engaged in the whale-fishery; and, although we suffered many hardships, privations, and dangers, we were happy in being the instruments, in the hands of Providence and our government, of proving that crime cannot go unpunished in the remotest part of the earth, and that no situation is so perilous as to justify despair.” A bit abstract, as resounding as a hymn, but unassailable.
The Dolphin’s log for August 29, 1826, notes that those of the crew who wanted to be transferred to the frigate United States were asked to give their names; thirty-nine did, William Lay and Cyrus Hussey among them. The log of the United States for September 2 lists thirty-four men transferred, again Lay and Hussey among them. Nothing in either ship’s records after the rescue on Mili distinguishes the two men from all the other crewmen aboard both ships. The United States, to Commodore Hull’s vexation, was delayed for months in its departure for home because its replacement, the Brandywine, had not arrived. Finally, on December 16, 1826, the United States sailed from Callao and reached Valparaíso January 6, 1827. On January 23 it sailed from Valparaíso and on April 22 was off Sandy Hook. It anchored in the Hudson River, began discharging and paying off the crew, and on April 30 was towed to the Navy Yard. Lay and Hussey had been out four years and four months.
The two men were still subject to some examination. There is no suggestion of suspicion of either one, and the process has the air of a technicality. Even while the United States was still tied up in the Hudson and before it was towed to the Navy Yard, Francis Macy, a family friend of the Husseys, had called on Commodore Hull to offer any assistance that he could to the two seamen; he reported the following in an April 27, 1827, letter to Hussey’s father:
I requested the Commodore to allow Cyrus to go on shore with me but owing to the peculiar situation of the two young men he would not comply, not having at that time been on shore himself since his arrival, but evinced a disposition to assist them all in his power. We this morning called upon the United States District Judge for the purpose of having Cyrus removed from the Ship by writ of Habeas Corpus, the judge informed us that it would be necessary to have the affidavit of Hussey before he could grant it, but that there would be no dificulty [sic] after procuring that document. We then took a Companion with us and proceeded on board the Frigate, where we fortunately found the Commodore, who without any hesitation allowed us to take Cyrus on shore with us upon our personal responsibility. He is now at our house, & I hope in a day or two to be able to procure his complete release. It is the opinion of Commodore Hull that nothing will be done by the U S & that he will receive orders from the Navy Department to release them both immediately, until that takes place Cyrus will remain with us & I can assure you it gives pleasure both to Mrs Macy and myself to be able to assist him at this time. Commodore Hull & Lieut Percival of the United States speak in praise of both Cyrus & Lay, & I am persuaded will derive as much satisfaction in restoring those two young men to their parents & friends as we do in assisting them at this time. Should you deem it necessary to give any particular instructions in regard to Cyrus you may rely upon the ready consideration of both my brother & myself as far as is in our power to assist you. Cyrus has been seventeen months in the service of the U. States & during that time has conducted himself with perfect propriety, which must be a great satisfaction to his friends for by this he has gained the good will & esteem of all the officers of the ship.
Commodore Hull wrote to Secretary of the Navy Southard on May 14 that he had permitted Hussey to go to Nantucket and Lay to Saybrook pending their appearance at an examination at the end of May. On May 10, almost as soon as he had reached Saybrook, Lay wrote to Hussey:
Dear friend or as I might in one sense call Brother I now take pen in hand to rite to you to let you know that I have arrived in Say Brook and found my friends all well I wish you to assertain whether there is any thing coming to me from the Oil that came home in the Globe I wish you to see the owners and do the same you would for yourself and if there is any thing belonging to me to bring it on to New York to me Yourself when you come. I have no news to rite but beg a most affectionate remembrance hoping we shall never forget the perils and dangers we have been carried through and that we are now among friends and in a christian land in haste Yours respectfully
There seems to be no record indicating whether Lay or Hussey received their shares of the profit on the oil returned, but the lays on 372 barrels would not have been worth walking down to the wharf to inquire about. The letter’s value is that it is a unique authentic expression of the survivor’s feeling for his companion, unmediated by a ghost writer—and, it may be noted, strikingly close in tone and diction to the text of the ghost writer, who must have been a good listener when he put the Narrative together.
