Six whaling logbooks of the 19th century, discovered only a decade ago, evoke a way of life that is now long past. They record voyages made by ships once owned by members of the Delano family of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. (See the sidebar on “How the Delano Logbooks Came to Light?”)
Included among these journals are two that are bound in canvas: the logs of the full-rigged ship Stanton and of the brig Charleston Packet. Anyone who wishes to look at these sources, however, will have to be prepared to decipher them first. The handwriting is mostly a scrawl; spelling and grammar can only be described as idiosyncratic. The entries are sprinkled with capital letters which were used arbitrarily by the mates who were responsible for the "nations. Punctuation was either avoided or inserted haphazardly. No one felt any compulsion to adhere to a set of rules.
The Delano logbooks are rich in spelling peculiarities: hour” for our, “stod” for stood, “shoar” for shore, sum” for some, “to” for two as well as too, “steared” for steered, “stode” for stowed, “scent” for sent, and Potoreak” for Puerto Rico. And when the Stanton, for example, reached the Sandwich Islands, the Hawaiian archipelago of our own day, the ship’s officers had to concern themselves not only with chasing seamen who had limped ship but also with recording the outlandish names such islands as Mawee, Woahoo, and Owyhee.
Many logbook entries contain words or phrases that remain illegibly elusive even under a magnifying glass. Penciled, stamped, or hand-drawn whales occasionally Punctuate a page, red ink “spaouting” from their blow-holes, emphatic proof that these great creatures of the deep were mortally wounded. Three might be taken in a single encounter, or four or five. Sometimes as many as seven were “saved,” the whaleman’s term for carcasses brought successfully alongside the ship.
Occasionally a pod of whales eluded its pursuers or an animal whale under attack got away. An upended tail reproduced on the page, with flukes horizontal to the surface of the sea, indicated that the whale had sounded, leaving an empty expanse of ocean to mock the frustrated crew of the whaleboat. The men had wanted to get close enough to make a kill, to put “wood to blackskin,” but this time the tables had been turned. They, not the whale, had been hamstrung.
The Delano logbooks are full of surprises, not the least of which is an entry in the log of the Stanton for Sunday, 1 January 1826, an uneventful day that began with fresh breezes and fair weather and with the men employed in tarring the rigging. Someone, presumably the mate, wrote at the bottom of the entry, as plain as day, “O Shit.” Immediately beneath this phrase appear the words “you had aught to be ashamed of yourself.” This is followed, in turn, by the letter J.
The mate, it seems, was disgusted with the voyage. Everything had gone wrong, and so he expressed his feelings forthrightly. The master, Josiah Howland, surveying the log later, and knowing that he would have to surrender it to the owners of the vessel (the customary procedure), virtuously added the only comment he could reasonably make in the circumstances, taking care to identify himself by tacking on the initial of his first name. Despite the reproof his words contained, perhaps Howland felt the same way about the voyage and had already privately voiced his own frustration in words not too different from the phrase the mate employed.
There is another possible, but less likely, explanation. An examination of the log of the Charleston Packet reveals that about the year 1830, two young brothers Franklin H. and Edward Delano, had audaciously practiced their signatures in very large cursive letters on one of the blank pages at the back of the logbook. They also wrote the words “Fair Haven” and “Capt. Tobey” and drew a picture of a male figure, perhaps a whaling master.
It seems unlikely that either of the boys would surreptitiously have added anything to the record of the voyage, but it is a nagging fact that the “J” of Josiah, as found in the Stanton entry, is similar to one of the practice “F”s that Franklin Hughes Delano was trying out while practicing his signature in the log of the Charleston Packet.
