Seafaring Sunday: Mary Brewster

The boats from the different ships have all be off whaling. Two of the ships got one each. We man 4 boats which takes all on board save brother James who is both cooper and carpenter, the cook and Steward and cabin boy. Husband and self are quite alone and we enjoy it much and anticipate much pleasure whilst the fish are catching. The boats start before light so to be up there where the whales are early enough to get fast before they leave in the morning. They take their dinner with them and stop till towards night before they return. These whales frequent this bay once a year to calve.

~ from the diary of Mary Brewster, wife of the captain of the whaleship Tiger at Magdalena Bay, Baja California, December 31, 1846

Header: Daguerreotype of Mary Brewster via the Mystic Seaport Historical Society

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Make

According to Admiral Smyth in The Sailor's Word Book, you can't get much more seaworthy in the word department than make. The simple definition of "to make", as given by the Admiral, says it all:

Is variously applied in sea-language.

And even that is an understatement. Ships, for instance, can make headway - advance through the water - make lee-way - drift to leeward according to their course - make stern way - retreat - make sail - increase the number of sails for increased speed - and so on.

A ship in dirty weather, as she rocks and pitches and particularly if she leaks, is said to be making bad weather (as if she were responsible for what she faces). A leaky ship is also said to make water, as apposed to take on water which is done when replenishing casks of the fresh variety. A slender thread separates the two terms, but an author using one for the other can be the death knell of otherwise impressive nautical fiction.

Make comes in the form of orders. Make ready! Prepare for what is about to occur. Make a lane, there! A bosun's order indicating that, as the Admiral defines it:

... [the crew at muster] should separate, to facilitate the approach of any one whose name is called.

And the now familiar "Make it so" of "Star Trek" fame which, unfortunately, was too often used incorrectly by Captain Picard. The order was given specifically to confirm the time given to a commanding officer by the officer of the watch, be it sunset, sunrise or the all important noon when the ship's day officially began.

Make fast meant to fasten something and was generally used for securing rope or cable.

Makes was used when referring to something coming in: the tide makes, the ship makes, the officer makes, etc.

A making iron is a caulking tool for finishing a seam of caulk. Making off was a whaling term for cutting up the blubber of the animal so that it would fit down into the ship's hold.

To make the land is to finally catch sight of it; that "Land, ho!" moment so popular in movies. A ship can make free with the land as well, which indicates coming very close to the shore - at times a little too close. Needless to say, this terminology carried over to activities in port, where a sailor - like the men-of-war's men in the above illustration - could make free with the ladies.

Happy Saturday, Brethren; may Saint Olga, in her goodness, intercede for you when your ship makes weather.

Header: "Men of War bound for the Port of Pleasure" late 18th century illustration via Wikimedia

Lady Pirates: Colonel Tangier's Lady

A lot is going on, as usual, including a very sick kiddo at my house. But rather than completely forgo a post, here is one from the archives: the fascinating story of Martha Tunstall Smith and her "whaling design". I am indebted to Joan Druett and her incomparable book on women at sea She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea as primary research material.

Almost as soon as the Coastal areas of New England were developed by European settlers, and certainly prior to that by Native people, whales were big business. They were even bigger business for smugglers. By as early as 1650, enterprising men and some intrepid women were involved in what they knew as a "whaling design". Essentially, they negotiated with the local Montauk, who regularly harvested whale carcasses from local beaches, to share the bounty of the sea. The Europeans would be given the blubber to boil down for salable oil in return for assistance with butchering the enormous bodies. This went on for about fifty years with one Reverend James Southampton being among the most prominent "designers."

By the early 1660s, others had gotten in on the action and the market was so good that actual whaling expeditions needed to be mounted. Again the Native people, both men and women, were recruited to put out to sea in cedar boats provided by their European employers. They were also given iron harpoons and their skill brought in even more valuable whale oil. To such a degree, in fact, that the heads of these new whaling conglomerates decided they were tired of paying English taxes on their goods before they were shipped back to England. As direct trade with any other European country was banned by the English crown, the whalers took to the ancient art of smuggling.

