Around the World on a Whaler: The Sea Life of Captain Richard Blackmer Holbrook Sr.

Her father’s sea years take up one paragraph of her typescript, and a second for the South Seas (scan 7):

At thirteen he left home to follow the sea, and made two long voyages where he met many adventures; he visited China almost before white foreigners were allowed to enter that country; He rounded Cape of Good Hope, and for three months in great storms rounded Cape Horn; in a barnacle-laden ship off Kamchata he and the crew were reduced to starvation, some perishing. They made Honolulu and were hospitably received and cared for. My father and the Captain were entertained by the King and Queen. I recall that he spoke highly of Queen Emma.

In the South Sea Islands his ship was boarded by cannibles, and being first mate, he stood at the wheel while the crew went below to arm. The savages examined him carefully, and nodded and smacked their lips in approval – he was young and tender and not befouled by tobacco. It must have been a harrowing experience and whatever his apprehensions may have been, I know that he did not show fear. Fortunately for him and for us they were driven off.

Further on she adds that he “followed the sea for fifteen years” and gave up “the captaincy of a large ship” for the gold rush (scan 13). She heard these stories as a child on Whidbey Island, decades after the voyages, from a father who liked to talk. Most of them can now be placed in the records: the two long voyages, round both capes; China; the starving, barnacled ship; the islands where the king kept his court. The royal welcome and the boarding in the South Seas are the family’s own, and are told here as the family told them.

He was born on 7 Aug 1821 at Manomet, the village on the shore south of Plymouth, in a house his daughter believed was built in 1690, “standing on land which has been in the family since the first land grants” (scan 7). The sea was the family’s living and its grief. His father, Capt. Gideon Holbrook, was a Plymouth shipmaster of fifty-six, master in his youth of the schooner Eagle and the brigantine William; his mother, Nancy Ellis, was a mariner’s widow. Her first husband, Richard Blackmer, mariner, had died young and insolvent, and she named this son for him.

There were nine children of the two marriages living when Gideon made his will in June 1841, five of them Nancy’s: Gideon, Richard, Elisha, Mary and Eliphalet. “At thirteen he left home to follow the sea,” Mollie wrote, and in a seafaring town in 1834 that was not unusual: a boy shipped as cook or cabin boy in a fishing schooner or coaster and learned the ropes on the way. Where Richard served his first years the records don’t say, but by nineteen he was rated an ordinary seaman, the step between the green hand and the able seaman, and that April he went to New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world, and signed on for the Pacific.

He did not see his father again. Capt. Gideon made his will in June 1841, two months after the Hydaspe sailed, “to enable my wife Nancy Holbrook to bring up those of my children who may be under the age of twenty one years,” naming “Richard B.” among the nine, and he died at Manomet on 23 Jan 1842, when the ship was crossing from Australia to the Carolines (Will of Gideon Holbrook of Plymouth, gentleman). The news, if it reached the ship at all, came by a letter months old. Richard came home in April 1845 to a house without him.

Five months at home was enough, or all the money would stretch to. On 12 Sept 1845 he signed again, in the Globe, a ship of 479 tons, twenty-one years old and newly bought from Philadelphia, John C. Daggett master. The crew list is the first record that describes him: “Richard B. Holbrooks,” of Plymouth, 24, light-complexioned, with brown hair (Crew list of the ship Globe of New Bedford, 1845, with her voyage of 1845-1850). She sailed the next day for the right-whale grounds of the North Pacific, which the whalemen called the Northwest Coast and which by then ran from the Gulf of Alaska to Kamchatka, where the first bowheads had been taken in 1843 (Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1878)).

While they were in the north the world changed. Gold was found in California in January 1848, and by the summer the news had reached the islands. Whalemen deserted by the hundred. “Immediately after the discovery of the gold mines in California,” Starbuck wrote, “desertions from the ships were numerous and often causeless, generally in such numbers as to seriously cripple the efficiency of the ship.” By the end of 1849 the Globe, full at last, lay at Lahaina with “but 8 men before the mast” left to sail her home. Richard, nine years a whaleman, was one of them.

The captain went ashore and brought off the consul. The consul had the men cast loose and the sails loosed, and told the crew that Capt. Daggett could not ship any more men at Lahaina “for the very obvious reason that there was no men there”: the whalemen of the Pacific were deserting by hundreds for the gold fields of California. They got under way, a short-handed ship with a crew that had stood up to its captain, and seven months of the sea before them.