Only a comparatively few days of a whaling voyage were spent in combat. Boredom surfaced in the log of the Stanton, for example, when dreary week after week passed without a sighting of the elusive prey. Months later, however, on Sunday, 10 September 1826, the log states that in her 25 months at sea the Stanton had taken “1400 bbls.” A barrel held 31½ gallons, and so the ship had garnered 44,100 gallons of oil, which represented a lot of dead whales. The officers and crew did not have to worry about returning in a “clean ship.” They were “getting a voyage” all right, and it would not be the short and easy “plum pudding” kind. The Stanton had sailed on 10 August 1824, and would not return until 5 November 1827, three years and three months after setting out.
Finding spouts and chasing them was why the Delano whalemen went to sea, but the length of their voyages indicates that several years were usually needed to fill a ship. A friend might wish the captain “a short and greasy voyage,” but every member of the crew knew that no one would see home again for three to four years unless the ship was very lucky. On board the Charleston Packet in mid-January 1827, on “avoige to the West Indaes and Else Whare,” days passed with ‘‘no sines of whale,” a complaint that could easily fuel frustration and dissatisfaction sparked by other causes. As the year progressed, the captain and mates had to deal with rebellious crewmen. On two occasions, troublemakers were “ceased up” to the rigging and flogged. One of the offenders had committed the sin of “denying his duty and not obeying the orders that were given him,” a serious charge at sea.
In a subsequent voyage, the brig searched in vain for “fish” until one day, in the spring of 1829, she came upon “an immense School” of sperm whales. The men “put off and got four of them along Side.” In June, six whales were taken and, in July, seven more were “saved.”
Despite such interludes of success, the absence of whales remained a regular complaint. Sickness was another. Some of the illnesses suffered by seafaring men on board whaleships in the 19th century were as old as time itself. On the William Wirt, a Delano ship that “took her departure” from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in December 1833 on a voyage that would last until September 1837, six men were reported “off Duty with the Scurvy” when she was on the coast of Peru, less than nine months out. The captain went on shore with the sick crewmen while the rest were “Employed stowing Down oil.” When he returned, he brought with him “orranges and Plantines,” but three of the men were so ill that they had to be left behind.
Other maladies that laid seamen low reflected their behavior on shore. One crew member, Moses Bowdy, earned a brief mention in the log by being “Sick off Duty with the venereal.” He was followed by another man and another, and by still another until, within the space of a single month, six whalemen were incapacitated. Once ill, they often remained unable to work for significant periods of time. The ship would then sail shorthanded until the captain could sign on replacements, with no guarantee that they, too, would not soon be “down with the venereal.”
The William Wirt was plagued by other happenings. Early in the voyage one of the men let a knife fall from aloft. It hit a crewman, cutting him badly. Soon thereafter the “main tack boards drew out & struck two men,” one of whom was “nocked over Board & Drowned.” Less than two months later, as evening approached, another man fell into the sea while “loosing the Jibb,” but a boat was lowered and he was rescued. A little more than six weeks after that, in mid-afternoon, the boats went in chase of “Spirm Whales to winward.” The starboard boat “struck” a whale and “got Stove,” smashed to smithereens. In the melee that followed, a boat steerer named “Henery P Allen was nocked overboard & his throat cut with a Lance in a most Shocking manner.” Taken on board the ship, “he lived untill 6 PM & then expired.” The next day, “a prayer was read by Capt. Daggett to which every one attended.” The body was “then Committed .. . to the Deep with all the Decency that could be at sea.”1
As the voyage proceeded, the captain had trouble with certain members of the crew. One afternoon in September 1834, for example, “a young lad by the name of John H Car was scraping the black skin [the outer covering of a whale] off of the horse Pieces [strips of blubber about six inches wide and several feet long]. Mr. Morse [the mate] told him to scrape them Clean but he didnot mind, so he spoke to him again but he didnot Pay any more attention, then Mr. Morse took up a piece of blubber [and] threw it at him. then he in an outrages [sic] mutinous manner ran up behind Mr. Morse and Clinched him and said he would throw him down in the blubber-room, the Captn Came on Deck and Called him aft, took the Pig Whip and struck him 8 or 10 times.”