On May 20 Commodore Hull wrote to Cyrus Hussey himself:
I have been directed by the Secretary of the Navy Since you left the Ship to deliver you over to the Civil Authority; I should therefore recommend your taking some friend with you and state your case to Judge Thompson and take his opinion, or be examined by him should he think proper to examine you. Was I in your Situation I should wish a discharge from the proper authority that nothing could be said hereafter. I hope you found your friends well and that you will remember the advice I have so often given you. Your friends are respectable and you should look forward to a Situation above a Common Sailor.
When you see your father inform him that I have received his letter, and thank him for his good wishes toward me.
If the little I have done in restoring you to your family & friends has been a service of comfort to them I am more than compensated in having been so fortunate as to gain their good wishes.
The letter, interestingly, is addressed to Hussey care of Nathan Comstock at 191 Front Street, the Comstocks’ business address. Hussey, after a brief visit to his family on Nantucket, had returned to New York for the judicial hearing at the end of May and may have been a guest of the Comstocks instead of returning to stay with Francis Macy. If so, what did they all talk about? It was a teeming household: Including the children of Nathan’s second wife, Anne, there were at least eight young Comstocks in residence. If William was living with the family, that would have been one more. George was on hand—he was going to be working for his father’s business, handling accounts and correspondence from 191 Front Street for at least two years. It was a Globe family, and the most vivid presence was the one who was not present at all, Samuel. Hussey was willing to talk about the Globe—his and Lay’s book would be out in a year. Did the Comstock family want to hear from him? In fact, did the family want to hear from George? George was willing to talk and to write too. And if Nathan did not want to hear from them, would the children, whose curiosity must have been passionate, have held their questions in? Did one of the sisters ask how he looked?
As the Globe adventure concluded, the participants went their various ways; George eventually settled in California, Lay and Hussey stayed briefly in touch. Lieutenants Percival and Paulding returned to sea, the Globe sailed again, and William came out of the wings for his time on stage.
George worked for a couple of years as his father’s amanuensis and accountant before handing those duties over to his younger brother Thomas. George was married twice, the first time to his cousin Lucy Comstock; two children born to them died as infants. After the marriage ended, Lucy remarried. George’s second marriage, to Mary Hollins of Newcastle, England, took place in New Orleans; the fact that their first child was born in Louisiana in 1847 and the second (of three) was born in San Francisco in 1853 suggests that George (like so many Nantucketers) was drawn west by gold fever. He died in 1855, leaving three children, the oldest being eight.
Money, which Owen Chase said was one of his motives for writing the narrative of the shipwreck of the Essex, may have been a major motive of the two Globe survivors—probably because they needed it. Lay was the moving force behind the publication of his and Hussey’s Narrative. His letter to Hussey dated September 24, 1827, about the publication of the book shows him as effective in business as he was in arguing with Luttuon:
I now take my pen to let you know how I get a long and what arrangements I have made with the printer. Wm. Bolles of New London will print and bind a book with 150 pages duodecimo on good paper and lettered for 18 cents the first 3000 copies and all over for one shilling and those in boards for 12½ cents and will take part pay in books and wait a suitable time for the remainder. I have no doubt in my mind but we shall sel 3000 if not 5 with great proffit if not at our subscription price. Do get the work revised and come on here with it as soon as possible and dont delay I want to get through with it this fall and get the books distribited. I shall expect to see you ou[t] here with the narrative as soon as the 15th of October if not before if Cyrus M has gone to sea I shall expect his father to come on just the same and we shall proceed the same and get the work done. I want to know your feelings about the printing [fragment breaks off].
One wishes the ghostwriter’s name had been mentioned; it seems clear that the writing was being done on Nantucket even though four-fifths of the book is told as Lay’s account. On some occasion during the summer Lay and the writer must have worked together on the text. Lay’s request that Hussey Senior take over the work of the book “if Cyrus M has gone to sea” is pertinent, for Cyrus had in fact gone to sea when this letter arrived.
