Officers using long flensing knives to ‘cut-in’ the outer layer of blubber, which is being winched upwards to the deck from the whale’s body. Dangerous work, as the stage was slippery, and sharks frequently circled below.
From John R. Spears, The Story of the New England Whalers, 1908
‘Trying out’ the blubber for oil, on the deck of an American whaler – dangerous work with a slippery deck and a sea running. This method had the advantage of keeping the oil ‘sweet’ on lengthy voyages. Enderby followed the ‘Greenland’ method, by making shorter voyages and trying-out ashore.
From John R. Spears, The Story of the New England Whalers, 1908
The captain, who, in contrast to merchant captains, was generally as roughly clad as his crew, was distinguished from them in that he had his cabin and quarters aft, and might even in rare instances be accompanied by his wife, as was Captain Barton by Mary Barton on two voyages of the Lord Duncan after its arrival at the Enderby Settlement.15 The officers or mates also lived aft and dined at the captain’s table along with the harpooners, while the crew was quartered in the fo’c’sle, forward of the mast. In the frequent storms, with hatches battened, the air in the fo’c’sle would rapidly become foul, with a halo around the lamps – for which at least, on whalers, there was always oil.
Whaling ships carried large crews to man the whaleboats. During long spells of inactivity the whalers carved rare woods, from islands where they had called, into tables, walking sticks and workboxes, sometimes inlaid with whale ivory and shells. They modelled fully rigged and masted ships in bottles; and the art of scrimshaw – carving scenes on a sperm whale tooth – was popular. They danced the hornpipe and reels, and sang sea-shanties – lively, bawdy or nostalgic – accompanied by fiddle and tambourine. They told yarns, and smoked or chewed tobacco. When whaling ships met at sea their crews would gam, or visit each other, to talk and exchange news, books, old newspapers and tattered magazines, and pass on letters for mailing to family or sweethearts.
Back in the 1770s, before they turned to whaling, the Enderbys had been shipowners and merchants; and an important part of their trade was to Britain’s American colonies. On the return voyages, their ships brought back whale oil taken by Nantucket whalers in the South Atlantic. This was increasingly vital not only for domestic use, but for Britain’s fast growing factories of the Industrial Revolution, and for its expanding railway system, in the days before the discovery of oil below ground.
The American colonists resented British rule, and this had come to a head over the issue of taxation, and the excessive tax on tea in particular. The American War of Independence was precipitated in 1773 by the incident that became known as the Boston Tea Party, when chests of tea were opened and the tea thrown overboard by ‘a group of responsible citizens disguised as Indians’.16 At least one of the ships involved – and very likely all three – were Enderby vessels.17
The war put an end to the valuable return trade in whale oil, and Britain now needed to develop its own whaling fleet. This was when Samuel Enderby,18 Charles Enderby’s grandfather, decided to branch out into the whaling business. By the mid-1780s, after peace had been achieved between Britain and the new confederation of the United States of America, he had several whalers operating. But there was heavy competition from the Americans, who were at the forefront of international whaling with numerous ships working out of Nantucket and the eastern seabord of New England. New and unexploited whaling grounds were urgently needed.
In the late 1780s, Samuel Enderby Sr planned to steal a march on the Americans by sending the first whaling ship on an exploratory voyage into the Pacific. On 26 August 1788 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks that Samuel Enderby & Sons, being ‘considerable Adventurers in the Whale Fisheries’, had a good ship, the Emilia, ready to depart in about a week for the southern whale fishery around Cape Horn. He had several questions for Banks: among them, whether Juan Fernandez was settled and, if so, if there would be any risk of his ship being seized if it put in there. Did Banks know of any spermaceti whales around the Cape? And were there are any good charts to be had? And was Banks in need of anything he might be able to procure for him, in return?19
There is no record as to whether Banks replied;20 but in January 1789, as Herman Melville records in Moby Dick, the Emilia ‘boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea’.21 As the rivalry was with America, it is ironic that both Captain Shields and the first mate of the Emilia were American whaling men out of the great whaling port of Nantucket.22
Samuel Enderby Jr, Charles Enderby’s father, who succeeded Samuel Enderby Sr, generally regarded as the father of British whaling. In 1797 he carried on the family tradition of exploration until his death in 1829.
Courtesy Mrs Barbara Enderby, Auckland
After seeing a good many right whales, Captain Shields notes in his log and letter of 6 March 1790 that he:
sailed no further to the Southward than the latt.d of 59. So: upon my passage fell in with a great many Islands of Ice … then I had nothing but hard gales of wind for near 21 days from NW to WSW after I got to the northward of the Straits of Magellan …
March 3rd I fell in with a very large school of spermacetti whales 25 leagues distanced from the Land in the latt.d 31.20 South out of which I kill’d five, saved four, the Ground very lively … I thought it necessary to go further to the northward.
This was the first of numerous successful encounters.
May 17th I landed upon the Island of Lobos where I found great numbers of the fur seals any man may load a ship of one thousand tons with fur sealskins if they please …
August 15th – being in the latt.d of 16o 10 South I took my departure from coast of Peru with one hundred and forty seven tons and a half of spermacetti.