The captain never forgave it. “Damn ’em they wanted to see the Consul,” he said the next day, “and they shall have no afternoon watch below.” He kept a French boy who misheard him at the wheel for four hours; he told John Pierce he would “cut your back-bone out in that main rigging”; he took Tripp by the ear at the wheel and swore he would put him “ashore on some rock.” Every quarrel, the journal says, ended the same way: “you wanted to see the consul God-damn you.” On 6 February the captain came on the cooper, Mr Johnson, and Holbrooks talking quietly by the pumps; they separated, and Daggett shook his fist in Johnson’s face: “don’t let me catch at that again.” Three days later he forbade his officers to speak with the part of the crew he called mutineers. In March, afraid of what the men might say against him at New Bedford, he threatened to “prosecute the whole ships company for Mutiny on the high seas.” Nobody mutinied. They kept the ship, and they kept the journal.

The Globe went south slowly. “The ship is so deep and her bottom so bad that we get along very slow,” the journal says on 6 February: four years and more at sea had grown a beard of weed and barnacles on her hull. They crossed the line, beat up to Rarotonga, where islanders came off with fruit and stayed aboard all night and the boats brought off wood, and turned south-east for the Horn. They had left Maui with twenty-five barrels of meat, “not meat enough, for 3 meals a day,” and by late March “scarcely enough for two meals.” On a Sunday in April they killed the last two pigs and had a sea pie, “which went very well after having on salt junk so long” (Journal kept on board the ship Globe of New Bedford, on her passage from the Sandwich Islands to the United States, 1850).

That same Sunday, 7 April, the writer set down what the whole forecastle was thinking: “All hands got the California fever we hear of nothing but topsail schooners and jackass brigs with loads of lumber to match.” They had sailed in 1845; since then, as he wrote in January, there had been “a war begun and finished a large extent of territory acquired and every body making their everlasting fortunes in California.” Ships they spoke off the Horn were bound there, one 106 days out of Boston.

In the cold the captain opened the slop chest, “mittens, Comforters and trowsers,” and the men, “without a shift of clothes,” began to fall sick, three below by the end of April. On the 28th, in a north-west gale, they hove to, “there not being room for the old veteran to go between Cape Horn and the South Pole.” Cape Horn was in sight on the 29th. Then, with the Horn behind them and the Falklands ahead, Daggett went whaling again with half a crew, heaving to at night as on the whaling grounds. “O: when will this voyage have an end,” the writer wrote on 2 May, “it seems as if we were doomed to wear out an existance in this ship to atone for some horrible Sin.” The meat was “very short and very bad so that it scents the whole forecastle,” and “starvation again stares us in the face.” Men had died on this voyage, and the captain still called a sick man a shirker: “If any man is unwell Capt Daggett says he is soldiering untill he dies and then poor fellow nobody thought he was so bad which has been the case more than once this voyage.”

He had caught the fever with the rest of the forecastle, and he did not wait. “With other Plymouth and Plympton boys,” his daughter wrote, he bought an interest in a sailing vessel, “in which they came around ‘The’ Horn in a rough and perilous voyage of months” (scan 13). It was his second rounding of the Horn in a year, and the hard way, westward against the gales; it may be the passage the family remembered as three months “in great storms.” He landed at San Francisco on 4 Mar 1851 ("Pioneers Gone," The Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

He did not go to the mines. A seaman knew what the city needed, and “instead of mining he wisely bought a sloop and traded for produce up and down the California Coast to help feed the hordes that were crowding into San Francisco and the mines.” For the first time he was master of his own vessel. Thirty miles out from the Golden Gate, on the Farallon Islands, the murres nested on the rocks by the hundred thousand, and in a city short of hens their eggs were a prize: “he gathered quantities of gulls eggs for which there was a ready market” (scan 7). He saved a thousand dollars.

Then typhoid took him. He lay unconscious for weeks, and when he came to himself, his “hard-earned savings of $1000” were gone, “what was not stolen was paid out in doctor-bills,” and his trunk and clothes had been stolen too. The doctor told him to go north for his health, “so he shipped on a schooner and sailed to Puget Sound” (scan 14). He was thirty, and he had to begin again with nothing.

