The Empire of Necessity (28 page)

The sky was clear, and starboard’s near-setting sun cast its light on the range’s western foothills, creating a lattice of light and shadow. The
Perseverance
was moving at a steady pace on a calm sea. Amasa’s eye followed the rolling water as it flowed into the coast’s undulating plains, tracing the contour of the land until it shot up with a startling steepness. The mountains were “magnificent beyond description,” he thought. “In some places beautifully shaded, where one mountain stands a little in front of another, making the most interesting and splendid appearance that can be conceived of.”
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*   *   *

The
Perseverance
, along with the
Pilgrim
, built in expectation that this second skinning expedition would do as well as the first, had set sail from Boston seventeen months earlier, practically almshouses for the Delano family. The
Pilgrim
was captained by Amasa’s brother Samuel and carried his other brother, the “badly-clubfooted William.” Amasa was on the
Perseverance
, along with his nephew and ward Charles, who was seven years old yet “wanted as much attendance” as a child of three. The boy had lost the use of his arms and Amasa was obligated to care for him, a responsibility that had, he said, a “more powerful effect” on him “than all the other causes put together.”
²

Though his last voyage had made a profit, family obligations and debts had built up while Amasa was away. In June, he married the widow Hannah Appleton, who ran a respectable Boston boardinghouse. But money remained a problem. On shore, Delano felt the burden of responsibility. Samuel was a shipbuilder and he had property in Duxbury, so he could take care of himself. The twenty-year-old William, who years later would die at sea, was a more hapless figure. And his three sisters, particularly Irene, just a year younger than him, were not well off.

The weight grew heavier as Amasa made ready to leave. “Almost the whole of our connections, whom we left behind, had need of our assistance,” he wrote, and “our absence would not be less than three years.”

He noted feeling “more anxiety than I had ever experienced at the beginning of any enterprise.” He was taking from his “parents all the sons they had, and one grandson, and from my sisters all their brothers.” And he was feeling his forty years: “I found myself less active in body and mind than I was at the age of twenty-five.” He had no choice, though, but to face “storms, dangers, and breakers” to take what he could “from barren rocks in distant regions.”
³

The
Perseverance
and
Pilgrim
first picked up a load of salt at the Cape Verde islands, where they signed up some Portuguese sailors and a few wayward “Sandwich Islanders.” Then they sailed down the western coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean toward the Pacific, gaining additional men along the way.

The brothers had heard that seals were scarce in the waters off Chile but the captain of a French ship had told them that the rookeries were full at King Island, in the eastern mouth of Bass Strait, the wide, windy passage that separates Tasmania from mainland Australia. The island had been home to the plentiful dark-plumed black emu. By the time the Delanos arrived in early 1804, the seals were gone and so were the emus. Over the millennia, the ostrichlike birds had evolved to be able to kick most predators to death, but within just about five years sealers hunted them to extinction, using dogs specially trained to grab the birds by the neck.
⁴

“Greatly disappointed at not finding any Seal on the Island of any Consequence,” the brothers headed to the western side of the strait, to Cape Barren Island. Along the way, they found the stranded
Integrity
, a British cutter helping to found a new prison colony up the Derwent River (which would eventually grow into the city of Hobart, Great Britain’s first and largest settlement in Tasmania). The
Perseverance
stayed with the ship and helped fix its broken rudder, while the
Pilgrim
took its cargo and passengers up the Derwent. Afterwards, Amasa sent Samuel to Sydney to present the British governor with an invoice for 400 pounds for “services performed.” The governor complained that the bill was excessively high but he had to pay it since the
Integrity
’s captain had signed off on the invoice. Delano, he thought, was a “piratical fellow” for taking “extortionate advantage.”
⁵

