Away Off Shore

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  15. The Golden Boy and the Dark Man: Obed Starbuck and George Pollard

  For accounts of Obed Starbuck’s whaling career see Stackpole’s The Sea-Hunters as well as “The Whalemen of Nantucket and their South Sea Island Discoveries,” HN (1946). The Hero incident is recounted in the anonymous “The Unusual Career of the Whaleship Hero of Nantucket,” HN (April, 1984); Thomas Nickerson also provides a detailed account in an appendix to The Loss of the Ship “Essex” (Nantucket, 1984). The account of the Loper’s arrival is in NI (September 11, 1830); the reference to the “glorious sight” of the Loper trying out its oil at the Nantucket Bar is from Obed Starbuck’s obituary, written by F. C. Sanford in NI ( July 1, 1882); NI (September 25, 1830) gives an account of the festivities associated with the arrival of the Loper. The crew’s parade: “Instead of guns, the crew carried harpoons, whale-spades, lances, etc. The generalship displayed by the marshals, the correct time of the music, and the soldierly step of this little band of whalers, together with the novelty of the scene, afforded a rare treat of amusement to numerous spectators.” Also of interest are the many toasts delivered after the dinner: “1.—Captain Obed Starbuck—No man living has given so much real light to the world, in the same length of time. 2.—The memory of all good whalemen—May they never want oil to smooth their way. 3.—Captain Obed Starbuck—He that keeps the best look out from the mast head, will the soonest see home [In reference to the fact that they spotted a whale as they approached the island]. 4.—Fourteen months—Long enough for a good captain and a good crew. 5.—Short voyages—He that tries hardest will try the most. 6.—The Loper’s bucks—Like the American Ensign—adorned by the STAR. 7.—Whalebone and Ivory. 8.—To War: that war which causes no grief, the success of which produces no tears—war with the monsters of the deep. 9.—Black Skin—The best skin which whalemen can see. 10.—Cabin, Steerage, and Forecastle—If well filled, will secure a full hold, and between decks. 11.—The fair sex—Short voyages make sweet faces. 12.—Death to the living and long life to the killers—/ Success to wives of sailors, / And greasy luck to whalers. 13.—Ship Loper’s voyage—No good luck, but great exertion.”

  The most oil ever brought into Nantucket by a single ship occurred during the same year of the Loper’s record voyage when the Sarah (Captain Frederick Arthur) came in with 3,497 barrels worth $89,000 after a three-year voyage (in Starbuck).

  Stackpole in The Sea-Hunters chronicles the many islands Starbuck discovered; one of the earliest and most notable discoveries by a Nantucketer was that of Captain Mayhew Folger of the Topaz who stumbled across the Bounty colony on Pitcairn Island in 1808; his logbook is at the NHA. NI (May 23, 1825) contains the article concerning the state of the Nantucket whale fishery.

  An example of the community-wide importance Nantucketers attached to promotion is found in a letter (at the NA) written by Alexander Pinkham in 1821 (which, coincidentally, was delivered to Nantucket on the Eagle, the same ship that carried most of the Essex crew home): “I have heard not without some astonishment but with a greater degree of pleasure that Franklin is out second mate of a ship. I knew he was good, and that fortune favors the brave, but that is a step seldom taken—from boatsteerer to mate, yes, but from seaman (and first voyage too) to second mate is rather unprecedented. Whilst he figures so handsomely on the ocean, Elizabeth will be no less conspicuous in society to which she must undoubtedly become a shining member. . . .”

  When it comes to the story of the Essex, there is no better resource than Thomas Farel Heffernan’s Stove by a Whale, Owen Chase and the Essex, which includes the complete text of Owen Chase’s original account of the Essex published in 1821. Interestingly, soon after the publication of Heffernan’s book, Thomas Nickerson’s handwritten account of the Essex was discovered in the attic of a house in Connecticut and subsequently published in 1984. When it comes to the ordeal in the whaleboats, Nickerson clearly depended on Chase’s earlier account; his version is most interesting when it deals with the events prior to and after the disaster. Henry Carlisle’s novel, The Jonah Man (New York, 1984), provides a fascinating look at the incident from Pollard’s perspective and owes much to the Nickerson account.

