Sep 30, 2010 - Sale 2223

Sale 2223 - Lot 219

Price Realized: $ 1,680
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
WHALING NARRATIVE WITH A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF EASTER ISLAND (WHALING.) [Austin, Charles?] A Trip to South America. 20 manuscript pages, each 8 x 5 inches, on 8 loose sheets; wear and foxing on first leaf slightly affecting text. Np, circa 1875?
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A young man wrote this lively reminiscence shortly after returning from a whaling voyage, which includes stories of port life, bad food, Cape Horn, a visit to Easter Island, and even a few whales. The story begins in the fall of 1869, with the author working as an upholsterer and living in a rooming house in Cambridgeport, MA. He decides to go to sea--"I then did not care much about how or where I went." He is soon recruited as a green hand for the whaling bark Edward Everett, staying for a week at the New Bedford Mariners' Home while awaiting departure. He despaired of the hard work, danger, and cuisine: "For dinner we had bean soup twice a week (the beans were so far apart that you would have to swim in for them)" (page 8). He did sometimes enjoy the camaraderie: "We had a fiddle, an accordion, tamborine, harmonica & the bones or to furnish us with a little music to make us lively" (13-14).
Typical for a New Bedford whaler, several of the sailors were Cape Verdeans of African descent. The memoir tells a haunting story of a Cape Verdean ("colored Portugee") boatsteerer who loses a whale with a poorly placed harpoon and then nearly drowns, allowing the whale to escape while he is rescued: "The Captain in his madness swore at the men in saveing him & called him a jonah & said he ought to be in the whales belly. As we all got back aboard the bark again we were makeing comments on the poor fellow, he was hissed from all quarters, officers & sailors. He was put among the sailors & the best sailor took his place." (16)
The narrative ends abruptly in mid-page with a 27 February 1870 visit to Easter Island, called here Saint Carlos. The island was then under the despotic rule of Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier, and the great majority of the local Rapanui people had either died of smallpox, been killed, or been sent off as slaves over the past ten years, with the small band of survivors converted to Catholicism and raising sheep for Dutrou-Bornier. The author, a young man on his first shore leave who had probably never met anyone outside of his native Massachusetts, had a rosy view of this apocalyptic scene: "As we went ashore the natives looked at us with amazement wondering who we might be for they don't very often see foreigners. Soon we got a little acquainted with them, then we began to have a good time. They make a real holler day of a Sunday & drink vino, that is wine . . . The natives here are Spaniards & they are very coarse featured looking with long black hair hanging down in two braids. . . . It was a curiossity to me to compare the difference in the living of the S. Americans Spaniards & the N. American Yankees. They in not knowing what better is, are highly contended" (19-20).