Resolute (24 page)

As his men had done before him, Buddington then made a quick inspection of the ship. There was no question about it—the
Resolute's
solitary voyage through ice, snow, and lord knows what else had taken its toll. The vessel's tanks had burst and its hold was filled with more than seven feet of water. Most of its rigging and sails needed to be replaced. But despite it all, the ship was still remarkably seaworthy.

From the moment he had climbed aboard the
Resolute
, Buddington could not help but be aware that, by the laws of salvage, the abandoned ship was now the prize of the owners of the
George Henry.
And what a prize she would be—far more valuable than all the whales he had not been able to catch on this stormy, ice-plagued voyage. On the other hand, the vessel was worthless where she lay. In order for it to be sold, and for Buddington and his crew to get their share of the sale, the
Resolute
would have to be sailed back to port.

Did he dare think it? Counting himself, he had only twenty-six men and that included his inexperienced sixteen-year-old son, the cabin boy. If he divided them between the two ships, it meant that he would have to sail the massive
Resolute
, a ship built to be crewed by sixty to seventy men, with, at best, only thirteen of his whalers.

For a man who, throughout his long seafaring career, had been called upon to make life or death judgments, it was, he would later state, the most momentous decision he had ever been forced to make. But he did not hesitate. He would do it. The reward was too great. Foolhardy as it might be, he would attempt to bring the
Resolute
home.

But first the ship had to be made ready to sail. The initial challenge was getting the water out of the hold. No one aboard the
George Henry
had ever seen anything like the vessel's British-made pump. No one had any idea of how to get it started. After three days of trying, Buddington himself finally managed to turn it on. For the next two weeks, crewmen manned the pump for fourteen hours a day until all of the water and the ice were finally removed.

It was only the beginning. The rigging needed to be set up, sails put in place, and the rudder repaired. After drying out the canvas that he had found aboard the British vessel, Buddington had his men attempt to rig a topmast sail, but just as they seemed to have completed the task, a strong gale blew up, taking the sail away with it. The captain would be forced to sail the vessel with just the lower masts. Finally came the backbreaking job of chopping away the ice that surrounded the ship and creating a channel that would allow the
Resolute
to make its way clear of the main pack of ice.

Somehow it was all done. But that only gave Buddington the opportunity to try to accomplish something that even many of the most experienced captains would have regarded as impossible. The weather was so bad that, as later reports would reveal, thirteen ships had given up the attempt to enter Davis Strait while the
George Henry
and the
Resolute
were anchored there. Not only would Buddington have to sail the enormous
Resolute
with a crew less than a sixth the size of that normally required, but he would have to do so through ferocious storms, with nothing close to the proper instrumentation. He had no chronometer and no chart to steer by other than a rough outline of the North American coast, drawn on a piece of scrap paper. He would be making the long, dangerous voyage with a watch, a quadrant, and what he called a “miserable compass.” What he did have, he would state, were “my instincts and more than twenty years at sea.”

By the third week of October, Buddington felt that he was ready to leave. Piloting the
Resolute
through the channel the men had cut, he anchored outside the ice pack waiting for the
George Henry
, captained now by his first mate, John Quayle, to appear. There he received yet another surprise. As he waited, the British bark
Alibi
suddenly appeared alongside. Informing the startled Captain Stuart of the
Alibi
of how he had recovered the
Resolute
, Buddington handed him Captain Kellett's epaulettes and asked if they could be forwarded to Kellett as soon as possible. Buddington then hastily scribbled a letter to the
George Henry's
owners describing what had transpired and that he would be returning to New London with not one ship, but two—one of them a prize beyond the owners' imagination. Stuart promised that he would mail the letter immediately upon his arrival in Great Britain.

Three days had now passed since Buddington had begun waiting for the
George Henry.
Now, fearing that the ice would close in on him, he had to push off. He would not see his own ship again until he reached New London.

The trip back to his home port would be the most difficult of Buddington's long career. Battered by at least one storm every single day of his two-month voyage, he was continually blown off course. More than once a sudden blizzard, with its accompanying mountainous seas, threatened to destroy the undermanned ship. “I frequently had no sleep for more than sixty hours at a time,” the captain would later tell friends. He was far too occupied with trying to keep the
Resolute
afloat to even think of maintaining a journal of his ordeals, but his ship's carpenter, Henry Hughes, did manage to make a few brief revealing notes in his dairy. “The falling of this ice and the thumping of the sleet make music enough for any person who is nervous … We have had a gale wind ever since we started for home and this is enough to make anyone out of patience,” stated one entry. Another read: “So here we be knocking about on the coast of Labrador, and a hard place it is too.” And on Thanksgiving Day he recorded that “there was a gale of a wind and a heavy thunderstorm…a dismal Thanksgiving.”

But it was a much better Christmas. “I don't know how I did it,” Buddington would later recall, “[but] I took the
Resolute
right into New London harbor, arriving there on the 24th of December. It took me 67 days to come … When I got into the harbor the news spread and there was the shore crowded with folks wondering what the ship was. I had our colours flying of course, but, out of politeness to the Britisher, I had his flag flying, too. The harbor froze over solid every night the
Resolute
lay there, with the
George Henry
on the west side. I used to say that the
Resolute
brought the ice with her.”

The
George Henry
had arrived in New London some five days before the
Resolute.
She too had had a storm-tossed, difficult journey. Early on she had lost her rudder and, with Hughes, the ship's carpenter, sailing with Buddington, the skeleton crew was forced to fashion a new one as best they could. It was a process that would have to be repeated several times as one jerry-rigged rudder after another was torn away in the heavy seas. By the time the whaleship reached New London, it was almost out of control and was leaking badly. John Quayle, who had never commanded a ship before, barely made it to port.

NEW LONDON
, Connecticut, in 1855 was a bustling, thriving place, second only to New Bedford as the world's greatest whaling center. Ships from around the world put into its harbor. But New Londoners had never seen anything like the
Resolute.
From the moment she arrived, she became the greatest attraction ever to grace the town. “From Old England's Thames to New England's Thames” stated the headline in a Boston newspaper. Special excursion trains were run to accommodate the thousands of sightseers who came to view her.

The
Boston Daily Advertiser
described the commotion:

“Till her destination is decided,” the newspaper had stated. It was a good question. According to the laws of salvage, the abandoned
Resolute
now belonged to the
George Henry's
owners. But almost as soon as she arrived in New London, a representative of the British government had appeared, laying claim to the vessel on behalf of the Crown. For a while it appeared that Anglo-American relations, already strained after a series of commercial and political disputes, would become more seriously threatened. But then one of Great Britain's favorite American citizens stepped in. Henry Grinnell had won the hearts of all Englishmen when he had sent two expeditions out to look for John Franklin. Now he wrote a letter to British authorities politely suggesting that, since the
George Henry's
owners had suffered a great financial loss when its captain abandoned his whaling to save the
Resolute
, England should give up its claim to the ship. Almost immediately, the British complied. To Henry Grinnell, the compliance was but the first step in a larger plan he had for the
Resolute.
For in the miraculous recovery of the ship he saw the opportunity for the United States to truly cement its relations with Great Britain. On January 7, 1856, he wrote a letter to the United States Secretary of State:

Grinnell's suggestion took on even greater weight when it was supported by a similar recommendation from everyone's hero Elisha Kane. After considerable debate, the United States Congress, on August 28, passed a resolution stating: