The Boy Whaleman

by George Fox Tucker

Our cargo discharged, and recruits taken aboard, we started for the coast of Japan on November 24, 1860. Whales were, and still are, plentiful in those waters, the first vessels to visit which were the Syren and Maro of Nantucket in 1820. Our cruise was to be a long one, and then we were to go north again.

Of all the adventures of whalemen, none exceeds in daring and danger that of Ronald MacDonald, all the more remarkable because the daring was unnecessary and the danger voluntarily incurred. In 1826 the ship Lady Adams disappeared near the coast of Japan, and it was surmised that she had struck a reef and that her crew, after reaching shore, had been murdered. Another vessel, named the Lawrence, was wrecked, and it was afterward learned that the second mate and seven of the crew, after landing, had been cruelly treated, one of the number having been tortured to death. It also appeared that the crew of another vessel, which stranded on the coast, received similar treatment, one of the men killing himself to escape further torment.

While whalemen regarded the Japanese coast with terror, yet one day, when a whaler was cruising near that coast, MacDonald, a seaman, obtained his discharge, taking in lieu of his “lay” a boat equipped for landing and supplied with sundry books and certain utensils, and boldly made for shore. On his arrival he was stripped of everything, but, as it appeared to his captors that his outfit indicated good intentions, they did not torture him; so he began to teach them English.

Some time afterward Commodore Biddle visited Yeddo for the purpose of establishing trade relations with the Japanese. MacDonald and the survivors of the two wrecked whale ships were committed to the Commodore’s charge with the warning never to return. The stories told by these whalemen, and the information gained by Biddle, determined our government to send another expedition under Commodore Perry, with results so well known to the world.

In the dogwatch the Lady Adams, the Lawrence and Ronald MacDonald were much talked about. A couple of our men had sailed in vessels that had cruised within a few years off the coast of Japan, but they said they had never known a boat to land on the coast, and so far as they knew a few whalers only had recruited at Hakodate, a port to which vessels might go. There was something mysterious about the quarter of the world we were approaching, and the uncertainty colored our conversation in the dogwatch. Shipwrecks and other disasters at sea were also brought up, and the more terrible the tales, the greater the interest.

“Suppose anything happened to us off the coast of Japan. What should we do?” said one of the men.

“It might be another case like the Essex,” replied Kreelman.

There was a demand for the tale of the Essex. While I had read all about that ill-fated vessel, I was anxious to hear Kreelman’s version.

“In the year 1820,” he began, “the ship Essex of Nantucket, Captain Pollard, was cruisin’ in this very Pacific Ocean when whales was sighted. The first whale they struck stove the boat. Two other boats was soon fast to another whale, and the ship headed towards them. All of a sudden a big sperm bull breached nearby and bore down on the ship at full speed and struck her with tremendous force and she begun to sink. The whale moved off, and then he come back, openin’ and closin’ his big jaws and poundin’ the sea with his flukes and dashed into her again; and pretty soon she was on her beam ends. Owen Chase, the mate of the Essex, writ a book in which he said that there wasn’t no such thing as chance about it, that the whale was mad because they had struck his companions and that he meant revenge. In three boats captain, officers and crew made for Peru, which was nearly three thousand miles away. They at first reached an island where nobody lived, and three of them preferred to die there rather than go through what the men would have to go through who were to go on in the open boats. One boat was never heard from. When one of them gave up and died the others ate his raw flesh like wolves. At last they were rescued. Three in one boat was picked up by one ship, and two in the other boat by another ship. Captain Pollard was one of the men that was saved. Word got round to Nantucket, before his return, of the awful time he and his shipmates had had, and when he come back the streets was lined with people, and not a word was said as he walked with bowed head to his home.”

Kreelman’s tale was correct. Some one said, “Fancy Chest, you are a scholard and have read about such things. You can’t tell no tale that can beat that.”