Morgan Log at Edgartown

 

Transit Map and Schedule

Both the ferry landing and the street at Oak Bluff were full of people in vacation attire. The tourist season out here has definitely begun in earnest. At the third light pole we saw no terminal across the street, but we did see a big white bus from the Transit Authority. The ‘terminal” was a man in a wheelchair selling tickets, many of them the $7 day passes. Lesley got one too, as she had decided to go as far as Edgartown with us to see the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. The bus was entirely full as soon as we got on, our whale-ship gear sharing the aisle with those who came in after us. As soon as our driver stopped taking passengers, another bus came up and took those who were waiting.

Crowded bus from Oak Bluff to Edgartown

Entrance to Martha’s Vineyard Museum on School Street

What a lovely drive along the shoreline from Oak Bluff to Edgartown, a leafy road with overarching trees followed by a long, narrow, flat road which was all that separated the ocean on the left from a pond of deep blue water to the right (later identified on a map as Sencekontacket Pond). The city of Edgartown turned out to be big enough that I wondered a little about how far we might have to walk, with all our gear, from the bus stop. It turned out to be no problem: up Church one block to Main, a quick right on School Street, and three blocks down. We reached the museum shortly after 11, just as I had hoped from the 10:30 arrival of our ferry.

Morgan log book kept by Francis C. Osborn. Courtesy of Martha’s Vineyard Museum

Bow Van Riper, the chief archivist, was away in the state of Ohio, but he had set aside what we had hoped to see and had prepared Nathaniel Jannick, one of his assistants, to greet us. Nathaniel brought me the log of the Morgan’s first voyage and he brought Vanessa a box of material relating to Laura Jernegan, the young Vineyarder who had gone whaling with her parents at age 6 (whose story had been the  launching pad for the film Electric Oil by Vanessa’s friend Jessica Rinland). Vanessa sifted through that material quite quickly and spent the rest of the time before lunch under a tree reviewing the book about females who had tried to pass as male sailors on sailing ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (part of the inspiration for her project on the Morgan).

Lesley and I spent most of our time, before and after lunch, reading and taking notes from the log of the Morgan’s maiden voyage kept by second mate Francis C. Osborn. The log of the Morgan begins toward the end of the volume in which Osborn kept the log of the whale ship Alexander Barclay of New Bedford from 1837 to 1840.  Francis Osborn writes very clearly. His logs are impressively legible. On the second page of the one for Morgan he repeats the whole first page, presumably to improve his handwriting.

First page of Osborn’s log of Morgan’s maiden voyage. Courtesy of Martha’s Vineyard Museum

In addition to his written entries, Osborn’s book has beautiful illustrations, placed so that one is not sure to which of the two voyages they refer. Inside the front and back covers are horizontal scenes on the vertical width of the page, somewhat crude in execution but quite visceral in their authenticity.

Whaling scene inside front cover of Osborn’s log of Morgan’s first voyage

 Much later in the book, where the log of the Alexander Barclay gives way to that of the Charles W. Morgan, Osborn has drawn an absolutely brilliant vertical composition of two whales in black and blue, the body and tail of the black one nested within the larger body of the blue, the tail of each a beautiful example of the “crescentic flukes” that Ishmael celebrates in his chapter on “The Tail.” In addition to the positioning of the shapes, there is the coloristic saturation and finesse of the deep blacks and iridescent blues, not only in the compound whales but in the bird flying in from the opposite page.

Osborn’s image of vertical whales and horizontal bird in Morgan logbook

 At the end of the volume, after the portion of the Morgan’s log in this book, Osborn created two beautiful portraits of full length right whales, each facing left but upside down from each other. Both of these amateur drawings by a whale ship mate are much more accurate than any of the drawings by scientific authorities that Ishmael satirizes in his chapter on “The Monstrous Pictures of Whales” in Moby-Dick.

The author with Osborne’s drawing of two right whales. Courtesy of Martha’s Vineyard Museum

Osborn’s visual tally of the whales killed by his right starboard boat

Osborn also drew a chart in which the whaleboat he commanded (the right starboard boat) is accompanied by a vertical stacks of generic shapes which correspond to the number of whales his boat had killed. Each whale is accompanied by the number of barrels of oil that creature had yielded to the industry of the chase. I remember Mike Dyer saying he thought this book was one of the most beautiful log books he had ever seeen, and now I can see why.

After the Morgan had departed from New Bedford on September 6, 1841, its log book did not record its first kill—signaled by the stenciled image of a black sperm whale in the log—until December 16, more than three months later. The log of the voyage contained in this volume continues into the month of May, but Osborn records not another single kill. Nevertheless, the log is very interesting to read.

Log book entry recording Morgan’s first sperm whale kill, December 16, 1841

In Osborn’s hand the mundane aspects of the voyage attain a kind of folk purity. As Lesley knew from her study of other log books, Osborn is following certain traditionial tropes and formulas. I had noticed early on that Osborn often ends an entry with “So ends the day.” Then I began to see that he often personifies the day itself, as in the entry he begins with these words: “Wed. Jan. 26^th comes with strong breezes from the SE.” By this time of the voyage, he ends most of his entries with “So ends,” knowing that the rest of the phrase would be completed in the mind of the reader.

Wednesday, January 12, 1841, “came in with pleasant weather.” The same day “So ends heading S. W.” In between, Osborn reports an exhausting morning, afternoon, and evening. “About 10 o’clock saw a large Sperm Whale. Lowered 4 Boats and Chased him untill one o’clock came in hand and got Dinner and then after again untill Night.”   The next day they “saw Whales, Lowered and chaised until it was Dark,” again without success.

Osborn’s January 12 entry about “Large Sperm Whale” they chased all day without success

By noon Lesley and I had begun to savor the the rhythm and style of the log, so we took a break and joined Vanessa for lunch. We took the advice of Lara Ullman, the assistant of Bow who filled in for Nathaniel during his lunch. Her recommendation of Express Love, retracing our steps up School Street, was perfect. We found a shaded table out on the patio and had sandwiches and coffee in perfect weather in a relaxed conversation it would have been fine to continue all day. By one o’clock, however, I was eager to get back to the museum because Vanessa and I were to be taking the 2:12 bus from Edgartown to the Gay Head Lighthouse, and I was wanting to see as much as I could of the rest of the Morgan log book before we left.

Lesley Walker taking notes from the Morgan log book at Martha’s Vineyard Museum

The longer Lesley and I spent in the log the more we enjoyed it, especially afrer the ship rounded Cape Horn and began to “speak” with other vessels. In early February, the ship anchored for nearly a week off Callao, the port city of Lima, Peru. The locals were celebrating “Feast Days,” giving the Port and Starboard Watches, in alternation, plenty of opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of land.  Lesley had been hoping to find some entries about the Australian islands at which her great-grandparents had entertained whalers, American and otherwise, but this portion of the Morgan’s log did not get anywhere near the western Pacific. Lesley nevertheless stayed on to read to the end of Osborn’s volume before returning on her own to board the Morgan in Vineyard Haven.

Vanessa and I continued on to Gay Head Lighthouse before taking another bus to Vineyard Haven for the 5 pm meeting with the rest of the 38^th Voyagers. You can see the triangle of our day trip on the transit map below, running from Oak Bluff at the top right along the coast to Edgartown at the lower right before crossing horizontally to West Tisbury and then down to Gay Head at the far lower left corner before heading up through West Tisbury again to Vineyard Haven at the top center.

Map of Martha’s Vineyard bus lnes, June 2014

Out to Martha’s Vineyard

Entry begun Tuesday, June 24, at 10:10 am

Slept well, got up for breakfast, looked out the window at the harbor in the morning sun, and finished typing up yesterday’s entry.

