Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
$24.95
In a way, I wish I hadn’t read this account of murder and mutiny on a whaleship. Although it’s wonderfully researched – and by this I mean no pertinent document, no matter how tangential, was left unread and recorded – the descriptions of the sadistic and indeed murderous treatment of crew members by a vicious captain turned my stomach and disabused me forever of the romance of whaling.
The author, a New Zealander who has won numerous prizes for her writing, lured me into the book with her fine descriptions, setting the scene of Fairhaven and New Bedford in May 1841, “facing each other from the opposite banks of the Acushnet River. There was the smoke of industry in the blue spring sky, but the scene was dominated by whaleships – whaleships at anchor, moored to wharves, hove down in the disarray of repair, or loading or discharging cargo, or, in the distance, nestling half-built in cradles of struts.” She further engaged me with a brief history of whaling in America from the time of the Indians to 1841 when Captain Howes Norris, of Martha’s Vineyard, took possession of the whaleship SHARON at Fairhaven.
Druett eased me on, writing about earlier problems with Norris that hadn’t been reported back home. He’d had troubles with his crews going back ten years. Another Vineyard whaling master had humiliated Norris during a mid-sea gam, or mid-ocean visit between vessels, by pointing out that his crewmembers were throwing food overboard in order to shorten the voyage.
She discussed one of the great problems of whaleships, that of crewmembers jumping ship and deserting. Conditions and treatment were more often than not, inhumane. Just about every populated South Sea island had its share of deserters who’d become beachcombers.
Now, I should say something about the assumptions the author makes, some of which I found irritating. Although I admit it is hard to take logbooks and letters and make those pages come alive for the reader, still, it gets frustrating to read, “Precisely at noon on Tuesday, May 25, 1841, Captain Howes Norris seated himself at his big chart desk and took out a ledger with pale blue, unlined pages and stiff marbled covers. After squaring the book on the blotter in front of him, he placed a sheet of paper that he had ruled with black lines behind the second right-hand page, to serve as a guide that would keep his small, neat script as straight as it would have been in an exercise book at school.” The other major assumption Druett makes repeatedly is in writing, so and so “would have done” such and such. I found myself thinking, How do you know? I can go along with, “Norris should have been feeling deeply uneasy” about something or other because the author had explained why at that point he should have been feeling so.
I think she got the timing of one thing wrong. She writes that at the cry, “She blows!” the hands left aboard the ship then whetted the knives and cutting spades preparatory to cutting away the blubber of any whales killed. I think those tools would have been kept sharp at all times though I don’t know that for a fact.
But nothing Druett had written prepared me for the cruelty and violence of Norris’s punishments for utterly minor infractions. Experienced foremast hands must have been used to floggings. They were a fact of shipboard life. I’d read Two Years Before The Mast and Moby-Dick as a teenager, though most of the horror had either flown right over my head or I’d forgotten it. But here I was reading things I really didn’t want to read by a very good writer, and I had to keep going because I was supposed to review the book.
Captain Norris was having rotten luck at finding sperm whales. And the more his crew missed the few whales they found, the angrier and more frustrated he became. Although he flogged indiscriminately, he frequently took his anger out on his “greenhands,” young men who had never shipped before. Druett quotes a Joseph Eayres of the GRATITUDE, who, after twelve years at sea wrote, in 1841, “I sincerely believe that the captains of whaleships at the present day are the most cruel and unfeeling men (at sea) of any class of people on the face of the Earth.” She also quotes a seafaring wife who observed that these ship’s masters were men who “left their souls at home.”
This seems to have been the case of Captain Howes Norris, who took out his rage most particularly on his mulatto steward, George Babcock. I’m not going to describe the months of sadistic torture Babcock underwent before he died other than to say it was worthy of the Gestapo. Third mate Benjamin Clough wrote of Babcock’s body, “He was sewed up in a blanket with his bloody clothes on and at sunset hove overboard. So ends as cold-blooded a murder as was ever recorded, being about eight months taking his life.”
But that’s not all. Norris, still not finding many whales to kill, took to drink (guilt?) and stopped going down in the whaleboats. By this time something like eleven crewmembers had deserted, leaving only enough hands to man two of the four whaleboats. Norris supplemented his crew with Kanakas, islanders whom he also mistreated and eventually was murdered by them one day while the rest of the crew were off in the whaleboats. The only reason anyone ever got for the savage killing was that “The captain was cross.” Captain Norris had been hacked to pieces with razor-sharp whaling spades.
The cooper, Andrew White, in an approaching whaleboat, wrote of Norris’s murder, “O the feellings that roaled acros our breast when this awful sound reached our [ears]. O tis out of the power of me to relate to you the feelings there was in thos two boats ther was some that were related to him ther feelings was different from the rest.”
The third mate, Clough, swam from one of the whale boats, sneaked aboard the SHARON, and single-handedly recaptured the vessel, became its captain, finished the whaling trip, and brought what was left of the crew home to Fairhaven, not without incident. But you’ll have to read In The Wake of Madness yourself to get the whole story.
While reading the book I came upon a tiny piece of scrimshawed ivory in my sewing kit, a delicate little crochet hook made by a whaleman for a loved one, and looked at it in a clearer but darker light. I found myself hoping the man who made it hadn’t sailed with a sadistic master. I also have a scrimshawed pin or brooch, and wonder if I’ll ever want to wear it again. When I look at my whale oil lamps filled with translucent orange-y sperm whale oil glowing so beautifully in their clear glass fonts, I shall forever remember the terrible cost of human life and dignity they represent. The cruelty inherent in whaling for both man and whale is a permanent blot on the human escutcheon.