Harrowing tales of when S.F. was top whaling port in world
The previous Portals described how a young man named Walter Noble Burns, while eating breakfast in a San Francisco restaurant in the late 19th century, saw an advertisement in a newspaper for whaling crews and impulsively signed up.
At the time, San Francisco was the most important whaling port in the world, home to 30 or more whaling ships. Burns’ ship, the Alexander, was a 128-ton brigantine, stoutly built of oak to withstand arctic conditions, with tryworks to convert blubber into oil.
As Burns recounts in the book he wrote about his experiences, “A Year With a Whaler,” the Alexander’s 24 crewmen were a wildly mixed lot. The captain was an old New England sea dog, and the mate a Yankee who had only been ashore for a few weeks in 30 years and constantly swayed.
The second and third mates were blacks from the Cape Verde Islands. One of the boat steerers was a “mulatto” from Barbados. Five of the forecastle crew were veteran deepwater sailors, including an American, a German, a Norwegian and two Swedes.
The green hands included a Western mule skinner, a cowboy, a farmer, a man suspected of being in trouble with the police, an ex-burglar, an Irishman and a sketchy former whaler, “a shiftless, loquacious product of city slums” who had signed up because “it beats hoboing.”
The Alexander departed San Francisco a few days before Christmas in 1890, and the
green hands were immediately set to work learning the ropes, standing lookout, and reefing and furling sails.
“Going aloft was a terrifying ordeal at first to several of the green hands,” Burns wrote. “If the ship were pitching, a fellow had to look sharp or he would be thrown off; if that happened, it was a nice, straight fall of 80 feet to the deck.”
By the time the ship reached a place called Turtle Bay on the Baja coast, the crew members had learned they would be paid only $1 each at the end of the voyage, and “plans to run away became rife.”
Thinking it would be easy to cross the mountain range that was visible in the distance and get to a Mexican settlement on the Sea of Cortez, Burns was about to swim ashore when the captain, who had gotten wind of the impending mass desertions, casually pointed out a pile of stones with a cross sticking in it and told the sailors it was the burial place of three sailors who had deserted.
“This is a bad country to run away in,” the captain said. “No food, no water, no inhabitants. It’s sure death for a runaway.” Burns changed his mind and decided to endure the fo’c’sle.
Burns was not free of the bigotry of his time. He describes how he “raged impotently” at being ordered around by a black man, the third mate Mendez, an imperious officer known as the “Night King.”
The day after he was punished by Mendez, the ship was alerted by the cry of “Blow! Blow! There’s his old head!” from the lookout. It was a magnificent sperm whale. The boats were lowered and the chase was on.
The whale dived, leaving the boatmen searching for the lost trail. Suddenly it surfaced, between the boats and the ship. The captain signaled its position to the boats. The Night King alerted his boat, which caught the wind and hurtled toward the whale. The boat landed on the whale’s back and the Night King, standing on the bow, hurled two harpoons into it. The enraged whale smashed the boat with a blow that hurled the sailors into the sea, then swam off like an express train. The wound had not been mortal.
The other boat rescued the half-drowned sailors. They found the Night King dead, tangled in the rigging. In the instant before the whale smashed the boat, he had heroically cut the line with his knife, thus preventing it from dragging the boat away. “The Night King’s last act had saved the lives of his companions,” Burns writes.
Before the Night King’s body was committed to the sea, the captain asked Burns to read a passage from the Bible. He opened to a random page and read, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” As the body slid into the ocean, a Hawaiian crewman emptied a bucket of slops over it — a sea ritual to prevent a ghost from haunting the ship.
After Burns and a few others tried unsuccessfully to escape in Hawaii, the Alexander sailed through terrifying storms to the bow and right whale grounds off the Siberian coast. Caught in solid ice for three weeks in June, they passed the time by walking to visit nearby ships — known as “gamming” — and exchanging books.
When the ice broke up, they were almost crushed by icebergs, and had to winch their way out. After a dangerous hunt in icy seas, they killed a bowhead whale, removed its baleen, peeled off its blubber, cut it up and tried it. The men ate whale steaks for weeks.
In Siberia, the crew visited with the Inuit and one of the Swedish sailors tried to run away with an Inuk girl. They also met a desperate runaway who had jumped ship the year before, not realizing that only whaling ships ever put in there. He was forced to spend the winter with the Inuit.
The man approached every whaler, including the Alexander, but none of the vindictive captains would take him. “The ships sailed away, leaving him to his fate,” Burns writes. “I never learned whether he ever managed to get back home or left his bones to bleach upon the frozen tundra.”
Finally, on Oct. 10, the ship broke out the American flag and, as every man aboard cheered, headed back to San Francisco. They carried 1,800 pounds of baleen worth $6.50 a pound and had full casks of oil. The total value of the catch was $50,000, of which the captain’s share was $8,000. The higher-ranking crewmen also made big money. Burns and his hapless fellow forecastle hands made “one big iron dollar.”
“It was long after darkness had fallen that (we were towed) into San Francisco harbor, past the darkly frowning Presidio and the twinkling lights of Telegraph Hill, to an anchorage abreast the city, brilliantly lighted and glowing like fairyland,” Burns writes. “I never in all my life heard sweeter music than the rattle and clank of the anchor chain as the great anchor plunged into the bay and sank to its grip in good American soil once more.
“My whaling voyage was over,” Burns concludes. “It was an adventure out of the ordinary, an experience informing, interesting, health-giving, and perhaps worth while. I have never regretted it. But I wouldn't do it again for ten thousand dollars.”