Some two months later, in November 1834, Car met with an accident. While climbing into the chains to draw water, he slipped and fell overboard. Like many whalemen, he did not know how to swim. According to the log, “a Boat was quickly lowered and got to him but he was sinking fast so wee didnot save him. he sunk to rise no more and wee hope is now at rest.”
Car was gone, but the William Wirt was not lacking in men to take his place. While the ship was still on the coast of Peru, for example, Moses Bowdy spent nearly 16 hours on shore “without Libberty.” He then “Came into a house,” the mate said, “where the Captain and myself was and began to talk in a very unhansome Manner to the Captn and asked him for Money but the Captn didnot think fit to let him have any so he began ... to abuse the Captn. he damned him [and] gave him the ly twice, then the Captn & myself walked out of the house to get clear of him. he came out in the street an hooted after ous [sic] and said there they go Goddam them Goddam the whole kith of them. [Back on board] the Captn ordered Moses Bowdy to be tied up in the Riging with an intention of punishing him but his being very humble and begging very hard Mr. Morse & myself begged of the Captn to forgive him this time and by his making very fair prommi|lses he let him go this time.”2
The following year, with the ship working her way to a safe anchorage among the Navigators (the islands of Samoa), Bowdy could not resist disappearing with several of his shipmates. The next day one of the men was captured, but in the meantime three others had fled in the night. Captain Daggett was obliged to give “a new Musket, three white shirts, one Pair of trowsers, and several more small articles” to the Samoans for catching three of the runaways. Two days had been lost, the ship had been detained, and some of the officers had felt that their lives were in danger while they were on shore looking for the missing men. The captain “called all hands aft & read the Marine law to them & Pointed out where in they had neglected & deviated from their Duty which has been frequently the case this voyge had wee been so disposed to have noticed it.” The offenders were taken out of irons and flogged “with Calmnefs without any degree of Anger.”
This particular log is a ledger-type, hardcover book printed and sold for the purpose of record-keeping at sea. There are three additional logbooks of this nature in the Delano collection. Two of them cover voyages made by the William Wirt from 1838 to 1842 and 1846 to 1850. The last of the logbooks is a record of the four and one- half years (1855-1860) that the ship Philippe De La Noye spent at sea, primarily in the Pacific, commanded by Thomas M. Gardner. She had been christened for Phillippe de Lannoye (one of many spelling variations), the progenitor of the Delano family in America, a surveyor who had arrived at Plymouth Colony in 1621 on the Fortune, the first ship to reach the New World after the Mayflower.
Generally, the information the various logs contain is not readily accessible, but the “Logg Book” of the William Wirt, for 1838 to 1842, which included a summer spent cruising for sperm whales on the coast of “Jappan,” is an exception to this rule. There are lists at the beginning and end of the book that provide basic information at a glance: the number of times whales were seen (93 sightings in 44 months), the names of the men who were “off duty Sick with the Venereal & when they Came on duty,” the amount of oil “Obtained & Stowed,” and an abstract of longitudes on the way home.
At the very beginning of this particular voyage, the officers and the crew were treated to a surprise. On the second day out of Fairhaven, one of the men went aft at 8:00 p.m. to report the presence of “a young Lad in the Forecastle that did not belong to the ship.” The mate to whom this information was imparted “took the Lad down in the Cab- bin. the Captn asked him how he came here...where he belonged & his name, if he had Parents, and how he [had] come to leave home, he said that he belongd to N York, his name John Williams, that his Father resided in N York & reason he left home was his Father turned his Mother outdoors & took in another woman to live with him. . .