I never see so many large whales all the time I have been in the business as I have seen this voyage … when the wind was moderate there was always whales for killing.
The ship sails remarkably fast and is one of the … compleatest Ships for the Whale Fishery that ever was Built …
In summing up he wrote that he ‘lost twelve barrels of oil [presumably due to leakage or rough conditions] and stowage in the Hold. I expect the oil will turn out one hundred forty three or four Tons, out of that Forty one Tons of Head Matter [the most valuable]. I have got 1870 furskins. 27 whales out of which 21 are large.’ 23
The Emilia had returned from this hugely significant voyage ‘a full ship’. Melville notes that ‘[it] was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house [of Enderby] again bestirred itself …’ In 1819, an Enderby whaler, the Syren, commanded by a Captain Coffin – a Nantucket name familiar in New Zealand waters – made an experimental cruise to open up ‘the great Japanese Whaling Ground – All honour to the Enderbies, therefore …’ 24
Melville’s Moby Dick is part novel – the fictional saga of Captain Ahab of the Pequod and his doomed quest against Moby Dick, the great white whale – and part textbook dissertation on every detailed aspect of the whale. In the fictional chapter ‘Leg and Arm’, in which the Pequod of Nantucket meets the Samuel Enderby of London, Melville acknowledges the eminence of the Enderbys in the whaling world by describing in highly embroidered language Ahab’s encounter with the one-armed Captain Boomer, master of the Samuel Enderby, the captains having suffered the loss of a leg and an arm, respectively, in encounters with Moby Dick. Melville continues his praise of the Enderbys in the factual chapter that follows, beginning it with an effusive eulogy:
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real his
torical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale.25
The British may have lost the American colonies, but those of Australia were opening up as the potential of that raw continent beyond its first use as a penal settlement became apparent. By the 1790s the harbours of nearby New Zealand, and in particular the Bay of Islands, were well known to the whaling ships of Britain and America.
In 1792 the first sealing gang to be stationed in New Zealand had reached Dusky Sound in Fiordland from Sydney on an Enderby ship, the Britannia, under Captain Raven, to procure sealskins for the China trade.26 From Dusky Bay, sealing intensified around New Zealand and Australia and exploded south through the subantarctic islands, where breeding colonies were decimated or wiped out in their tens of thousands for their skins.
Sealing was important, but Samuel Enderby encouraged his captains to explore further south, with the emphasis on whaling, where stocks were apparently limitless. In 1806 Abraham Bristow, on his third voyage in the Enderby’s ship Ocean, discovered the Auckland Islands. He returned the following year with the Sarah, explored and named parts of the islands, charted them (somewhat inaccurately), and landed pigs at Pig Point.27
In the search for an Antarctic landmass, James Cook had been the first to probe far to the south, crossing the Antarctic Circle three times between 1773 and 1774 but making no major discoveries. He was convinced that if land did lie further south it was virtually inaccessible and could be of no particular value.
The Russian explorer Bellingshausen followed in 1819. He discovered two small islands – the first land to be discovered within the Antarctic Circle – but he circumnavigated the Antarctic continent itself without sighting it.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes: ‘During the next few years, several determined attempts were made to penetrate farther south, with the object of discovering areas suitable for whaling or sealing. These voyages are intimately connected with the firm of Enderby of London.’28 In 1823 James Weddell, in command of an Enderby brig the Jane, achieved the greatest distance south. In 1830, the year after Charles with his brothers George and Henry had succeeded Samuel Enderby Jr as head of the firm, John Biscoe, formerly of the Royal Navy, in command of another Enderby brig the Tula, of just 148 tons, sailed eastward from the South Sandwich Islands and sighted ‘Enderby Land’. He returned the following year to discover the Biscoe Islands and Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula.29 In 1832 John Balleny, sailing on from New Zealand in the Enderbys’ schooner Eliza Scott, accompanied by the Sabrina, discovered and named ‘Sabrina Land’ and the Balleny Islands within the Antarctic Circle;30 and in 1833 yet another Enderby captain, Peter Kemp, discovered Heard Island. Balleny, in particular, was able to give valuable information to Sir James Clark Ross of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1840.
H.R. Mill comments in The Siege of the South Pole:
There is, perhaps, no other instance of a private mercantile firm undertaking so extensive a series of voyages of discovery without much encouragement in the way of pecuniary returns … Messrs Enderby differed from other merchants by the careful choice of their skippers, who were men of some education and often of naval training. They were instructed to pursue discovery with a view to the advancement of knowledge as well as to pecuniary profit.31
Loyalty to the firm and perseverance were qualities Charles Enderby inherited from his father and grandfather. In 1819, at the age of 21, he completed his seven-year apprenticeship as a cooper, following his father’s original trade, for the standard consideration of what was officially termed ‘love and affection’ in lieu of money. However, he would have found some satisfaction in knowing he was being groomed for a position of responsibility. He graduated with the freedom of the Coopers’ Company and the City of London,32 to take up a junior executive position in the firm.
