The Empire of Necessity (20 page)

Years later, some away teams still didn’t know that the piled-up heaps of skinned corpses left on the beach from previous kills repelled living seals, discouraging them from coming on shore. On one island, men hid behind boulders for days waiting for a rookery to fill up. The seals would “just land in the surf, stick their heads up and look about for a moment … and go to sea again.” It took the keenest among the waiting men to realize that the seals “were afraid to come on shore, on account of the carcasses … strewn all over the beach.”
¹⁷

Another captain, George Howe, master of the
Onico
and supposedly an experienced sealer, didn’t know how long skins should be soaked. When told by his away team that the skins they had gathered were “damaged by lying too long in the water,” Howe asked why they were not taken “out sooner.” When his men reminded him that it was he who ordered that they stay in water for “five days,” the captain said that “they were not soaked enough.” Howe asked if the skins “stank.” Yes, his men told him. Good, he said, “they ought to stink.” The pelts were soon worthless.
¹⁸

At first, missteps like these didn’t much matter. There were so many seals.

*   *   *

Amasa Delano estimated that when New Englanders first arrived at Más Afuera and “began to make a business of killing seals, there is no doubt but there were two or three millions of them on the island.” The
Eliza
, out of New York, had dropped anchor in 1792 and taken 38,000 skins off the island. From then on, more and more vessels arrived carrying away bigger and bigger hauls. Between 1797 and 1799, the shore crew of a New Haven ship called the
Neptune
killed and skinned 18,000 seals. The numbers in the margin of the diary kept by one of its crew members, David Forbes, records the steady pace of the killing, which took place every day but Sunday: “Killed 370 whigs.” “500 whigs.” “700 whigs.” 400. 370. 230. 400. 160. 260. 440. 270. 280. 350. 300. In 1800, the
Betsey
took 110,000 sealskins off the island.
¹⁹

It did indeed seem as if you could kill them all one day and start fresh again the next. Yet within a stunningly short time, the intense slaughter that took place on Más Afuera and elsewhere flooded the Chinese market. During just one week in December 1801 alone, thirty-two ships were in Canton selling hundreds of thousands of skins. With so many pouring in, their price was rapidly dropping. “You see how fluctuating these markets are,” Delano’s agent in China said.
²⁰

The market wasn’t fluctuating. It was plummeting. To compensate for the falling prices, ship captains pressured their away teams to step up the killing, which in turn led to the rapid disappearance of rookeries. Oversupply and extinction went hand in hand.

Falling prices and vanishing herds rapidly changed the nature of the industry. In the early 1790s, it would take only a few weeks, or at most a season, for small gangs of six to ten men on an island like Más Afuera to fill a ship’s hold with skins. Less than a decade later, the size of away teams had tripled, and they were staying on islands two or three years at a stretch.

As the seal population diminished, desperation grew. Cooperation among different seal ships and away teams, which was common early in the boom, gave way to a scramble for territory. In 1803, a Nantucket gang that had laid claim to Más Afuera’s valuable “northwest plain” was sending “all hand round the cove to put a stop to Capt. Britnall sealing.” A few days later, they “stopped Mr. Butler from destroying the clapmatches at the cove.” To prevent such conflicts from escalating, seal ship captains signed “treaties” dividing up the island’s hunting grounds. But the fighting continued.
²¹

Efforts to self-regulate the hunt were too little and too late. There were “sudden and large fortunes to be made,” wrote one sealer of his experiences, yet little accumulated wealth was built up “in consequence of the animal’s being almost annihilated.” Within a few years, seal rookeries would be gone for good on many of the Argentine and Chilean islands, with some subspecies of seals becoming extinct.
²²

“On island after island, coast after coast,” the historian Briton Cooper Busch says in
The War against the Seals
, “the seals had been destroyed to the last available pup, on the supposition that if sealer Tom did not kill every seal in sight, sealer Dick or sealer Harry would not be so squeamish.”

14

ISOLATOS

Work on a whale ship required intense coordination and camaraderie. Out of the gruesomeness of the hunt, the peeling of the whale’s skin from its carcass, and the hellish boil of the fat, something, as Melville wrote in
Moby-Dick
, sublime emerged. The enormous profit derived from whaling integrated not just capital and technology but human sentiment. And like the whale oil that lighted the lamps of the world, divinity itself glowed from the labor, a value shared by working people throughout America: “Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”
¹

Sealing was something else entirely, pitting desperate captains and officers, racing to make a voyage pay off, against equally desperate foremast hands, who, left alone on remote islands, had plenty of time to gripe and plot. It called to mind not industrial democracy but the isolation and violence of conquest, settler colonialism, and warfare, men brutally exploiting one another and nature, not for something elemental and needed by all like light and fire but for the raw material of conspicuous consumption. Sealers seized territory, fought one another to keep it, and pulled out what wealth they could as fast as they could, before abandoning their claims empty and wasted.

*   *   *

Some sealing islands were stocked with black cattle, wild hogs, and goats left by previous visitors. Others were nothing but barren clay mixed with stones and sand. Sealers, often schooners and brigs like the
Perseverance
, dropped off away gangs for ever-longer stretches. The men left behind by captains like Delano were given little instruction and few provisions, aside from start-up casks of hard bread, lard, and liquor, axes to build a shelter, salt to dry the skins (unless they were to be sun dried), a few muskets, balls, and powder. They were expected to live off the land. The island called Desolation at the southern tip of the Americas especially lived up to its name, even during the summer months, when the seals came ashore to give birth.