  The anecdote about the boy harpooning his cat is in Macy’s Scrap Basket. The island’s focus on “Oil! Oil!” is described in the Nantucket Journal (October 26, 1826). The comments concerning the “surly importance” of the Nantucket whaleman come from William Comstock’s The Life of Samuel Comstock, The Terrible Whaleman; Comstock continues: “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son . . . is a real spit-fire, meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which, on that island, is considered the very acme of human perfection.” One of Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s favorite stories was of a Nantucket whaleman in Portsmouth, England, who (literally) threw a British naval officer off his ship for swearing at him, then refused to drink wine with the illustrious Admiral (calling him “a damn Englisher”) even though Sir Isaac had pulled strings to keep the Nantucketer out of prison (in Amory’s biography of the Admiral). Clearly, Nantucket produced strong-headed seamen. The reference to a whale as a “tub of high-income lard” is from Robert McNally’s So Remorseless a Havoc, Of Dolphins, Whales and Men (Boston, 1981). Comstock makes the reference to the “honor” of being island-born on a Nantucket whaler; he continues, “After a crew has shipped on board a Nantucket whaler, the first step taken by the officer, is, to discover who are natives of the island, and who are strangers.”

  Pollard’s account of Owen Coffin’s death originally appeared in Journal of Voyages and Travels by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennett, Esq. (London, 1831) and is reprinted in Heffernan. There is a traditional (and undoubtedly apocryphal) story about Pollard in which he is asked by a “stranger” if he ever knew a Nantucketer by the name of Owen Coffin. “Knew him?” Pollard is reputed to have replied, “Why I et him!” The reference to the gruesome condition of Pollard and Ramsdell upon their rescue is from Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely’s Journal, quoted in Heffernan. Nickerson describes the reaction of Owen Coffin’s mother to Captain Pollard in an 1876 letter to Leon Lewis, the author who was to use his journal as the basis for a book that was never published. Pollard’s reference to lightning never striking twice is related by Charles Wilkes, who was midshipman of the Waterwitch, in his Autobiography (quoted in Heffernan); Pollard’s despairing resignation to his fate is in Tyerman and Bennett.

  Generations of American children would read about the Essex in McGuffey’s Eclectic Fourth Reader; according to the author of a September 3, 1896, article in the Garretsville (Ohio) Journal (in the Essex blue-dot file at the NHA), “Such accounts as that make impressions on the minds of children that last.” See Heffernan’s chapter “Telling the Story” for a synopsis of how the Essex story has been retold throughout the centuries; Heffernan also includes a transcription of Melville’s comments in his copy of Chase’s Narrative. For an account of Melville’s visit to Nantucket, see Susan Beegel’s “Herman Melville: Nantucket’s First Tourist?” HN (Fall, 1991). Emerson makes the comment concerning the islanders’ sensitivity in his Journals. The reference to the Essex being a taboo topic on Nantucket comes from Stackpole’s afterword in Nickerson.

  The reference to “a spy amongst us” is from NI (April 18, 1822); Stackpole makes the claim that Nantucketers were “a superior type” in The Sea-Hunters, adding, “Tradition had given these men of the sea a background of religion and home which made them both Godfearing and self-respecting”; Stackpole also refers, however, to the brutal Captain Worth. For an account of David Whippey, who “lived among the cannibals” (and never left), see Ernest S. Dodge’s Islands and Empires, Western Impact on the Pacific and East Asia (Minneapolis, 1976), as well as Stackpole. Captain Swain is described in Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano (Boston, 1846). Samuel Comstock and the Globe mutiny are chronicled in Comstock, as well as Hussey and Lay’s firsthand narrative of the mutiny. Interestingly, Comstock ’s actions were not universally condemned on Nantucket; for some
he seems to have been a kind of Jesse James of the whale fishery, a good-hearted outlaw pushed to extreme measures by extreme abuses; see the highly romantic poem “The Young Mutineer,” which appeared not only in NI but in Comstock as well.