Hussey sailed September 13, 1827, on the Nantucket whaleship Alexander, Captain Samuel Bunker. He had been home from his adventures on the Globe less than four months; everything that he was going to contribute to his and Lay’s Narrative had to have been recorded by the writer in that time. Five days after Hussey sailed, his sister Margaret and his father wrote him warm, newsy letters (news of the last five days!), in which the keenness with which they miss him is evident. Letters to whalemen out for two or three years are often touching, but the need to say “I miss you” after five days shows pretty strong feeling. Margaret’s letter is utterly charming. She apologizes, “I am not use to writing much but perhaps I shall improve in writing to thee. I suppose the[e] loves to see straight lines but thee wont see them here if thee does”—all of which is written in exquisitely straight lines. “I suppose,” she continues, “thee would a great deal rather have a letter from a grown person than from me because they could write things of more consequence.” No, Margaret.
At some point Hussey changed ships; the Nantucket whaler Congress had been out a year longer than the Alexander and would be assumed to return sooner. It did, arriving back in Nantucket on May 2, 1829, with 2,507 barrels and some very sad news; on a page of a copy of the Lay and Hussey Narrative, Nantucket historian Fred Sanford wrote, “Mr Hussey died off Cape Horn on his way home from another voyage he had been upon in Ship ‘Congress’ of Nantucket in the Year 1829 24 years of age.” If the story of the Globe did not contain one final absurdity, it would not be complete. The young man who was inexplicably spared from an island massacre and who escaped execution at the hands of the votaries of Anit and who talked the iroojlaplap out of killing him dies a death at sea—a profoundly sad but also banal fate.
Gilbert Smith, according to reports on Martha’s Vineyard, “lived and died in France,” having been enlisted there to build up the French whaling fleet. Another Vineyarder, one of the lost Globe seamen, Rowland Jones, is commemorated by a carved stone in the West Side Cemetery in Edgartown with the concluding lines,
Far, far from home from Friends and kindred dear
By Savage hands this lovely youth was slain.
No Fathers pity or no Mothers tear,
Soothed the sad scene or eas’d the hour of pain.
Lieutenant “Mad Jack” Percival was promoted to commander in 1831 and captain in 1841; he commanded the Erie off Brazil, the Cyane in the Mediterranean, and the Constitution on a cruise around the world. He died in 1862. Lieutenant Paulding rose through the ranks to rear admiral at the end of his career. He sailed on the Constellation and other ships, commanded the frigate St. Lawrence, headed the Washington Navy Yard, and was active in Civil War assignments. He died in 1878.
The Globe sailed again, under Captain Reuben Swain II, about seven months after its return to Nantucket, leaving port June 13, 1825, for the Pacific. That was two months before the Dolphin sailed on its rescue mission, so the Globe was traveling in the wake of the rescue ship, and if Captain Swain had wanted adventure, he could have overtaken the Dolphin at the moment of the rescue. It is not likely that Captain Swain wanted adventure. The Globe returned in May 1828 with 2,105 barrels, the kind of result that it had been achieving on every voyage except one.
On the ship’s return, Captain George Macy, who specialized in converting and selling old whalers, bought an interest in it, loaded it with a cargo of lumber from Belfast, Maine, and took it to Madeira or Cape Verdes (Captain Macy’s son’s recollection) and exchanged the lumber for other cargo to sell in South American ports including Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The first mate on this voyage was Stephen Kidder, one of the escapees on the Globe’s flight from Mili Atoll. Off the coast of South America the Globe was boarded by pirates, who took some money and small objects. In 1830, at the end of a two-year voyage, the Globe was sold, condemned, and broken up in the port of Santos, Brazil. Maybe a sentimental moment—for whom?