“We only number six families and about 15 children at present,” Rebecca Ebey wrote in February 1853. “There are 18 bachelors and youths residing on the island, but we want more families, so we can have schools and churches.” He was one of the bachelors. “Coveland is beginning to improve. Vessels are beginning to load in the Cove with Spiles and square timber.” The first settler, Isaac Ebey, had taken his claim on the prairie by the west shore in October 1850, and he and his wife Rebecca kept a diary in which Richard comes and goes as a neighbour. On 3 June 1852, with the onions being weeded and a schooner dropping anchor at Port Townsend, “Mr Howe and Holbrooks called in.” In August, with Ebey away at the legislature, “Samuel Crockett, Mr. Smith Mr. Howe and Mr. Holbrook were all here in the forenoon. All very anxious to hear the news from Mr. Ebey.” In February 1853 Howe and Holbrook walked over to see “if the indians had brought over the Island mail from Port Townsend but they had not” ("Diary of Colonel and Mrs. I. N. Ebey," ed. Victor J. Farrar, Washington Historical Quarterly 7-8). Letters came by canoe, when they came at all. That winter the territory made Island County, with Coveland its seat.

By the next winter a younger brother had come out to him, and on 26 Jan 1854 he wrote home to their mother at Manomet (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)):

On the morning of 27 May he and Hathaway made their houses fast and went “up the Gulf of Georgia a short distance upon a fishing cruise, expecting to be at home again that same evening, but it came on to blow so hard” that they could not get back for two days. They came home to find “that both of our homes had been broken into and that we were robbed of pretty near the entire contents of both houses,” the thieves’ tracks “clearly discernible all about the premises.” Richard wrote to the acting governor from Bellingham Bay on 1 June: “On the morning of May 28, while from home, my house was broken open and robbed, by a party of Indians, of my goods, tools, provisions, and clothing.” The local justice added that “through the present disaster he will be deprived of this season’s work.” He put the loss at $1,378.20. He did not go after the Indians to get it back, and swore so: he filed his account with the governor and trusted that “in the course of time he would be ultimately indemnified.” Thirty years later the claim reached Congress, with the sworn word of the men who had known him longest, and it was never paid. This is the family’s trading post that “was burned in an Indian war.” After it he farmed at Penn Cove for the rest of his life.

It was a small world and, by the settlers’ own memory, a warm one. Food was dear in 1852-53, flour forty dollars a barrel when it could be had at all, and the island lived on venison, salmon and potatoes. Families jogged six or seven miles in a farm wagon to spend a Sunday with a neighbour. “Hospitality was unbounded and every man was the close friend and comrade of his neighbor,” Flora Engle remembered. “The afflictions of one household became a common cause of sorrow and the good fortune of a neighbor brought rejoicing to all.” When a candidate came to the island to speak, “everybody attended to hear him exalt his own party and abuse the opposing party” (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)).

In November 1856 the warship Massachusetts fired on a camp of northern people at Port Gamble and killed their chief, and the island knew what would follow. “Much fears are entertained by us,” the settlers petitioned in December, “that they will seek revenge for their loss and defeat on the defenseless exposed and frontier settlement of this Island.” The commander at Fort Steilacoom agreed: “Whidbey’s Island is in the most defenseless condition of any settlements on the sound.” In the spring of 1857 the rumours came down the Sound of canoes in numbers, and the Lower Skagit of Penn Cove left their villages for the mainland: “In the spring of 1857 the Penn Cove encampment was abandoned altogether.” Winfield Ebey wrote on 10 May: “Numerous reports are constantly in circulation relative [to] them coming down in numbers. God only knows what is to become of us. I cannot believe we are to be murdered by them but we may” (Douglas Deur, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve: An Ethnohistory of Traditionally Associated Contemporary Populations (National Park Service, 2009)).

They came in August. After the canoes had camped on the island for days, a settler, asked whether Isaac Ebey, at work in his field, was a chief, answered carelessly that he was “a hyas tyee,” a big chief. About one o’clock in the night of 11 August the Ebeys’ dog woke the house. “We were entirely defenseless, there being no fire-arms of any description in the house,” wrote the U.S. marshal, George Corliss, who was a guest there that night. Ebey went out onto the porch; there were two shots; “Here he was seen by his wife with one hand to his head. She cried out to him to jump into the house through the window, but he did not seem to hear or notice her” ("Letter from Marshal Corliss," Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia), 21 Aug 1857). “What do you want?” he asked, and the answer came in the trade jargon: “We want your head!” He fell dead at his own door. His wife and children escaped through a window into the woods; the neighbours, roused “by means of friendly Indians,” ran for the beach with their guns, too late: “the Indians were aboard their canoes and so far out in the fog we could not see them,” Robert Hill remembered. “None of us at that time knew what had been Colonel Ebey’s fate” (Told by the Pioneers: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Washington, vol. 2 (WPA, 1938)). They had taken his head. The killers were Tlingit, by the word that reached the governor at Victoria from Fort Simpson, avenging the chief killed at Port Gamble.