Enter Colonel William Smith who would become known locally, and possibly derisively, as Tangier. Smith seems to have been an adventurer who fought Barbary pirates at one point; thus his nickname. He told tales, probably very tall, of being made English Governor of Tangiers. The truth is that he had most likely been nothing more than a prisoner of that state, but how would the colonial bumpkins be able to fact-check his story?

The Colonel came to New York on the coat tails of another soldier, Thomas Dongan, who was made Governor in 1682. Dongan granted Smith extensive land which the Colonel parlayed into a massive estate stretching from the current site of JFK International Airport to Little Neck Bay. He called his holding St. George's Manor and, to top off his good fortune, he married a local woman who was already involved in the profitable whaling consortium.

Martha Tunstall was probably a native of New York. The year of her birth and the circumstanced of her youth are lost to us, but some interesting facts survive. Her family name is one of those listed in a complaint made by the afore mentioned Reverend Southampton about the poaching not of whales bu of "ye Indians" who were hunting those whales. Evidently the Tunstall family, or one or more of its members, was working on a "whaling design" of their own and, needing good help, they stole employees from the good Reverend.

By the time Martha married Smith some time prior to 1679, she was a well known and sought after "wise woman" in the greater New York area. Some of her recipes, written in a journal marked Receipts, have survived. They cover diverse ailments from simple blood blisters (apply the fat of a lamb and wrap in gauze) to more troublesome pains like broken bones, deafness and this concoction to bring down a fever:

Dry and pulverize the lungs and liver of a frog. Mix the powder in rum and drink this down. If the fever does not subside repeat a second and third time.

Martha may have been a midwife as well as she notes the names of mothers and children with dates and times in her book of "receipts". She herself was giving birth to children almost immediately after her marriage to the Colonel, but this did not stop her work in the whale oil trade or on her estate. Smith's vast holdings allowed him to live like a virtual Lord and it seems that his wife, and possibly her family, no longer had to recruit Natives from other whalers. Since their estate had, at least in part, been purchased from local tribes, there were a number of able bodied men prepared to go about the mistress' business. The oil was boiled down, barreled and shipped via smuggling vessels to the West Indies where it was traded not only for coin but for rum, cocoa, sugar and tropical fruit.

The bottom fell out of the Smith's boat so to say when Governor Dongan was replaced by Sir Edmund Andros. The new Governor moved his capitol to Boston and put New York colony under the charge of Lieutenant Governor Nicholson. He was an extremely unpopular leader, imposing more taxes and harsh penalties for non-payment, particularly on the middle class. In 1689, when James II was ousted by his daughter and son-in-law back in England, local New Yorkers staged a coup. They appointed Captain James Leiser of Fort James as their leader and marched against the owners of large estates. This included St. George's Manor.

Nicholson turned to these landowners for help and some of them responded. The result was a lot of burning and ransacking that accomplished very little. Smith had the good sense to stay out of it, sending word to the Lieutenant Governor that he could not help in any way. Nicholson finally threw up his hands and returned to England. Uprisings of one sort or another continued, however, until the new Governor - the aptly named Henry Sloughter - arrived and put things in order with brutal efficiency. Leiser and many of his associates were summarily hanged. 

Meanwhile, the landowners had suffered losses in revenue and property. In contrast to her neighbors, Martha Tunstall Smith seems to have been able to keep her family afloat without much trouble. By now her sons, how many we do not know, were old enough to help in her "whaling design" and smuggling business. Despite the death of Colonel Smith in late 1691 or early 1692, Martha continued to record profits in the vicinity of 300 pounds per year as late as 1707.

This is the last year we have word of Martha and her operation, interestingly in the form of a notation in a tax collector's ledger. The entry lists her having paid "... Nathan Simon ye sum of fifteen pounds, fifteen shillings for act of Madam Martha Smith, it being ye 20th part of all..." What became of Martha, her business and her boys is a question for further research. What we know of Martha Tunstall Smith and her hard headed Yankee work ethic is, at the very least, remarkable.