Having run away from home, John was soon to learn how life at sea, on board a whaler, compared with the world he had left behind him. As the voyage progressed, some of the whalemen decided that they would rather jump ship than take their chances with the risks that God and man and Leviathan could throw their way. Whether on his own initiative or through the persuasion of others, John Williams, the stowaway, was one of six men who turned up missing in December 1838. When several of these runaways were caught, two of them, Tracy and Lyman, caused further trouble. “They threatend to see the Captn & officers Hearts Blood & [said] they would Burn the Ship & scuttle her. . . . they said they would bring Rum onbord [the rum they had guzzled on shore was probably why they were now behaving in this fashion]. The Captn turned round to the crew & told them to take notice of what Tracy & Lyman said, they Called the Captn a damned Liar & a dam down East Son of a Bitch. ... & further more Tracy told the Captn that he was a damn Yanke Skiper of a dam Bluber hunter & that he mite kifs his Afs.”
Tracy and Lyman “kept this Language agoing for about one hour.” The captain “tried to reason with them” but they remained unmanageable. Finally, he ordered the mate to tie them to the rigging for punishment. After they had been flogged (16 “Stripes” each), they “talked very Rational & Begged the Captn[’s] Pardon.”
In November 1846, the William Wirt sailed again “with 29 men all told,” heading for the waters off the west coast of South America via Cape Horn. She cruised on the Galapagos and Juan Fernandez Grounds, and also “on the Line” (the equator). Her master, Jesse Luce, was killed in a whale-chasing incident in February 1848, and was buried at sea with all the dignity the men could muster. Thereafter, the mate, Henry Daggett, took command, bringing the ship home in May 1850, having been gone three and one-half years.
The rigors of life at sea and the hazards it embraced, along with the bellicose nature of some of the whalemen and the severity of the punishments imposed on them, explain why desertion was so frequent. In The Yankee Whaler, Clifford Ashley records an anecdote in which a New Bedford skipper is accosted by a clergyman who suggests “there must be truth in these stories of ill treatment, else so many men would not desert!” The captain is not impressed by this argument. “Brother,” he replies, “if I cleared my ship for Heaven tomorrow, and touched at Hell next month, every damn one of ’em would desert if he got a chance.”3
In Ships of the Past, Charles Davis has encapsulated, in a personal experience, both the lure of the sea for a romantic and the hard-headed assessment of it by a realist. When the captain of an 880-ton bark that sailed ’round Cape Horn and back in the 1890s asked him on one occasion, ‘Whatever brought you to sea, Davis?,” he innocently replied that he had signed on “for the fun of it.” The captain could not believe his ears. “A man that’ll go to sea for pleasure,” he retorted, “will go to hell for pastime!”4 In the logbooks, the mates routinely wrote “So Ends this day” or “this twenty-four hours.” As the last of the Delano whalers entered her home port of Fairhaven, the concluding lines of “Blow, Y Winds in the Morning” tell as what the lucky survivors of this final venture in pursuit of “oil and bone” what they might have done once they stepped ashore:
When we get home, our ship made fast, and we get through our sailing,
A brimming glass around we’ll pass and damn this blubber whaling!5
How the Delano Logbooks Came to Light
In 1889, when he was seven years old, Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to explore his maternal grandfather’s summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. He stumbled upon some old logbooks that vividly described whaling voyages that had been financed by members of his mother’s family. These ventures had lasted several years each, covering four decades, beginning in 1824 and ending in 1860. He thus learned of expeditions to the coast of Brazil and, farther still, to the waters of the North Pacific, including the seas surrounding the closed, forbidden islands of Japan.