Sunrise through hotel room window, Tuesday, June 24

I am now sitting on the shade on the top deck of the Seastreak ferry, which is truly streaking for Martha’s Vineyard. If it takes one hour flat out at this speed straight through Wood’s Hole, and across Vineyard Sound, one can only imagine how long it took Ishmael and Queequeg on the packet boat in the early 1840s to get to Nantucket, much farther out in the sea than Martha’s Vineyard.

Seastreak heading to Oak Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard

The sky is a soft light blue this morning. The water is a deeper blue, but about as light as the sky where boats cutting through it here have left their wakes. Vanessa was telling me before we got to the boat about Eva Liput, a former New Bedford fishing captain iwho is now creating huge semiabstract paintings whose patterns derive from the wakes made by the boats she has sailed.  (This concept reminds me of the Circuit prints that Frank Stella made in the 1980s, inspired by the tracings he saw in the plywood backing after cutting the metallic shapes for his Circuit relief paintings.). We see no wakes in the water now, as we head east and look south.  Only the deep, blue, breezy sea all the way to the distant, unobstructed horizon line.

Unobstructed horizon line to the south

As Vanessa and I were standing here on the upper deck, we were delighted to see Lesley Walker, our fellow Voyager from Australia. So now we are three. Lesley had prepared for our voyage on the Morgan by going on her first whale watch, from Plymouth out to Stellwagen Banks, where she saw a profusion of humpbacks for more than an hour, plus a minke whale breaching. One of the humpbacks came right up to their boat, slowly rolled, and playfully slapped the water with its fin.

Lesley Walker and Vanessa Hodgkinson on Seastreak to Martha’s Vineyard

Entry continued, Thursday, June 27, 7:30 am

The weather and the ride to Oak Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard were perfect. We had a quick, distant glimpse of the Charles W. Morgan at the dock at Vineyard Haven as we passed outside that harbor on our way around to Oak Bluff on Nantucket Sound.

Passing Vineyard Haven on the way to Oak Bluff

I think the water, as we got off the ferry at Oak Bluff, is the purest translucent green I’ve ever seen. I asked at the ticket booth where to find the terminal for the Martha’s Vineyard Transit Authority, where we each planned to purchase a day pass for $7. The agent pointed along the shore and said it was “three lampposts down and across the street.”

Getting East

Entry begun Monday, June 23, 8:30 pm

Exultation is not the first word that comes to mind about travel these days. The airplanes that carried me from Cincinnati to Philadelphia and from there to Providence had the smallest seating space I ever remember. In Philadelphia there was barely time to get from one concourse to the next, connected by a shuttle bus, by the time the plane for Providence was supposed to board. I get there just in time but it wasn’t loading. There was an unspecified mechanical problem and no estimate yet about how long it might last. At least that would presumably give my checked luggage time to catch up with my plane, which was a very long distance from where we had landed. The delay lasted only about twenty minutes, and things began to get better. Beginning with the woman who had the window seat to my immediate right, even more confined than my aisle seat.

I love how you meet people traveling you would meet in no other way. Somehow Japan came up as the plane was preparing to taxi and it turns out she and her two teenage sons had spent six weeks backpacking on Japan’s public transportation, seing the sights and sleeping in the cubicle hotels, having such a good time they did not want to come home. Today’s mission was quite different. Her mother in the East is suffering from Alzheimer’s and is being nearly starved to death by the daughter (sister of my seatmate) who had taken her in, it turned out, only to siphon off the mother’s monthly benefit check. A sister in the South, and police in the town where the mother now lives, had agreed that the mother had to be extricated from this intolerable situation, an operation my seatmate, with the local police on call, was to perform tomorrow morning, taking Mom to Sis in Florida before flying back to the city near the Great Lakes where she works two jobs totaling 60 hours a week, both sons now having left the empty nest.

During the two flights I read about half of The Charles W. Morgan by John F. Levitt, first published in 1973 and updated by Mystic Seaport staff in 2013. This book is answering some of my questions and telling me many things entirely new. The cabin boy on this ship usually did sleep near the officers’ quarters, whereas the cook was sometimes assigned to the forecastle. The relatively spacious quarters of the “captain’s day room” in the Morgan has something to do with the fact that five different captains had wives living aboard with them, one of whom gave birth during the course of the voyage, the new son replacing the captain’s sixteen-year-old son from a previous marriage who had recently died in a fall from the mast. Yes, there were floggings on this ship, even after the practice was outlawed, and more than one near mutiny.