The
Perseverance
arrived in Kent’s Bay on Cape Barren Island on March 3 and set up camp. The surrounding waters were filled with “rocks, shoals, and dangers,” and the land was made up of broken granite and deep, wavy loams covered with grass trees, heath, and brushwood. Sealing had just started here and elsewhere in the strait a few years earlier. Already, though, British officials were concerned about the promiscuous slaughter of adult seals, which was leaving pups to starve to death on the beach by the thousands. If the market price had been high enough, it would have been worth it to kill young seals, since their small patches of fur could be used to make wallets and gloves. But with the China market saturated and the price of fur dropping, profit margins weren’t enough to pay for the time and effort it took to skin small seals (it was easier to just cut larger pelts into smaller pieces).
⁶

Delano’s most immediate problem at Cape Barren was not too few seals but too many sealers. Some of them were fugitives from mainland Australia, working for Port Jackson and Sydney merchants. Others were escapees from the convict colony on the Derwent River, where the British had started sending its “worst class” of criminals. “Ill-behaved, useless, and lazy,” many of these “abandoned hardened wretches” fled as soon as they arrived, stealing boats, muskets, gunpowder, and food and escaping into the dark of Bass Strait. They hoped to make it to New Zealand or Timor though most got only as far as Cape Barren, swelling the “number of lawless runaways who for so long a time infested” the island. These “sea-rats” joined already established merchant-contracted seal gangs or worked as alone men, living in wretched hovels and kidnapping indigenous women from Tasmania to keep as slave wives. They lit false guide fires to lure ships into shoals and then pillaged them when they wrecked.
⁷

Amasa said later that he had tried to avoid “open rupture” with the other sealers. It was hard, though, to withstand so many “insults from such villains.” His boats were stolen and his ships cut adrift. Many of his men couldn’t take the harassment. They deserted, either joining rival seal gangs or enlisting in the military service of “His Britannick Majesty.” With his crew dwindling in numbers, Delano was forced to replenish its ranks with escaped convicts.
⁸

Around mid-October, occasional hit-and-run skirmishes erupted into a full-on battle between Amasa’s away team and a sealing gang led by James Murrell, who worked for the Sydney merchant house of Kable and Underwood. After Murrell and his crew broke up a camp set up by Delano, Delano’s sailors retaliated. They pulled Murrell and a few of his men out of their cabins by their hair, dragging them over rocks and nettles to the beach, stripped them naked, tied them to trees, and flogged them till they bled. Murrell got loose and ran into the sea. He was chased down by a “Sandwich Island savage”—one of the Hawaiians in Delano’s crew—and given “several violent blows with large stones.” Murrell raised his arm in defense and was struck lengthwise between his wrist and elbow “so heavy as to cause the flesh to burst open.” He was finally dragged out of the surf half dead, abandoned on the beach in the “most excruciating pains.”

The
Perseverance
and
Pilgrim
fled New South Wales the next day. The ships carried hardly any skins but left with at least seventeen English, Welsh, and Irish deserters or escaped convicts, along with canvas, tackle, and rigging pilfered from Murrell’s sealing camp.
⁹

*   *   *

The Delano brothers headed east to the more familiar hunting grounds off Chile, calling on one island after another yet still finding no seals. Realizing the voyage was a bust, their men began to jump ship, a few at each anchorage. The two brothers, deciding that if they split up they could cover more territory and perhaps find a full hunting ground, made a plan to rendezvous at an island called Santa María and went their separate ways. Samuel headed to the islands of San Ambrosio and San Félix and Amasa went north, to Juan Fernández, located between Más Afuera and the mainland.

The
Perseverance
dropped anchor about six miles off the island’s northwest shore. Most of the men Delano could rely on had been left elsewhere to try to find seals, leaving him feeling isolated. Captain of his ship, he felt like its prisoner. His brothers were far away and he had no one on board he had confidence in to leave in command. Nor did he trust any of his ship’s hands, especially the Tasmanian convicts, to take out the whaleboat on their own. He feared that if they made it to the island they wouldn’t come back or, if they met up with other away men, they might ally with them against him. Delano, despite his misgivings about leaving the ship, had no choice but to lead the away team himself.