Header: Henrietta de Chastaigner by Henrietta Johnson via 17th Century American Women

History: Aboard USS Essex

May 28, 1813: At the height of the War of 1812, Captain David Porter aboard USS Essex of thirty-six guns, takes five British whalers in the South Pacific. Here is an excerpt from Porter’s report to the Naval Board of around the same time:


I have completely broken up the British navigation in the Pacific; the vessels which had not been captured by me were laid up, and dared not venture out… They have furnished me amply with sails, cordage, cables anchors, provisions, medicines, and stores of every description; and the slop-shops on board them have furnished clothing fore the seamen. We have in fact lived on the enemy since I have been in that sea, every prize having proved a well-found store-ship for me.

Take a moment, you among the U.S. Brethren, to remember the heroic spirits of our service men and women of all eras on this Memorial Day.

Header: USS Essex via Age of Sail (see sidebar)

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Point

The word point at sea often refers to guns, both great and small; or at least it did when ships were made of wood and men made of iron (as was the case in the era of the gorgeous painting of USS Constitution with her studding sails set above). But there were other points to be made upon wave, and we won’t skimp on any of them today.


A point of land is similar in nature to a head. It is an outcropping that reaches into the sea, projecting out and making a handing place for lighthouses and customs ports.

Point brass or point iron is a shipbuilding term referring to a particular type of plumb bob. A pointer is the arrow or indicator of an instrument, as in the pointer of a compass. Pointers, on the other hand, are props that shored up the hulls of whaling ships to help them through icy and iceberg-laden waters. This was also the term for braces used to support the bilge of any wooden ship; they were placed on the diagonal across the hold to prevent the ship’s timbers from “loose-working”: coming apart due to the heave and swell of the water on which she rode.

Pointing refers to rope and is the process by which the ends of it are tapered by hand to make them easy to fit through holes, such as the eyes of a sail. These pointings were sometimes tarred, making them similar to the end of a modern shoelace. The eye holes were thus referred to as points.

The details of a seaman’s – and particularly an officer’s – duty were known as points of service. As Admiral Smyth admonishes in The Sailor’s Word Book, these “ought to be executed with zeal and alacrity.”

As to the guns, a pointer-board was a piece of wood used to point a ship’s guns. To point a gun was, of course, to train it on a target.

Point blank and point blank range come to the English idiom not through seafaring but archery. Prior to the introduction of gunpowder into Europe, archers were highly prized in warfare both on land and sea. Practice of archery was an all-important pastime for such men (and women, as it turns out). The pre-Medieval term for what we might imagine as a bull’s eye on the practice-butt was a “blank”. Thus we come to point blank; not close or straight on but a direct hit of the arrow onto the blank.

Point blank range for the great guns aboard ship during the Age of Sail was considered between 300 and 400 yards, with some variation for the size of the bore. This was how far the ball – there is no accurate measurement for shot, chain, etc. – could fly before succumbing to gravity and beginning to arc toward the ground or water. Once guns were rifled, the use of the term fell out of favor other then to mean quite literally pressing the gun to an object and firing.

Finally, in the language of the old Royal Navy man, a point-beacher was – to use the delicate turn of phrase mastered by Admiral S – “a low woman of Portsmouth.” The engravings of Rowlandson easily come to mind.

Happy Saturday, Brethren; more tomorrow for Seafaring Sunday.

Header: Catching a Zephyr: USS Constitution off Gibraltar, 1804 by masterful marine artist Patrick O’Brien (these O’Brian/O’Brien guys really know their nautical stuff!)

Women at Sea: More From the Whaling Wife

We've had a look at the shipboard diary of Mary Brewster before. Mary sailed aboard her husband’s whaling vessel, Tiger, from 1845 to 1851 and left a detailed journal cataloguing her adventures. Today’s entries find Mary and the Tiger off the coast of what will become the state of Alaska and indeed very far from their home in New England.


Friday, July 3, 1846: Light winds and weather more pleasant though cloudy and bad heavy swell. One whale sighted, boats have not lowered it being too rough. My employment has been of various kinds, cooking, making poultices for some hands, and numerous small jobs. No chance for idleness here nor lonesome feelings, plenty noise and work. Day closes with the sea more regular and cloudy.