Dick Russell, Eye of the Whale, 2001

It might not be so surprising that Melville knew about the long history of the Makah Indians hunting whales along the Olympic Peninsula near Ozette, because the Morgan spent considerable time hunting in those very waters in the 1840s. In 1862, the Morgan joined the whale ships that had begun to send boats into the “shallow waters” of Scammon’s Bay in Baja California “to hunt down female whales and their calves.” One female fought back so strongly to protect her young that she “stove” two of the Morgan’s whale boats. In the 1850s, Charles Melville Scammon, for whom the lagoon was named, had been the first whaling captain to send armed whale boats into the gray whale lagoons for (usually) easy kills. He eventually had a change of heart and in the 1870s published an illustrated treatise on the species (Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America) that is still a classic (see Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale).

Fairfield Inn, New Bedford

 Things got better for me as soon as I saw the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean through the window of the plane.  Ultramarine is the word that came to my mind and my eye at the same time. My checked bag in Providence got to the carousel almost as soon as I did. The Enterprise rental car agents were courteous and efficient. The air outdoors was fresh and breezy. Driving to New Bedford I saw two tug boats near the new bridge that skirts Providence, and the traffic was smooth the rest of the way on I-95. A huge new sign for the New Bedford Whaling Museum crowns the hill as you approach the city, a harpoon, rather than an arrow, pointing to the right. MacArthur Drive, the street immediately in front of my waterfront hotel was newly paved, no doubt for the arrival of the Morgan. I was a little before check-in time at the Fairfield Inn, but they were still able to give me a room with a view of the harbor.

Images laid out to hang, Center Street Gallery, June 23

After checking in, I went to the Whaling Museum, where Melanie and other staff members were installing our Art of Seeing Whales exhibition. It was wonderful to see the Dutch and Chinese whales ready to go up on the wall right inside the entry, and before I left they were up. All walls were lined with works waiting to be hung, more or less in the order in which they will be mounted. There was some confusion about certain frames and mounts that took a while to work out (I walked up the hill to the flat file in our Archive in the Whaling Museum’s Research Library to get some matts that had been used when some of our Matt Kishes went to Washington, DC), but I am entirely confident that Christina and her team will have the exhibition close to its final form by the time Mike Dyer, Vanessa Hodgkinson, and I get off the ship two evenings from now, if we sail according to schedule.  When Christina arrived from a meeting, we went looking for Skin’s Path, Aileen Callahan’s charcoal drawing of the whale’s skin, which will fit just right in a niche where a space had opened up because works that had been chosen turned out to be more suitable for display cases than mounted on the wall.

Cork Wine and Tapas, formerly New England Boilder Repair and Welding

I saw Vanessa at Crowell’s Gallery and frame shop, where she had shown her Moby-Dick works in January—and where some of the works for the exhibition at the Museum were currently being framed. Vanessa came over to the exhibition space soon after I went back and helped with some questions about the installation. Christina took Vanessa and me out for a drink and tapas at Cork, one of the many flourishing restaurants and cafés from which one can now choose in New Bedford, a far cry from the situation when we began developing our Archive here a decade ago. Christina and I enjoyed hearing about Vanessa’s plans for her adventure on the Morgan and related projects, and Christina and Vanessa enjoyed the twelve new drawings by Matt Kish that I had brought with me from the Midwest.

After we parted, I had clam chowder up the street at Freestone’s and returned to my hotel to write out and type up this entry. Vanessa will meet me here at 9 am tomorrow to take the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. Mike Dyer was not at the Whaling Museum today because he is walking from New Bedford to Wood’s Hole before taking the ferry from there, admirable devotion to the spirit, and locomotion, of the era in which the Morgan first sailed.