I was born on 24 June 1902 at Cedar Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I attended Cedar Street Elementary School, which was six blocks away, then went to the Middle Street Grammar School. After grammar school I attended New Bedford High School, where my favorite subject was geography. The geography books showed pictures of the half-clad natives of the West Indies and South Sea islands and that aroused my curiosity.
New Bedford before the ’teens was a wonderful town for a boy to grow up in. There were the docks, with whaling ships still setting out on their voyages. Most whaling captains built homes on Buzzard’s Bay, and many had a distinctive feature—an area on the roof enclosed by a railing. We were informed early about what this was—the “widow’s walk.” When the captain’s wife felt it was time for the ship to return, she went up there and walked back and forth with a telescope, looking for signs of a sail on the horizon. When the vessel was sighted and reached port, the wife was on the wharf—not only to greet her husband, but also to see what rare things he had brought back from foreign shores.
We were down on the wharves just about every day. All we had to do was walk down to the foot of Union Street. Whaling activity was scattered all along the riverfront— greasy casks of whale oil and men working on ships, on sails, and painting. You could hear the caulking hammer at work.
While I was going to high school, I worked afternoons in a typewriter shop, learning to be a typewriter mechanic. From where I worked I could see a couple of barks that were still in the whaling trade. Some were hoisting casks of whale oil out of their holds; other vessels would be loading stores, getting ready to go away. I still longed to see those lands pictured in my geography book.
I finally got up nerve enough one day to ask a captain for a job. His vessel was a whaling schooner named the A. M. Nicholson. He said he could use a cabin boy, but I would have to get a letter of consent from my mother or father. I told him I didn’t have any mother or father. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get my clothes out of the house.
I went back to the typewriter shop on Union Street and typed a letter from my “supposed-to-be aunt.” I carried to the schooner next day and gave it to the captain, who took me to the custom house to sign the ship’s papers. The custom house agent, Mr. Cooper, sat in a swivel chair and from time to time put an additional pair of glasses over the ones he was wearing.
After he read the letter, he turned around and asked. “Boy, why didn’t your aunt write the letter with pen and ink?”
“She didn’t have any,” I said, thinking quick.
He looked me up and down and finally said, “You seem to be a pretty good boy. Sign your name here.”
I signed my name “Ernest H. Rosa.” (My real name, of course, is Johnson.)
The captain’s name was Gonzales. Until the time we sailed he treated me like a son. As a matter of fact, he treated me well throughout the voyage. And I learned a lot from him. He was glad to get a hand at a low rate of pay- just a small percentage of the profits from the catch. If we didn’t catch any whales, we didn’t earn anything. Captain j Gonzales was small of stature, of Portuguese descent, a brown-skinned man like myself, and friendly enough for a captain.
American Negroes were not found in whaling ships. The black men on board were West Indians, but the officers and boat steerers in my day were mostly Portuguese from Brava and St. Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. They had reputations as skilled whalemen, and the New Bedford and Nantucket whaling vessels stopped in the cape Verdes and added these men to their crews. Over the years, at the end of the whaling voyages, many of them settled in New Bedford, as had my ancestors. Others had a hankering for home, and when they earned enough dollars, they would buy a passage on what was called a “Portuguese packet” or a “Brava packet” back to the islands. This was usually a schooner. One such schooner, the Ernestina, is preserved by the state of Massachusetts at new Bedford.
Instead of going to the typewriter shop, I was now reporting aboard the Nicholson in the afternoons. I signed for the ship’s stores as they came down by motor truck and horse and wagon: salt meat in barrels, hardtrack, a few fresh stores to keep us going a few days out to sea. What came down, I signed for. Barrels and barrels of “salt horse,” as the crew called it, arrived. Whether it was or not, I still don’t know. But the cook turned out to be clever at making it good to eat. He made his bread with sea water, and it was quite palatable too.
About three days before sailing, the captain told me to bring my clothes down.
“I haven’t got no clothes,” I said.
So he took me up to a seaman’s outfitting store and told me to get what I wanted. I didn’t know I had to pay for it eventually. So I just went wild; I fixed myself up with a south wester, oilskins, boots, underwear—a first-class outfit.
We were supposed to sail on 5 February 1917, but on that day the Acushnet River was frozen solid. You could drive across it in a horse and buggy, or even a car. So the tugboat came up and broke the ice and put a hawser on us and towed us outside of Martha’s Vineyard. As I remember, her name was the J. T. Sherman. After we got to the other side of the island, we hoisted sail and the tug turned us loose.
That’s when I got into my bunk, where I stayed until we Sot to the other side of the Gulf Stream. I didn’t do anything but drink water and vomit.