“Three long weary torturing days,” Winfield Ebey wrote when he could write at all. “My Brother Isaac is dead. My noble high minded brother is no more. Shot and beheaded at his own door by the murderous Northern Indians.” The territory sent a case of muskets and two thousand caps by steamer, soldiers were put into the blockhouse at Point Partridge, and families went back behind the stockades. Some left the island altogether. The settlers’ anger had its own grim sequel: for years afterwards, Hill wrote, “no northern Indian ever set foot on Whidby Island and lived to return to his native northern home.”

Richard Holbrook had known Ebey since his first weeks on the island; the diary has him at the Ebey house waiting on news of him in 1852. He was a bachelor of thirty-six, with a cabin at the head of the cove a short walk from the western shore the northern canoes passed, and three years before he had come home to a ransacked house himself. What he felt the records don’t say. That his neighbours slept behind log walls with their guns, and that he stayed, they do.

By that December Richard had been eight years on the island and had told his neighbours he meant to bring home a wife. At Olympia his neighbour Capt. Thomas Coupe, then the island’s member of the legislature, told him “he knew just the girl for him to marry,” and took him to call. He called again alone the next day, formal and pleasant, and the day after that he proposed and was refused. He proposed again on the Friday and was refused again, and on the Saturday Harriet saddled her mare and rode off to her friend Mrs. Ford’s near Fort Steilacoom. In the morning she looked out of the window and saw Mr. Ford coming up the road, “and with him was the persistent Captain Holbrook!” She gave up. “I like to remember his persistance,” Mollie wrote, “although he was past his first youth and had left a girl behind in Massachusetts that he had intended to return for” (scan 109). The Steilacoom paper printed it three days later: “In Steilacoom, same time [Monday evening, Dec. 24th], by same, at the residence of Mr. G. Ford, Mr. R. B. Holbrook, of Whidby’s Island, to Miss Harriet P. Low, formerly of Maine” ("Married," Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom), 27 Dec 1860). It was Christmas Eve.

They came home from the wedding by sailing vessel and then by canoe, six Indians paddling through a storm, with his big bandana tied over Harriet’s head, and at the head of the cove their neighbour Mrs. Libbey came down to the water calling, “Why, I thought you were an Indian woman, Mr. Holbrooks, I thought you had brought home an Indian woman after all!” That first spring Harriet drove the horses while he broke a fifty-acre field, land “that had never before in all the ages it had lain there, been cultivated nor planted” (Mollie, scan 110). “I imagine they grew very well acquainted and became good chums in those pioneer days,” their daughter wrote. He had to be away at times, and “he thought it wise as a safeguard for mother, to frighten the Indians,” so he told them that his wife “was very strong and vicious, and had killed an Indian up the Sound.” Harriet, who came to love her Indian neighbours, said all her life that her coziest and happiest years were in “the old three-roomed cabin with the big willows in front and the fine view from the little windows” (Told by the Pioneers: Tales of Frontier Life, vol. 1 (Washington Pioneer Project, 1937)).

He was not, his daughter thought, “a very practical farmer, but a contented one, and a great gardener. He loved flowers and planted them through his vegetable gardens.” In 1874 he built the family a frame house of a storey and a half, and it still stands, moved a little east about 1930, at 683 North Power Road (National Park Service, Historic Resources Study, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (2005)). He kept the county’s money, in his years as its treasurer, in “an old blue sugar-bowl up in the china-closet,” and when the territorial treasurership was offered him, Mollie remembered as a child, he refused it, “not wishing such responsibility again.”

He was a son of the sea before he ever shipped. His father was a shipmaster, his mother had been a mariner’s widow before she was a shipmaster’s wife, and he carried the name of her first husband, a mariner who died young. At thirteen he went where Manomet boys went, and for the next sixteen years the sea was the whole of his life.