In 1829, on the death of Samuel Enderby Jr, Charles became head of the family business, now known as Enderby Brothers.33 In due course, on Charles’ departure for the Auckland Islands, George was elected on to the board of directors of the subsidiary Southern Whale Fishery Company; but Henry, who shared lodgings with a well known-tenor,34 had never had his heart in the business and soon left it.
Charles Enderby came from a typically large Victorian family of 11 children. His sister Elizabeth had married Lieutenant General H.W. Gordon; their son Charles was set on a military career and later achieved fame as General Gordon of Khartoum.35 Further back in the family tree, Charles’ great-grandfather Daniel Enderby had married Mary Cook, sister of Captain James Cook; and his grandfather Samuel had married Elizabeth Buxton, daughter of the owner of a whaling business – which is where the family’s involvement in whaling first began.36
Sometimes, the voyages of discovery promoted by the Enderbys – first the two Samuels and then Charles – resulted in losses to the company. But there were also important benefits: in 1841 Charles, a founding council member of the Royal Geographical Society,37 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as ‘a Promoter of Geographical Discovery in the Antarctic Regions’.38
The three nationally sponsored Antarctic expeditions of 1840 – led by Wilkes, d’Urville and Ross – were crucial to Charles Enderby’s choice of the Auckland Islands as the base for his whaling venture in the Southern Ocean. All three had used the magnificent northern harbour on the main Auckland Island as their base before heading south.
In spite of the appalling dangers of pack ice, cold and storms met by the early explorers, it is still surprising that no further attempt was made at Antarctic exploration for nearly 30 years, with the exception of Captain Tapsell, who sailed farther south than Weddell from the Enderby Settlement in the whaler Brisk in 1850 – a cold and dangerous voyage for which he would receive little thanks.39
British whaling masters and crews never caught up with their more experienced and skilled American rivals, and as Britain’s dependency on imported oil grew, fewer firms were involved in the business, while the Americans prospered. From 1830 the Enderby Brothers had begun to diversify into rope, twine and canvas manufacturing; they built a large factory on the banks of the Thames, where the Alcatel works now stand.40 The factory took 10 years to complete, and it employed the most up-to-date machinery. The rope-walk manufactory, running inland from Enderby Wharf, was a quarter of a mile long. In 1843 Charles Enderby told a committee of the House of Commons that tarred New Zealand flax rope made under their patent process was superior to Russian hemp for whale lines, and was always used by their vessels.41 About the same time, the Enderbys’ early experiments into insulated cable for the London and Birmingham railway, in association with Cooke and Wheatstone, pioneers of the electric telegraph, failed when water penetrated the tarred hemp insulation.42 But it marked a beginning.
Four years before Charles Enderby left for the Auckland Islands, a disastrous fire, raging through the night, totally destroyed the joiners, workshops, the spinning, carding and loom rooms and rope-walk of the Enderbys’ factory; 250 workers were forced out of employment.43 Nearby Enderby House, with its octagonal room, still stands. The factory was never rebuilt, and the firm moved soon afterwards to new premises at 13 Great St Helens in the City.
A disastrous fire destroyed the Enderby factory and works at Greenwich on the banks of the Thames on 8 March 1845.
Illustrated London News
Just over a year after this catastrophic fire, concern at the diminished state of British whaling and the nation’s growing dependence on its rivals for the supply of whale oil prompted Thomas Preston, a business acquaintance of Charles Enderby’s, to approach him for advice. This was done by way of a letter on behalf of ‘several gentlemen connected with the British Shipping interest, whose attention has been long directed to the fact, that owing to the decay of its once flourishing Whale Fisheries, this country, notwithstanding its superior maritime resource
s, is gradually becoming more and more dependent upon foreign nations … for its supply of whale oils’. The gentlemen were ‘animated with the desire to see this unsatisfactory state of things effectually remedied … by the re-establishment of the British trade upon a new, enlarged, and solid basis’.44
It was clear that Preston and the ‘several gentlemen’ had already had discussion with Enderby on the subject, and knew he was working on a plan. Still, it took Enderby four months to reply with his formal Proposal for Re-establishing the British Southern Whale Fishery, which, with Preston’s letter as its preface, included comparative tables of predicted catches and financial returns, and set out the advantages of the Auckland Islands as a base close to unexploited whaling grounds.
Negotiations followed with an initially reluctant government, but Enderby finally prevailed, and the Southern Whale Fishery Company was incorporated on 16 January 1849, a royal charter giving authority and the protection of the Crown to the colonising side of the enterprise.45 Enderby was appointed Lieutenant Governor the following June. To strengthen his case, and offer shares in the new company, he was planning to publish an account stressing the special advantages of the Auckland Islands.46 He had already met Robert McCormick, of Ross’s Antarctic Expedition, who would become a close friend, and had had a detailed conversation with him about the islands. In March McCormick had undergone ‘a long examination, before the president and directors [of the Auckland Whaling Company] as to the various capabilities of the Auckland Islands for a settlement’.47
The Enderby Settlement Page 4