In 1929, Roosevelt, who was in his first year as governor of New York, found time to write an introduction for a book of sketches. Whale ships of New Bedford by Clifford W. Ashley. The governor recalled how he had found, in his youth, some canvas-bound logbooks “in one of the old trunks” in his grandfather’s attic. He revealed that “years later with a budding historical sense, and with the enthusiasm of the boy of long ago still unabated,” he “rummaged again in the old trunk,” browsing once more in the logbooks that had earlier captured his imagination.1 Still later, in the spring of 1942, as the war in Europe and the Far East was occupying virtually all of his time, Roosevelt, now President of the United States, snatched a moment from his heavy White House schedule to answer a letter he had received from his mother’s brother, Frederic Adrian Delano. Uncle Fred had reluctantly decided to sell the Fairhaven property and therefore wanted members of the family to indicate what mementos from its furnishings they would individually like to obtain. Even though six busy years had passed since FDR had last visited the “Homestead,” he could still remember the things he had loved there in his boyhood and their precise location in the house. He said he would be “awfully glad” to have the opportunity to buy some of them.2
What about the logbooks? In his letter, the President expressed the opinion that they had been given to the New Bedford Museum. Actually, he was wrong about this, and his aging uncle did not correct him.
To satisfy my own curiosity as a historian, I attempted to locate these “lost” logbooks. They could not be found in any obvious depository. No record existed at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, to indicate where they might be. After months of searching on a part-time basis, I suddenly came upon them in the manuscripts and archives department of the Baker Library at Harvard University.3 They had been given to the Business Historical Society in September 1934 by Frederic A. Delano, a member of the Class of 1885, and had eventually been added to the holdings of the Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration.4
—R.J.C. Butow
1. Punctuation has been added to long quotations where needed for case of reading, but no changes have been made in capitalization or spelling.
2. The use of the [a in the text of this article, as in the word “prommifses,” signifies that the quaint “s,” the old-style double “s,” was used in the original logbook entry.
3. Clifford W. Ashley, The Yankee Whaler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), p. 104.
4. Charles G. Davis, Ships of the Past (Salem, Massachusetts: The Marine Research Society, 1929), p. 95. Franklin Delano Roosevelt owned a copy of this book which he kept in the small study he used in his mother’s home. He wrote his name in the flyleaf and also “Hyde Park[,] October 1929.”
5. From the words of a whaler’s song found in an old logbook in the public library in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and subsequently recorded by Revels Records in 1984 as part of a cassette featuring traditional sea songs, chanteys, and ballads.
1. Whaleships of New Bedford: Sixty Plates from Drawings by Clifford W. Ashley; With an Introduction by Franklin D. Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929). One of the copies in the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., contains this flyleaf inscription: ‘'For dear Mama—With love & a merry Christmas from Franklin D. Roosevelt[.] 1929.
2.Franklin d. Roosevelt Library, Roosevelt Family [Papers] Donated by [the] Children. ”Box 17, Folder: Frederic A. Delano .... FAD to FDR, 13 April 1942, and F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Vol. Ill, Part 2, edited by Elliott Roosevelt, assisted by Joseph P. Lash (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. 1950), pp. 1309-1310, FDR to Uncle Fred, 14 April 1942.
3. I am indebted to Robert W. Lovett. Florence B. Lathrop, and Mary F. Daniels of the manuscripts and archives department. Baker Library, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, for giving me access to the Delano materials. Mss 252: S784 (Ship Stanton. 1824-1827), C475 (Brig Charleston Packet, 1825-1829), W689 (Ship William Wirt, 1833-1837, 1838-1842, and 1846-1850), and P557 (ship Philippe De La Noye, 1855-1860). I am also grateful to Richard C. Kugler, Virginia M. Adams, and Judy Downey of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., for assistance with various aspects of the whale Fishery, and to William R. Emerson and the entire staff of the FDR Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., for their helpful responses to the research questions I have asked them over a period of years.
4. The Files of the Business Historical Society in the Baker Library contain correspondence between Frederic A. Delano and Frank C. Ayres, executive secretary of the society, covering the years 1919 to 1935. Directly pertinent to Mr. Delano’s gift to the society are the executive secretary’s letters of 2 August, 6 August, 24 September, 3 October, and 10 October 1934, and Mr. Delano’s letters of 3 August, 20 September, and 8 October, 1934. On the society itself, see Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, Vol. I, No. 1 (June 1926), pp. 1-2.