Nine of those years he spent before the mast in two whalers, and the records let us see what that meant: a bunk in a dark, wet forecastle, salt meat and hard bread, four years between letters, and at the end a share of the oil worth about fifteen cents a day. He came home from the first voyage to find his father dead, and he went out again. Whatever romance there was in it was in the places, Fayal and the Swan River, the Carolines and Tahiti, the fogs off Kamchatka, Lahaina’s anchorage under the mountains, Hong Kong, and those were what he told his children about, with the adventures and the kings and queens. The hunger and the beatings he seems to have kept to himself; Mollie mentions only the starving ship off Kamchatka.

The one moment we can watch him is at Lahaina, on 18 Jan 1850. He was twenty-eight, an old hand with nine years of whaling behind him. The ship was undermanned and the men had the law on their side. When John Tripp told the captain he would see the consul first, Richard gave the same answer and was tied up in the rigging beside him. The journal records no blow and no oath from him; the next record of him is talking quietly at the pumps with the cooper who had hung beside him, until the captain shook his fist and parted them. Forty-four years later his obituary called him “a man of absolute integrity,” and his daughter wrote that he was “a keen reader of character, quick in his likes and dislikes, and not slow in expressing them.” That is the same man.

What a man owns tells something of him, and the list he made of what the Indians took from his store on Lummi Island in 1854 is the nearest thing to his own room we have: trade goods and tools, a rifle and pistols and a sword, a pilot-cloth coat and two frock coats, a silver watch, a ship’s lantern and a barrel of whalemen’s soap, and three books, a geography, Webster’s dictionary and a Bible. He did not go after the thieves; he swore that he “never attempted to coerce or intimidate in any way any tribe or band of Indians,” and waited thirty years on the government instead. When the claim went to Congress the men who had known him longest swore to his character. Henry Roeder of Whatcom had “always known him to be an honorable and much respected citizen.” Samuel Howe, his friend since 1852, had “always known him as an honorable gentleman, therefore incapable of rendering or attempting to collect an unjust account.” Eli Hathaway, his partner, called him “a prudent and careful person, for he was particular in keeping a close watch upon his property generally,” and an honorable gentleman, “and as such I believe he is esteemed by every person who knows him” (Indian depredation claim of Richard B. Holbrook, Lummi Island, Washington Territory, 1854).

The sea taught him to endure, and it taught him to start again. He lost his savings and his health in California at thirty, came north with nothing, and lived in a tent. He was patient, and he was persistent: past his first youth, with a girl left behind in Massachusetts he had meant to go back for, he asked Harriet Low to marry him twice in one week and followed her to Steilacoom to ask a third time. What he made at Penn Cove looks like everything the forecastle was not: his own land, cleared and ploughed; a house; a garden where he “planted flowers through his vegetable gardens”; a door open to company; and a pinto pony saddled whenever a new family landed on the island and might need a hand. A man who had come to the island with nothing knew what a newcomer lacked.

He was a reader and a talker, “very interested in world affairs and politics, partizan and conservative,” and he named his first son for Horace Greeley, the most famous newspaper editor in America. He was careful with what was not his: he kept the county’s money in a sugar bowl in the china closet and would not take the territory’s. With his own children he was “rather a severe father,” the Puritan in him, Mollie thought, and when his little Josephine died he “was never the same again.” He loved the farm so much that, when he sold it in old age, his daughter believed the leaving made him ill. Mollie’s own words about the Holbrooks could be his epitaph: “They have made themselves felt quietly, behind the scenes, so to speak. There is never a blare of trumpets, nor a striving to make themselves heard” (scan 13).

• He reached California in March 1851, not in 1850: he came home from the Globe in August 1850.
• On the whalers the records find him in the crew, not as first mate or captain; he was Captain Holbrook from the West, master of his own sloop on the California coast and one of the captains of Penn Cove’s timber trade.
• His ships put in at Lahaina, where the king kept his court until 1845, rather than Honolulu.
• Emma was a schoolgirl in Honolulu in his whaling years and queen from 1856; he admired her, as Mollie says, but she was not the queen who welcomed him.
• The trading post “burned in an Indian war” was his store on Lummi Island, robbed by Indians in May 1854, in a time of peace.
• He and Harriet were married on a Monday evening, Christmas Eve 1860, not a Sunday.
• He sat one term in the territorial House, in 1861-62; in December 1860, when he met Harriet at Olympia, the island’s member was Thomas Coupe.
• The later marker at Sunnyside gives him 1830-1898; he was born in 1821 and died in 1894.