And William. The complete oeuvre of William Comstock has, almost certainly, not yet been found. Variously described as a reporter living in Brooklyn and “an obscure writer whose contributions figure in some of the periodicals of the ’fifties” (even though identified titles of his come mainly from other decades), he is taken seriously as one of Melville’s sources, and he is a hilarious satirist. Maybe he is the same William Comstock who wrote temperance tales. One literary history gives him a bit of attention in the course of a more extensive treatment of his son Augustus, who wrote under the pen name of Roger Starbuck and specialized in sea stories (Augustus had reportedly gone on more than one whaling voyage) and westerns.
Son Augustus followed to some extent in William’s footsteps, but Augustus accommodated the popular market more than his father—not that William would have disparaged the popular market, but he had too many different things to say to fit a pattern.
William’s 1838 book, A Voyage to the Pacific, Descriptive of the Customs, Usages, and Sufferings on Board of Nantucket Whale-Ships, grew out of a series of eight 1835 articles on whaling in The Boston Pearl and Literary Gazette. Apart from the critical attention that has been paid to it as one of Melville’s white whale sources, it is a vivid representation of the human drama of whaling and is far above the level of “popular” writing; it is engrossing and suggestive—anything but naive.
His Artemus Ward take-off, Betsey Jane Ward . . . Hur Book of Goaks, is inspired hilarity, and its chapter titled, “The Travelling Show,” is perhaps the funniest treatment ever of Nantucket in literature. There are plenty of barbs at Nantucket in The Terrible Whaleman, but they have grown to luxuriant profusion in Betsey Jane Ward.
To an extent, William’s versatility is daunting to the reader who would like to understand what precisely is being said in The Terrible Whaleman. William is not just telling a story for the sake of a good sequel to A Voyage to the Pacific. Nor is he, as has been charged, mounting a misguided defense of his brother out of loyalty. The first light that William sheds on what he is doing in the life of brother Samuel is in his two-paragraph preface to the book:
The author of this work fell in with William Lay, in Providence, several years ago. Having given the young man an invitation to his boarding-house, he was obliged by a visit from him in the evening. Mr. Lay signified that he was not well pleased with the edition of the Globe Narrative, which he was at that time selling. He said that neither he nor Hussey wrote a syllable of it; but having laid the facts before a writer belonging to Nantucket, the whole had been put into its present shape, for the trifling consideration of fifty dollars—said writer being, in many ways, leagued with those who had suffered by the mutiny, and dependent upon them for his support. A gloss had therefore been given to the “plain unvarnished tale” of the youths, and many of the facts had been ingeniously twisted to fay in, and lay up with the strands of prejudice and partiality. He therefore offered the author of this work, another fifty dollars to correct the errors, and supply the defects of the writer, intending to get out a second edition as soon as he had disposed of the first. As the author left the country a few weeks after this conversation, he had not an opportunity to carry the plan of Mr. Lay into effect; but hopes that in the following pages he has given the public a more faithful account of the mutiny than any that has yet met their view.
Although, “no place can murther sanctuarize,” yet the foulest deeds may be extenuated. It probably adds to the interest of a tale of horror, to load the actors in its scenes, with every imaginary failing which ingenuity can invent, and the historian usually considers a murderer a fair object for him to exercise his eloquence upon, a proper target for the sharpest arrows in his quiver; but while his just indignation is aroused by the depravity of his subject, let him entertain a little regard for poor human nature, and not serve up from the hurly-burly pot of his rancid imagination, such a dish of ill-sorted and contradictory vices, as shall make his species appear much baser than the devil ever intended them to be. When a reckless and intrepid villain is [branded] with cowardice, and a sagacious plotter is styled an ignoramus, the common sense of the reader is liable to partake of the shock which the writer intends only for his sensibilities. The description of the chief mutineer in Lay & Hussey’s Narrative, is a mere effigy, and the account of him in the Criminal Calendar, is a clumsy portrait of it.
