Read Final Voyage for Free Online

between husband and wife, often kept a whaler’s marriage fresh, or allowed it to endure. Probably just as often, it made the whaleman, of any rank, a bemused stranger in his own home and propelled him to sea again.
    Eliza and Thomas were an unusually devoted couple—their letters while he was away from her at sea frequently expressed how greatly they missed each other. But Thomas Williams had become a confirmed and exceptionally skilled whaleman (he tried numerous speculative ventures ashore, but none proved successful), so Eliza instead sailed with him on his next voyage. The degree of her longing to be with her husband is evident by the fact that she was somehow able to leave the two boys, ages six and three, with her family in Wethersfield.
    Eliza was five months pregnant with their third child when she sailed from New Bedford with her husband aboard the Florida on September 7, 1858. From the first moments of the voyage—even before, on the pilot boat sailing out to the ship, hove to below Clark’s Point—she kept a journal. Her impressions were plainly and frankly recorded, yet her essentially uninvolved, supernumerary, fly-on-the-bulkhead observations of all that was new to her, and the accretion of minutiae that filled her pages over the course of three years, make for some of the most vivid and accurate descriptions to come down to us of the life and work aboard a whaleship:
    In company with my Husband, I stept on board the Pilot Boat, about 9 o’clock the morning of the 7th of Sept. 1858, to proceed to the Ship Florida, that will take us out to Sea far from Friends and home, for a long time to come. . . . The men have lifted me up the high side in an arm chair, quite a novel way it seemed to me. Now I am in the place that is to be my home, posibly for 3 or 4 years; but I can not make it appear to me so yet it all seems so strange, so many Men and not one Woman beside myself.
    The small aft cabin was furnished with a geranium and a pet kitten. The food at her first meal aboard was “a good deal like a dinner at home” except for the universally disliked, rock-hard ship’s biscuit. But as the boat that brought her out to the ship headed back to shore, Eliza found herself miserably awash with “tender associations” of home and thoughts of “Dear Friends, Parents, and Children, Brothers and Sisters, all near and dear to us. But I will drop the subject; it is too gloomy to contemplate.”
    And she did thereafter almost completely drop the fulsome lamentations for home and family. Her entries were confined to the world of the ship and its business. At first she didn’t know enough about that world to write about it, and could only focus on the misery of her own condition:
    SEPTEMBER 8 TH.
     
    There is nothing of importance to write about today; nothing but the vast deep about us; as far as the eye can stretch here is nothing to be seen but sky and water, and the Ship we are in. It is all a strange sight to me. The Men are all busy; as for me, I think I am getting Sea sick.
    While Eliza lay sick in her bed, Captain Williams was going through the procedures accompanying the commencement of a whaleship voyage. On the first day out, the crew were mustered in the “waist,” the clear area of the main deck forward of the mainmast where the drawing of the boat crews—the men who would actually go out in the small whaleboats after whales—took place. These boats were usually commanded by the first, second, third, and fourth mates, but aboard the Florida and all the ships of which he was the captain, Thomas Williams, a large, powerful man who had been a successful boatsteerer, always “lowered” in his own boat to chase after whales himself, unless weather conditions or the close presence of land made it imprudent for him to leave the ship. So, in turn, the first, second, third mates, and finally Williams, sang out names from the crew gathered before them until five men, in addition to the mate or captain, had