  Moses E. Morrell’s journal, “The Whim Whams and Opinions of M. E. Morrell, Written by Himself, for his own amusement on a voyage to the South seas on board the Ship Hero of Nantucket, 1822–4,” is in the Edouard Stackpole Collection at the NHA. Morrell makes several unflattering references to the Hero’s officers. When the crew is not allowed to celebrate on deck during the Fourth of July, Morrell wishes that “our officers [were] as Patriotic as they are avaricious.”

  For an account of the orgies and abuses that were a routine part of the Pacific whale fishery, see Dodge; the first chapter of Joan Druett’s Petticoat Whalers (Auckland, 1991) also has some fairly lurid accounts of the whaling life. The letter concerning her grandfather Starbuck’s reticence was written by Charlotte Vain in 1940 to Edouard Stackpole and is among his papers at the NHA. The record of Obed Starbuck’s voyages can be traced in Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery . Starbuck’s final voyage on the Zone was also plagued by the loss of the third mate, who was knocked overboard and drowned.

  For Nantucketers, the arrival of a whaleship was of “intense interest.” According to an article in NI (May 14, 1842), “It is an era in most of our lives. It breaks in upon the monotony of common life, either by gladdening our spirit with good tidings, or chastening it by sad intelligence. . . . We feel a singular blending of joy and grief on such occasions. We know not whether to smile or to weep. Our emotion at all events is much subdued.” Frederick Sanford’s recollection of the arrival of the Two Brothers and Hero appeared in NI (March 28, 1879).

  16. Absalom Boston and Abram Quary: “Of Color” on the Grey Lady

  Boston’s portrait is at the NHA, while Quary’s is at the NA. Grace Brown Gardner’s article “Abram Quary and his Portrait” (in the blue-dot “Quary” file at the NHA) is an excellent source of information; she quotes an NI article by Benjamin Franklin Folger that describes conversations Folger had with Quary; William Crosby Bennett (also quoted by Gardner) makes a reference to Quary as “the Prince of Nantucket caterers, and without his assistance no evening entertainment was deemed quite complete” (see Epilogue). A hand-colored photograph of Quary in extreme old age is at the NHA. For information concerning Absalom Boston and New Guinea, I have relied upon Lorin Lee Cary and Francine C. Cary’s “Absalom F. Boston, His Family, and Nantucket’s Black Community,” HN (Summer, 1977).

  Stephen Hussey’s will is in the Nantucket Probate Court Records and is also referred to in Starbuck. Copies of Elihu Coleman’s pamphlet (reprinted several times) are at the NHA and NA. Both the Carys and Stackpole recount the incident involving Prince Boston, Swain, and Rotch that led to the end of slavery on Nantucket. Receipts for labor and purchases between Absalom Boston and various members of the Williams family are part of NHA Collection 197. According to information provided by the NHA: “John Williams, a Portuguese, and his family were the only members of the name of Williams to settle in Nantucket.”

  For an insightful, nonidealized portrait of African Americans on Nantucket, see Isabel Kaldenback-Montemayor’s B.A. Thesis, “Black on Grey, Negroes on Nantucket in the Nineteenth Century” (Princeton, 1983), a copy of which is at the NHA. My own “‘I Will Take to the Water’: Frederick Douglass, the Sea, and the Nantucket Whale Fishery,” HN (Fall, 1992), deals with many of these same issues but from the perspective of Douglass’s first visit to Nantucket. As I mention in that article, there were even Nantucketers who participated in the slave trade. In a letter written from Havre, France, in 1796, Benjamin Tupper wrote to his mother on Nantucket: “I have bought a large ship of 500 tons and she sails this day for the West Indies. . . . She carries 500 Negroes, if she arrives safe I shall have money enough to come home & live with my friends”; the letter is reproduced in HN (July, 1937). The 1807 reference to the submissiveness of seamen of color is made in J. Freeman’s “Notes on Nantucket” in NP. The letter from Abraham Williams to Nathaniel Freeman is in NHA Collection 197. Vickers’s reference to a single caste of seamen of color is in his dissertation; as early as 1723 the appointment of a constable’s watch on Straight Wharf referred to “Indians, Negroes, and other suspected persons.” Macy speaks of the “inebriety” of the blacks in his History.

