An ax-ivaving mutineer is slain on board the Oscar, after which his body is ferried ashore (right) in this composite of the 1845 affair.
“You ought to have taken the boat and gone after them, and run a lance through them!” bellowed Captain Isaac Ludlow at his first mate as they stood peering at the splashing forms in the distance. It was not whales the captain of the Oscar yearned to lance. His rage, that August day in 1845, was directed at three of his own seamen who had defied orders by swimming ashore for unauthorized liberty.
Thus began one of the most bitterly debated incidents of conflict at sea in the annals of American whaling. Before the events had run their course, they threatened to topple that most sacred tenet of maritime law—the absolute authority of the captain.
The Oscar, 291 days out from Sag Harbor, New York, was provisioning at Ilha Grande, Brazil, when the three sailors paddled ashore without leave. The men stayed only long enough to get roaring drunk, and then swam back to the ship, where they were sent below while the captain pondered a proper punishment.
Grumbling and cursing, the besotted sailors armed them
Selves with knives, axes and cudgels. Joining them was the cook, who believed himself aggrieved on another score. The captain met them with a rifle. He warned that he would shoot the first man who set foot on the quarterdeck. When a seaman lunged forward, the captain shot him dead.
The surviving seamen were immediately placed under arrest by the U. S. consul. But then, surprisingly, the captain was also arrested, and charged with murder. At the trial in New York, Ludlow held that he had quelled a true mutiny. In this he was fervently supported by his fellow masters. “If Gaptain Ludlow is convicted, I will never again set foot on a whale ship,” declared a master. But with only four mutineers out of a score of crewmen, it was difficult to prove that any attempt had been made to seize the ship.
The judge’s decision was truly Solomonic. Gaptain Ludlow was exonerated as acting within his rights, and the three surviving seamen were found guilty of assault rather than mutiny. But to whaleship captains, the all-important thing was that the rule of the master at sea had been upheld.
When the brief but bloody melee began, the Triton’s third mate, Elihu Brightman, was asleep, unnoticed, in the waist whaleboat. According to one account, Brightman, armed with a lance, waited to confront the renegade Manuel. When the chance came, the mate made one thrust with his razor-sharp lance and pinned the man to the deck. The sight of their impaled leader demoralized the islanders, and the whalemen drove them over the side. The Portuguese outlaw was fed to the sharks.
Assuming that the captain and his boatmen were dead, Brightman and the crew took the Triton to Tahiti. The Alabama out of Nantucket later arrived at Sydenham Island and rescued the missing men. The islanders, no longer incited by the evil Manuel, had spared their captives’ lives.
Two years later the Charles W. Morgan was drifting in a calm about five miles off the same island and the second mate, hanging in the lookout hoops with Nelson Haley, was recounting the story of the Triton. Suddenly he broke off the story—“Damn them, here they come!’’
And come they did—at least 500 hostile “blue-skinned savages,” as Haley remembered them, in some 50 war canoes. On deck. Captain Samson supervised the Morgan’s defense. At his command, crewmen slashed with cutting spades, repulsing natives who tried to climb aboard by grabbing the chain plates. The canoes backed off and surrounded the ship, evidently content to wait until a current took the Morgan aground on a reef encircling the island. Meanwhile the natives screamed and made insulting gestures: in one canoe a portly islander arose, shouted a local obscenity, turned his back, placed his hands on his hips and bowed low to present his broad behind. As Haley described it, “no clothes obstructed the shining mark.” Captain Samson raised a shotgun loaded with bird shot, took careful aim and fired both barrels. The islander arched gracefully into the water.
The fallen warrior’s paddlers beat a rapid retreat. But now the men in the Morgan’s bow could see bottom as the current carried the whaler toward the reef. The islanders sensed victory, and half a dozen canoes darted from the pack and came for the Morgan’s sides. Again the whalemen beat off the attackers with cutting spades. The ship nudged over a rim of coral as the islanders shouted in unison, triumphantly whirling their paddles. And then, at the last possible instant before going aground, the Morgan slowly began to move. The current, diverted by the edge of the reef, had turned and was taking the ship with it. Soon the Morgan was in 15 feet of clear water and the bottom dropped out of sight.
“When we saw all danger past,” Haley recalled, “did we not yell in derision to those blue-bellied beggars, who had stopped their clatter on seeing the ship pass what they made sure would be her doom!”
However narrow the escape had been, and however deadly the possibilities, Nelson Haley, at least in retrospect, thought of the Morgan’s triumph over the contemptible savages as something of a lark. It was a luxury of attitude that Haley, young, unmarried and filled with adventuresome juices, could well afford. But for others among the whalemen, life in Pacific waters was a much more sober affair, with an added burden of responsibility—for by the mid-19th Century, in ever-increasing numbers, the wives and even the children of many whaling masters had come to share both the delights and the dangers of “the other side.”
World History