When we got out in the Gulf Stream, the captain came down, picked me up in his arms, took me out on deck, and set me down in a chair. He called for the cook to get a Socket full of sea water, which he made me drink until my little stomach was full. I went to sea from then until 1945 and was not seasick once—I took hurricanes, gales, all the worst the sea has to offer.
At this point in the voyage, we carried only a skeleton crew. The idea was to drop down to the West Indian islands of Dominica or St. Lucia to ship more men. We had five or six seamen, a cook, steward, three mates, the caplin, and myself. The chief mate’s name was Freitas; he was a big brute and he had a brusque style with the crew. The second mate was a small man, quiet, with the same fame as the captain except that he spelled it differently. I think the third mate, whose name I do not remember, had Just gotten his papers because he was out every day with his sextant, practicing.
I was learning the ways of the sea. When you wanted to go to the bathroom, you made your way out on the jib- boom and dropped your pants. You sat on a wire out there— in the summertime; in winter you stayed on board and used a bucket. One of my duties as cabin boy was to empty the captain’s bucket.
One night, after we’d crossed the Gulf Stream, I was on the quarter deck with the captain. “Boy,” he said, “see that cloud up there? We’re going to have plenty of wind tomorrow. That’s an ‘eye.’”
I said to myself, he knows I am a greenhorn and I’m supposed to believe anything he says. But when I got up at daybreak next morning, the seas were rolling across the decks; we had a lifeline from the forecastle all the way back to the quarterdeck. Two men were tied to the wheel. We had a storm trysail up on the mainmast with two reefs in it. We had two reefs in the forestaysail. This canvas kept the Nicholson heading into the seas.
The wind blew for two days. When the captain went up to shoot the sun on the third day, he made a mistake in his mathematics. I called his attention to it—I was good at mathematics. He thanked me graciously; if I hadn’t caught that little mistake, he said, the vessel would have sailed about 300 miles off course.
About four or five nights later I was up on the quarterdeck, and the Old Man said to me, “Boy, see that black cloud on the horizon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s where we’re going. We’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
Here we go again! I said to myself. He’s trying to fool me again. But when I got up the next morning, we were about five or six miles off a beautiful island that had coconut palm trees along the coast. That was the island of Dominica. We started to shorten sail and pulled into the harbor of Roseau.
The men came out in dugouts and helped us furl the sails. The captain gave them all some salt horse and hardtack. They say that in Dominica some form of moisture will be falling 24 hours a day. It may not be rain; it may be no more than a heavy mist. Hence the island has lush vegetation. But the people were poor and never saw meat. A few cows were on the island, but none were for butcher-butchering. The natives used to get into their dugouts and hope to find a blackfish, a small kind of whale, off the mouth of the river. They would harpoon the creature— and sometimes be towed halfway around the island—and with luck they would get it ashore, cut it up, and give a piece to everyone to eat.
In the meantime, back home. . . .
I didn’t show up at the house. From the time I was a child, it had always been my mother’s custom to leave me with Mrs. Henderson, a friend of hers who lived nearby, when she went shopping. I didn’t show up, and she began to get worried, so she called Mrs. Henderson.
“No, he didn’t stay here last night. I haven’t seen him.”
So my mother notified the police that I was missing. The next day some smart aleck told her that he had seen me hanging around the docks, that she should visit the custom house.
She did inquire there about her son, Ernest Johnson. The custom house agent examined the papers for various ships. “No, we haven’t signed any Ernest Johnson on a ship. Describe him.”
She described me and he remembered “Ernest Rosa.” My mother soon figured out what had happened. She demanded that they get the Coast Guard to pursue the A. M. Nicholson and bring me back home.
“If you request it, madam, we will have to notify the Coast Guard to bring him back. He’s a minor. But let me make a suggestion. Any boy who has enough guts to run away and ship on a whaler and lead one of the hardest lives that there is—I would let him stay there. Because when he comes back after an experience like that he’ll either be a man—or a monkey.”
When he was shipping a crew in these islands, Captain Gonzales preferred men who had been whaling before. Some of them had made whaling voyages, had wound up at New Bedford, didn’t like it or had run out of money, and returned to the West Indies. Next year they might join a different ship or the same ship, for that matter.
To assemble as experienced a crew as possible, the A. M. Nicholson took on some men at Roseau and then went on to Castries, the port of the island of St. Lucia. There, we filled our casks with fresh water, and the captain bought some chickens and a couple of goats. That was the last fresh food we saw until we got home, except for what the sea yielded. We took on some more hands at St. Lucia. For the most part, the islanders struck me as representing brawn over brains; they were uneducated and fought amongst themselves in the forecastle.