High breakers blocked his landing and his boat drifted east with the wind. The weather was overcast, and before long Delano noticed that his ship was receding away from the island, apparently having hauled anchor. It was disappearing into the west and soon looked as if it were only “as big as a man’s thumb.” Delano’s men pulled hard on the oars but couldn’t make headway. They came on a calmer bay with a small pier. The island’s governor, who was there on the dock as if waiting for them, refused to let them come ashore. Delano begged to be allowed to stay the night. The governor, under orders from Lima not to let foreigners on the island, wouldn’t relent. Delano had no choice but to head back out past the surf, where the wind and sea had grown even rougher.
¹⁰

Waves began to break over the boat. The men rowed and bailed until ten at night and still couldn’t find the
Perseverance
. Delano fired his musket, hoping his ship would see the flair, but the thick air muted the light. “There was such a cross sea” that with each pull of the oars water filled “half way up to the boat’s thwarts.” Yet they couldn’t wait out the storm by riding the waves without some kind of ballast. Every lift up by a crest of a wave was followed by a wet dive down into the trough of its swell. Delano had his men lash their oars together to make two spans, one on either side of the boat, each weighted down with stones to improvise a catamaran that helped steady the wave-tossed vessel.

The away team stayed like that through the night, “suffering hardships in the extreme.” Amasa had almost drowned once already at Cape Barren. He, his brother William, and four other sailors were bringing barrels of fish to the shore in a small boat to smoke. But as they pulled toward land, they got caught in a horse market. Two colliding tides forced the waves to rise in a heap: their boat went up and then down and then filled with water and sank, leaving Amasa and the others “floating on the surface.” Amasa took hold of a piece of wood to keep afloat. When he looked up, he saw one of his men, a Swede named John Fostram, swimming toward him. Panicked that Fostram would pull him under, Delano began to kick furiously to get away. He looked back to see Fostram drown. “I remember but few incidents in the course of my life,” Delano later wrote, “that were more gratifying to me than that of Fostram’s sinking.” Then he saw that another sailor was also trying to reach him. He too went under. “I never until then had experienced any satisfaction at seeing a man die, but so great is the regard we have for ourselves when in danger, that we would sooner see the whole human race perish than die ourselves.” Eventually the sea calmed and Amasa, along with William and two other men, was rescued.
¹¹

This time, though, Amasa couldn’t count on his brothers. Samuel was far to the south looking for seals and William was on a nearby island. He began to fear that the
Perseverance
had intentionally abandoned him. Cliques had formed on the ship, and on the sail from New South Wales to South America their leaders were constantly testing his authority. Absent the rousing power of an outside enemy to fight, like Murrell, and no seals to kill, and therefore no money to be made, some of his men had turned against him. Sailors who had been with the brothers since leaving Boston a year earlier had begun to complain that their “share” of the voyage was so far pitifully small. Those who joined along the way, especially the escaped convicts, felt little loyalty to the Delanos. Fights broke out among the crew. Acts of petty insubordination grew in frequency. His men ignored his orders. Worse, they started to mock him. “My crew were refractory, the convicts were ever unfaithful.”

He began to rely on his chief officer, Rufus Low, to administer more frequent and heavier punishments. These retaliations worsened the situation, quickening the cycle between transgression and reprimand. Soon, a desperate Delano was meting out floggings and withholding food for only “minor offences.”
*
In turn, deckhands began to see Delano’s command as increasingly capricious. “Nothing pleases him,” one sailor later testified.
¹²

Floating in the rough sea on his rigged catamaran, Delano thought that he had lost his ship and that his crew had cast him away to die. He was thinly dressed, only in Nanking pantaloons, which were “very tight,” and a waistcoat and sleeved jacket of thin white cotton cloth. They were tight, too. Amasa laid down in the bottom of the boat and passed the night soaking wet, “with the water washing over me all the time.” The sea continued rough through the morning. By ten the storm had finally broken, allowing the boat’s men to dismantle the drag and begin again to row. Finally, after another five hours, they came upon the
Perseverance
. A rope and pulley had to be used to haul Delano onto his ship, since he was temporarily paralyzed from spending the cold night bound in waterlogged cotton. He asked the sailor he left in charge why he hadn’t kept track of the boat and was given only a vague answer. The storm prevented the men from doing so, he told Delano, and the strong wind made them drop their masts.