Here William prints an eight-stanza version of the text of Henry Glover’s poem, “The Young Mutineer,” including the stanza that was too sensitive to print when the poem appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer. (See Appendix E for text and discussion of the poem.) One may judge what the approving use of that stanza is a token of—certainly not a simple-minded defense nor the opposite, a simple-minded indictment. The stanza reads:
He lies on the beach—with a heart-rending yell,
Horrid and despairing, he sunk down to Hell,
His glazed eyes in horror were turned up to Heaven,
His last yell to the skies, in wild echo was given—
In vain it ascended, no mercy was there,
To cheer the dark dying of the Young Mutineer.
In between his account of Samuel’s early life and his going to Nantucket to join the Globe, William interrupts his narrative with the omen that stands as the epigraph to Chapter Three and with a discussion that almost looks like a passage that has wandered in from another book. It may puzzle, all the more since it brings the building action to a halt and leaves Samuel standing on the verge of signing on a whaleship that the reader knows is going to be that whaleship. This is what William writes at the most heightened moment yet in his story:
Are we not sensible that there are feelings in our souls which have never yet been fledged, which are cramped in our terrestial bodies, and cry, like General Burgoyne, for elbow room? The pensive or sublime emotions raised by some peculiar kinds of music, lead the mind to the very gate of Paradise—but no farther! It seems, as if a spirit spoke to us; but we cannot understand his words—we taste but are not filled. Like Tantalus we inhale the steam of the viands, but cannot reach the substance. At the sound of the Aeolian harp, an ocean of ideas rolls towards us; but breaks at our feet, and we step not in. We travel back to a thousand years in one moment; but memory fails and we recognise nothing. The gates of a mighty city seem to be opened—we look in; but all is dark, and we see neither pallace nor tower. The belief in the supernatural is the effect of our determination to give these indescribable sensations, form and substance—to make that tangible which is shapeless and immaterial.
Yet in searching for the marvellous, it is not well to neglect that portion of it which is actually within our reach, and, every day, falls under our observation, albeit, unheeded and unimproved. Do you ask for apparitions? What more wonderful and mysterious apparitions can you desire than the creation itself presents? We are suddenly, and unexpectedly thrown into a world teeming with every thing that is beautiful and grand. What matters it whether the apparition comes to you, or you go to the apparition? It is an apparition still. Suppose that with ripened faculties and cultivated mind, you have existed for some fifty years, alone, in some spot where the universe was not; beyond the attraction of any planet, sustained independent by your own gravity—You had never seen matter, save that of which your own person is composed. Suddenly, this world comes rolling up to your astonished eyes from the depths of ether, clad in the fur of her million clouds. Rocks, trees, rolling oceans, and thundering cataracts burst upon your view—the chorus of a myriad of singing birds breaks in your ears—the most gaudy flowers and delicate blossoms adorn the valley and the hill—the twisted vine upholds her lucious grapes—and all you see betokens luxury and grace. Would not that be apparation enough for you? Would you desire something more marvellous still? Yet we are amongst all these wonders; we are sent to see them—but so gradually does the mind unfold itself, and so much interwoven with every thought of our minds are these amazing apparitions, that we tacitly declare they are a part of ourselves—of our own manufacture—and forget that one grain of sand is really as much of a wonder and a miracles as the “thousand ghosts” of Osian when they “shriek at once on the hallow wind.”
The very next sentence begins, “To return to our hero—” but in fact we had not left him. Samuel is a bit like the figure standing with his own gravity in some spot where the universe was not—almost the apotheosis of the narcissist. What if the world had come rolling up to his astonished eyes? What if he had been favored with that supreme apparition, worthy of a mystic, and had been able to see what is? And what if we can? Is the world that appears to us less wonderful with the sorry figure of the person lost in himself standing amid the myriad of birds and flowers? The important thing is what is real. The mutineer is unfathomable and aberrant, but he is real. And therefore wonderful—a thing of wonder. That, for the terrible whaleman’s brother, is what the terrible whaleman was.
The old whaling logs had a formula for closing every day’s entries: “So ends.” The two words descend like a curtain on the brutal, thrilling, tedious, satisfying, unsatisfying, perilous, tragic, unpredictable days of the whaleship. On one ship the curtain comes down on deeds of blood and a mind sailing by itself—things of wonder. So ends.