After we left St. Lucia we went off the coast of Santa Domingo and for the first time started to look for whales. But the picking was very poor. So we stood away to the north, for Hatteras. One day a U.S. Navy destroyer came alongside and said that the United States had declared war on Germany. The Navy urged Captain Gonzales to seek shelter in port.
“I’m not going nowhere until I get filled up!” said the captain.
And sure enough, off Hatteras we began to catch whales. We had three whaleboats, and when we lowered and went after whales, only the captain, the steward, the cook, and myself were left on board. My usual task when the boats were away was to steer—after I learned how. But sometimes I was sent up to the crow’s nest to try to keep track of the boats.
The boatsteerer harpooned the whale. Then he changed places with the mate, who took the lance and killed the creature. Sometimes the whale took us on the “Nantucket sleigh ride”—swimming at high speed across the surface of the ocean. Or it might sound and go so deep that all the whaleline in the boat was used up. In that case, a cork float was attached to the end of the whaleline so that when the animal came up again we could spot it and resume the chase.
Up in the crosstrees, I would sing out to those on deck, “Boat fast to whale two points on the starboard bow,” or whatever it might be.
Whaling was often a dangerous business. How would you like to be in a whaleboat trying to kill one of those monsters who, with a swish of his tail, could crush a boat like kindling wood? That would happen if you got too close to the tail when you went to harpoon it. Many a man lost an arm or a leg or even his life.
If we had enough wind, we would sail the schooner to where the boat was after it got the whale. If it was dark, the men in the boats would sometimes light a flare. If a mist settled on the ocean, the boat would sound the foghorn so we could find it.
When the whale was brought alongside the ship, cutting-in started. Three planks extended out from the side in a kind of platform. With their cutting spades, the mates got out on the plank that was parallel with the side of the ship and began.
Either two of the mates, or a mate and a boatsteerer, got out on the cutting-in platform with their spades and made a hole in the whale’s blubber near the head, where they inserted a great big iron hook called the blubber hook. They cut across and then down the sides. The hook was pulled slowly aloft by one tackle from the foremast head and one from the mainmast head. The fall for the tackles "'as led to the anchor windlass forward, where most of the crew labored. The whale turned over and over, as a wide strip of the blubber was peeled from it. When the blubber hook was mastheaded, the strip of blubber was cut off horizontally and dropped on deck.
Meanwhile, the sharks had a feast. They grabbed big chunks out of the whale’s body as it lay alongside the ship; it was a bloody scene.
When the strip of blubber was on deck, the crew cut it up in the same way that you cut pork for Boston baked beans. The blubber is sliced but is left attached to the skin on one side. These chunks of blubber are about 18 inches Wide and cut across the long, two-foot-wide strip that came from the whale. These “prayer books,” as they "’ere called, were thrown as is into the try-pot, which was a metal pot used to render whale oil from the blubber. A tank was on the side of the try works (the furnace). When the try-pots started to fill, a special small bucket, fixed to an iron handle and a wooden handle fitted to that, was used to bail the oil out of the try-pot and into the tank so it could cool. When we left the islands, we had filled everything with fresh water. As we began to collect whale oil, we dumped the water out of the casks and put the oil in.
When all the oil was boiled out of the prayer books, they were taken out of the try-pot with a long fork and thrown into the fire underneath the tryworks, where they served as fuel.
We had one of the best cooks you could imagine on the A. M. Nicholson. Once the blubber had been removed, he would ask the mate to cut him off a piece of whale meat with his spade. The cook could make tasty mince pies, hamburgers, meatloaf, or stews from whale. If there was no whale, the mate would go forward and harpoon a porpoise, which would be jumping around under the bow as the schooner sailed along. Except for whale, porpoise was the only fresh meat available.
One day a whale was alongside, being cut up. I was on deck—it was greasy—and all of a sudden I saw a boatsteerer jump over the side right into the whale’s entrails. I thought he was whacko! He kept hollering, “Ambergris! Ambergris!”
I didn’t know what it was. But the captain was standing there and he said to me, “Boy, we’ll have a good payday when we get back.”
It turned out that one of the men, George Williams (he knew my mother; he appointed himself my guardian when we went ashore in the islands), had made a miss-cut with his spade and sliced into the whale’s intestines. When he saw what was there, he jumped down into the whale’s entrails. I saw him scooping the material—ambergris— out of the intestine and into a bucket with his hands.
Ambergris made the best perfume in the world. It is usually found floating on the ocean or sometimes washed up on a beach. It is actually the constipated stool of a whale, but has this strange quality that made it valuable to the perfume industry. Ambergris is not used today, since the whale is an endangered species.