  See On Our Own Ground, The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst, 1992), for Apess’s brief mention of his trip to Nantucket; later he would become involved in what came to be known as the “Mashpee Revolt” among the Indians on Cape Cod. For an account of how the “total environment” of the ship fostered relative racial equality in the early nineteenth century, see W. Jeffrey Bolster’s “ ‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History (March, 1990). The reference to a “Guine[a]” whaler is in a journal in the “Misc. Papers, Letters, etc.” file in the NA.

  Anna Gardner’s reference to Absalom Boston is recorded in her collection of poetry and prose, Harvest Gleanings (New York, 1881). Other “volunteer toasts” delivered by African Americans during the Loper banquet and recorded in dialect were: “De ship Loper and her crew—Strong as de lion, meek as de ram, catch de whales when he can see him, who do dat?—Tune, Keep a look out there. Our Nantucket Carmen and Butchers—No more like de Boston gentleman than Aunt Philis Painter’s nose like a bunch of Horse radish. Tune—Pitman’s march. Misser President Jackson—No more like Misser Henry Clay than Sam. Harris fiddle like a roll of a blackball. Whale Captains of Nantucket and N. Bedford—No more like Capt. Starbuck, than horse-foot like elephant. To Woahoo—Glad he cant speak no cuckold telltale, den all our captains go by him jus like ship Loper” (NI, September 25, 1830).

  In NI (April 18, 1822), the letter writer refers to “the few ‘heathen youth’ which . . . have been imported within the short period of a month.” The mention of the Sandwich Islanders attending Sunday school is in NI (April 25, 1822); Stackpole quotes from the story about the “Heathen School” on Nantucket and the response it incited in NI (May 9, 1822); the reference to the tractability of the Polynesians is cited by Stackpole. According to Elmo P. Hohman in The American Whaleman: A Study of Life and Labor in the Whaling Industry (New York, 1928), during the period from 1800 to 1820 Nantucket whalers “contained a much higher percentage of both Negroes and Indians than in later years.” In 1807 it was estimated that the average whaling crew (which ranged between sixteen and twenty-one men) contained between seven to nine blacks. In 1820, one-eighth of all Nantucket whalemen were said to be full-blooded Indians (many of them coming from the Vineyard), with two-eighths to three-eighths being of both black and Indian descent, such as Absalom Boston. Reuben Delano tells the story of his early life on Nantucket and his experiences on a series of whalers in Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano. William Comstock’s statement concerning the treatment of blacks on Nantucket whalers is from his The Life of Samuel Comstock, The Terrible Whaleman. Kaldenback-Montemayor also points to the fact that no African Americans made it out of the Essex disaster alive.

  That white Nantucketers were not about to associate themselves with seamen of color is indicated by an anecdote related in Amory’s biography of Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin. At one point during Coffin’s meeting with the Nantucket sailors in Dartmoor Prison in 1815, an African-American sailor claimed that his last name was Coffin, thus earning him the privileged status of belonging to a “neutral country.” When the Admiral asked him how old he was, the black sailor responded that he had just turned thirty. Sir Isaac, who was known throughout the British Navy for his sense of humor, shook his head and said, “Well, then, you are not one of the Coffins, because they never turn black until they are forty.”

  Melville’s “The’ Gees” first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1856 and is currently available in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 183
9–1860 (Evanston and Chicago, 1987). In “The ’Gees” Melville makes a scathing reference to the island that would have had, if they had read the article, a deeply personal relevance to both Quary and Boston: “Among the Quakers of Nantucket, there has been talk of sending five comely ’Gees, aged sixteen, to Dartmouth College; that venerable institution, as is well known, having been originally founded partly with the object of finishing off wild Indians in the classics and higher mathematics.” In his Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (Cambridge, 1968) (of which Melville strongly approved), Browne claimed that while on board a whaler in the 1830s he “would gladly have exchanged my place with that of the most abject slave in Mississippi.”