Saturday, July 4, 1846: Beautiful and pleasant all day, warm enough without fire. Saw whales and chased hoping to get one as it would serve our purpose for a celebration but none could be got. At 6 PM we made the land called Roca Pamlonia 40 miles distant. Hope to go nearer, bore by compass N by E. How pleasant to the eye is the sight of land though distant. I often feel that if I can once more see my native land and walk thereon I shall prize it more than I ever did before.

Roca Pamlonia is a stretch of rock some sixty plus miles from the mouth of Prince William Sound near Valdez, Alaska. It is a treacherous area that has been known to chew ships up in bad weather. But Mary’s longing for land speaks to the trouble of “sloth” – depression – that she fought with during her years at sea.

Header: Daguerreotype of Mary Brewster via the Mystic Seaport Historical Society

Women at Sea: Whaling Wife

Plundering the sea of its bounty is something humans have always been good at, and one of the high – or low depending on your perspective – points of such enterprise was the British and American whaling fleets of the 19th century. In a factory-like process that was both arduous and deadly, men harvested whales in the Great South Sea for oil and baleen. Occasionally, women were aboard these ships to. Sometimes they were disguised as men, like Georgiana Leonard aka George Weldon. Other times they were on board as the “decent” wives of officers, most usually captains.


Such was the case with Mary Brewster, who sailed aboard her husband’s whaling vessel Tiger and kept a journal of her adventures between 1845 and 1851. Her voice is resonant even these many years later as she speaks, in the most ladylike manner, of weather, food and her worries for her husband, his ship and the crew. Today, an excerpt from the page of Mrs. Brewster’s journal dated January 22, 1846:

Great excitement on board during the forenoon. Some one raised a sunfish. It being calm a boat was lowered to strike it. The succeeded in killing and after much labor got it to the ship. The shape is more round than other ways which makes hard towing, going round more than advancing. The boat got alongside with it and it being good size all hands was called to help get it over the ship sides. Such a time and noise. Had it been a whale they could not have appeared more elated. It was not all taken. Part of it was cut off and threw overboard. The part which came in I saw and it looked very little like a fish. We had some of it cooked for supper. I took a piece as I wish to know how good it was in taste. It resembled our lobsters. The meat is very white but coarse. Had I never seen the fish perhaps it would have tasted better, but seeing it was sufficient to produce contrary feelings. The oil of the liver is said to be good for Rhumatism.

The sunfish in question was probably of the type known as mola mola or ocean sunfish. It is, as you can see here, not the most attractive creature and certainly something Mrs. Brewster had not had prior contact with.

If you are curious about Mary Brewster and her fascinating journals, which we will revisit from time to time, Joan Druett’s book on the subject is available online.

Header: Daguerreotype of Mary Brewster via the Mystic Seaport Historical Society

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Sound

Today's word, as it relates to the sea and seafaring, comes from and Anglo-Saxon root: sund. This, according to Webster’s, is also the root of our word meaning healthy, as in sound mind and body. Apparently the word had two either separate or interchangeable meanings for the Anglo-Saxon. One was, as noted, healthy, and the other was swimming or – more specifically – a place to swim. Perhaps for our far northern ancestors, health and swimming were so closely linked as to be easily identified with one word.


A sound is a body of water with three sides bordered by land and the fourth fed by the sea. Another less frequent definition is a deep bay skirted by reefs or banks. For the most part, a sound will be composed of salt water and have different levels of bottom from shallow to deep. This makes the sounds around any large land mass perfect for taking soundings.

Sounding is the physical process used to determine the depth of the sea at any given point or points. This was done in routinely by use of a lead line which would be dropped overboard to the bottom of the ocean, inlet, sound and so on, if possible. Tallow would be stuck to the lead in order to determine the makeup of the sea floor, this being considered also part of the sounding. Thus these bits of bottom, whether sand, shell, ooze, etc. are sometimes referred to as soundings.

To be in soundings, a ship would be close enough to land that the lead would consistently touch the bottom. As The Sailor’s Word Book notes, deep-sea leads may touch bottom at surprising depth so being in soundings was understood colloquially to refer to sailing in water with a depth of 80 to 100 fathoms or less.