Away teams survived by wading into freezing water to harvest mussels, shooting birds, and boiling maidenweed for tea. Carrion crows could be mistaken for turkeys until they were shot; then their stink announced that they were vultures. Other islands had only seals to eat. Men cut steaks out of the meat, boiled the organs, salted the tongue, ate the brains as sweetbreads, and made black pudding with the blood. With luck they could occasionally trade with passing ships, exchanging sealskins for “oranges and English nuts.” They lived Jonah-like, so to speak, inside the animals, as if they were the viscera themselves: they used the skeletons of whale bones as beams for their huts, sheathing them with the skins of seals and sea elephants. Sometimes, away teams would find traces of those who preceded them. After their first kill on a small, rocky, waterless Pacific island, a group of sealers came across a “sight which petrified them with horror”: the skeletons of seven men and the remains of a hut, all that was left of a team that had been put ashore “for the purpose of getting elephant oil and seal.”

It was a harsh, brutal life, and one, for both officers and foremast hands, considerably lower in standing than whaling. Many involved were unskilled, part of a revolutionary generation of land men who learned the job on the spot, hoping to make enough money to return home and buy a farm. The only experience they had that prepared them for the work was slaughtering and butchering farm animals. As William Moulton, from inland New York, put it, the “object of my voyage was to acquire property.”

Left alone for months or years at a time, the men suffered the “severity of winter in this rigorous climate,” wrote Moulton. The snow was constant on the islands of the southern latitudes. Where there wasn’t snow, there were ticks, flies, and other insects. “Tormented by Buggs,” ran one entry in a sealer diary. The diet was monotonous and tough. The seal blood that went into black pudding was fibrous, causing bouts of intense vomiting. Scurvy was common. Some men were reported to have died shortly after eating a seal liver steak. They didn’t know it at the time, but the livers of seals contain a staggering amount of vitamin A, which could produce “purgings, dysenteries, and other complaints.”
²

When the men weren’t killing and skinning, they cooked, drank, and played checkers or cards. Occasionally, another ship would drop anchor and relieve the boredom. “Held a ball on Captain Bunker’s craft,” read the journal of a sealer who had spent twenty months on Más Afuera. “Music was a flute, drum and violin.” But months of isolation bred vague resentments, cutting into the ability of sealers to enjoy the company of others: “A great disliking of this ship and crew among us.”
³

Days and nights were lonely and dreary, as diary entries testify: “Rain all day.” “Stormey rainy weather.” “Cloudy misty weather.” “Misty dirty weather.” “Cold, snow.” “Making a pair of trousers.” Then: “Rainy day again. Finished trousers.” “Little to eat and nothing soon but seal.” The men tried to keep the holidays: “The two hands returned with 4 goats … to keep the birthday of our savior. Not much to do except look for the ship, for which I employ the greater part of my time.” On islands where the water was warm enough, some lonely hands took breaks from the slaughter to play with the seals, gamboling alongside them in a bay, as if they were seals themselves.

Dreams washed over the men. “Cartwright dreamed of home last night.” Another “dreamed of the young virgins.” After months of solitude and slaughter, even pleasant ones were interpreted as ominous: “Last night drempt of a wedding at home which I’ve heard say is a sign of a funeral.” “Last Night drempt of home again which makes me fearful of what has happened there.”
⁴

Quick relief was not to be expected: “One year yesterday since I landed on this uninhabited Craggy Dismal place and in less then one more hope to depart from it with gods will.” Nor could one assume it would even arrive: “Many a look do I cast on the distant ocean to descry our ship & many a sigh for fear she will not come.”
⁵

*   *   *

Whaling bound men tightly together in a small space for a long time, their solidarity made possible by the reliably high price of whale oil. Sealing was a more frayed affair. A seal ship might pick up hands in different ports as needed to fill out away teams, which meant that the ties linking crew to officers and captain were weak and unraveled quickly under pressure. When the margin of profit on skins collapsed due to oversupply, the only way to make up the difference was to reduce the daily operating budget of the ship. Officers cut meals to two a day and reduced portions. They diluted the rum and rationed medicine. And they drove men to kill more seals and to find more space on the ship to pack the extra pelts. First mates put seamen’s chests on shore to make more storage room and captains converted forecastles into cargo holds, forcing their men to sleep in whatever nook they could find, often on deck and exposed to the elements. The skins, not the men, needed to stay dry. And once the skinning was done and a ship’s hold packed from its bilge flats to its deck beams, officers might see away men as redundant, abandoning them “to perish on some maroon island” and keeping their rightful proceeds of the voyage.
⁶

Whale men were cheated as well. In his history of maritime New England, Samuel Eliot Morison describes the kickbacks and double dealings that filched sailors out of their cut, usually calculated at around a hundredth part of a voyage’s earnings. There were any number of things that hands had to pay for, from fees for “fitting out” and insurance to items taken from the ship’s “slop chest,” like tobacco and clothing. The charges would be added to what was called a portage bill, an account of debits and credits, and deducted from their share. Some arrived in a final port at the end of a voyage to learn they had been running a deficit and had to pay, or take out another loan, just to disembark. Yet in an established industry with the backing of complex institutions, including corporations and underwriters, there was some accountability and oversight.
⁷

Seal ship captains, however, even more than whalers, earned a reputation for exceptional deceit—not because this particular trade attracted a more vile sort of man but because its economy and ecology were unsustainable, forcing captains and officers to find new ways of limiting labor costs. “The oppression of these tyrants,” wrote William Moulton, talking about his own experience as second mate on the
Onico
, “was insufferable.”

Moulton was older than most of his shipmates. From a farming family in upstate New York, he was a veteran of America’s Revolutionary War. So he had an idea what tyranny looked like, describing seal ship captains as if they were British aristocrats or Hudson Valley landlords. “These gentry,” Moulton wrote, “can never fleece, drive, nor starve enough out of their men, nor devise too many pleas to cull and consume everything on themselves, to gratify their lusts of avarice and appetite.”