We had good hunting off Hatteras. We filled up by June and started home. But because it was foggy and cloudy, the captain couldn’t get a sight. We went for about five days without seeing anybody or being able to get our position. Finally, the weather broke and we sighted a steamer. We put up the distress signal and she stopped. We put a boat overside and one of the mates rowed over to get our position. The A. M. Nicholson was 35 miles off Shinacock Light, Long Island, New York.
The Old Man set every sail he had. The ship was so heeled over and deep laden with oil that our lee rail was almost under water. We passed every vessel there was, steamers and all. We pulled into Buzzard’s Bay and anchored off Butler’s Flat lighthouse, too late for the customs and the quarantine doctors to come out that evening.
So it was next day before a tug hauled us into a dock on the New Bedford waterfront. A number of people were there to greet us: the owners, people from the paper came down to find out how much oil we’d got, and so on. I was relieved that my mother was not in the group.
My pay, as I remember, was one barrel of oil out of every 170 barrels. We were paid off the same day we docked in the custom house. I owed the ship quite a bit, but still I had more money in my pocket than I had ever had before. The ambergris helped—it sold, if I remember right, for a dollar an ounce, and we all got a share of the proceeds. I went up town to a department store and bought my first long-pants suit.
I was afraid to go home, so I went everywhere else but there. But somebody saw me and told my mother. Soon we bumped into each other—she was going one way, and I the other. The reunion was joyful and tearful, and my whaling experience was at an end.
The A. M. Nicholson had her try works removed, and the hold was partitioned with cabins for her next voyage, which was to take passengers to Brava and St. Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands. Captain Gonzales wanted me to go—he said that he was going to get a mate this time who could speak fluent English and who would teach me navigation. He wanted me to become his navigator.
But my mother wouldn’t have it. Even when Captain Gonzales came up to the house and begged her to let me go, she refused. I was determined to go to sea, however, and within a year I had joined the Indian, a steamer belonging to the Clyde & Mallory line, as able seaman. She cracked her propeller shaft going into Narragansett Bay, and a tug had to come up and tow us back to New York. I was in many vessels after that. Mr. Cooper, the custom house agent, turned out to be the best friend one could ask for. He got me all kinds of jobs, starting with the one on the Indian. I was with the Grace Line running to South America’s west coast for years.
In World War II, I was second cook on the Chateau Thierry, the biggest transport the Army had. We had six cooks in the first-class kitchen. I was second cook and baker on a Liberty ship on the Murmansk run—the “suicide run.” The convoy would leave New York or Boston, and at Reykjavik the Murmansk detachment would peel off. We anchored in a fjord, and every morning the Germans would come over to count the ships. When we started up the Atlantic, they were on our tail 24 hours a day.
There were not enough docks in Murmansk, so for an anchor we dug a hole in the ice and put a steel pin in it and poured in water that would freeze. The ship tied up right alongside the sheet of ice and made her lines fast to these pins. The women were the stevedores; they had two-wheeled hand trucks that they brought out on the ice. They could handle the big wooden cases we were putting overside with our cargo gear better than a man. Every so often they would reach inside their thick clothing and pull a bottle of vodka out of a pocket. They took a swig—a good half pint at a time.
These are some of the sights that a seafaring man sees. I never regretted my choice of profession; the geography books in my New Bedford school had steered me in the right direction.
Sea-grown Cures
We were catching sperm whales, which enabled us to take part in an old sea ritual said to have medicinal qualities. Before the cutting-in started, the mates would split open the head and a man, generally a boat- steerer, would get inside and use a bucket to bale out the “case,” as it was called. The case was filled with a white substance about the consistency of soft soap, and this was removed by the bucketful and put in the try-pots. This was the first material we tried out—the spermaceti.
An old theory said that a person with severe rheumatism or arthritis could be improved by getting into the whale’s head after the spermaceti was out. There was still heat in the whale’s body. The opening would be closed up around the “patient” until only his head was sticking out. The heat and the oily residue did the trick.
One of the men on board the Nicholson from the islands was troubled this way and he took the cure. He was in the whale’s head about four or five hours. He did not report any immediate cure, but when I ran into him a couple of years later in New Bedford he said that he had suffered no rheumatism since.
The sea had another homegrown remedy. One day from the crow’s nest I saw a sea turtle floating on the surface. We lowered a boat and went after it. It was not a large turtle—only about 125 pounds. I threw the harpoon into it, right into the shell. We got the turtle into the boat and tied its flippers with whale line. We rowed back to the Nicholson, where the sailors heaved it up on deck and dropped it on its back. Someone put a piece of fish about a foot away from its head. When it stuck its head out, wham! went the ax. We had turtle soup, turtle steaks, and turtle stew—a welcome change of diet. The medicinal value came from the turtle’s fat—it is the best thing in the world if you have an earache.
Ernest Johnson