Along those lines, places in the blue ocean where the deep-sea lead could not find the bottom were referred to as soundless. These were places that our ancestors imagined to be “bottomless” as they had no knowledge of the vast canyons that lurked below the hulls of their wooden worlds. Or, for that matter, the creepy creatures that inhabit such eternal darkness; beyond be monsters, indeed.

The sounding line, along with its attached lead (pronounced “led”), is a very ancient tool. The Romans used it before the Empire; the Anglo-Saxons called it a sund-gyrd.

A similar tool, for use exclusively aboard ship, is a sounding rod. This was an iron rod with markings of feet and inches which was let down into the bilge or well of a ship via a groove in the pump. The result was a measurement of standing water in the well, from which a decision could be made about manning the pump.

In whaling, the term sounding was also used to indicate the vertical dive of a whale after it was struck. The assumption was that the whale would strike bottom – probably rarely the case in fact – and that such a dive would let out approximately four coils or 2,000 feet of the whale-line attached to the harpoon.

I hope this Saturday finds you and yours sound, Brethren. Enjoy, and a mug of grog to one and all!

Header: Moonlight by J.M.W. Turner c 1797

History: A Sad Tale And A Happy Find

On February 11th of 1823, six days after legendary pirate Jean Laffite was buried at sea in the Gulf of Honduras, the Nantucket whaler Two Brothers foundered and sank in the infamous French Frigate Shoals off Honolulu, Hawai’i. The story of the whaler, like that of so many other American whalers that set out for the Pacific and were never seen again, is a familiar one. In fact the Shoals are a veritable graveyard of ships which, even to this day, are difficult to navigate. Until recently, however, the exact location of the ship, who’s Captain makes the story of particular interest, was unknown.

George Pollard Jr. was originally given command of a whaling ship at the decidedly young age of 28. The ship, named Essex, set out from Nantucket and reached the South Pacific without incident. Pollard and his crew were relatively successful at the mind-numbingly arduous and dangerous work of whaling until 1820. That summer Essex was literally attacked by a whale, resulting in her loss. The horrific details of the incident – which include cannibalism by the survivors who spent weeks in an open boat – are best saved for Horror On the High Seas week. It is enough to say that Captain Pollard was among those who survived to be rescued by another American whaler, Two Brothers.

Pollard returned to Nantucket where, after what seems like only a short time to recuperate from such a harrowing experience, he took command of the ship that saved him in the great South Sea. Pollard was joined in this cruise by some of his former men and they set out for the Japan ground which lay roughly between the Hawaiian Islands and Japan. Though Pollard was known as a stout commander with a keen sense of where to find the “fish”, his luck seems to have been atrocious. He lost his second ship not three years after losing his first. The circumstances so shocked Pollard that one of his mates later recalled his captain standing stock still on deck when Two Brothers began to sink. He was dragged off to a boat before he could go down with his ship.

Almost serendipitously, an unplanned dive brought a group of marine archeologists from the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries to a sandbar in the Shoals known as Shark Island. There, about 15 feet deep, they found a large anchor. A little more investigating revealed that the find was from the 1820s and probably from an American whaling ship. On February 11th of this year the team announced that they had what was left of Pollard’s ill-fated command.

Artifacts including the anchor, iron trypots used for boiling whale blubber into precious oil, ceramic fragments, and blubber hooks. Because the Shoals are part of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, the larger items cannot be removed from the water. According to this article from the NYT, Monument officials are already working with the Nantucket Historical Association to see to it that smaller artifacts will become part of a permanent whaling exhibit in Hawai’i.

Even without the dramatic back story, Two Brothers is a remarkable find. As the article notes, this may be the first Nantucket whaler discovered in situ. The vessels frequently foundered far from shore and in deep seas where whales were plentiful. The artifacts found at French Frigate Shoals will doubtless shed a lot of light on a chapter in seafaring history that was brutal for all involved: the sailors, their families, their ships, and the whales.

Header: A modern view of French Frigate Shoals via their website