1859

1859 frames the Volunteer’s voyage as both a working season and a turning point for Greenland whaling. The year’s route—from Lerwick northward, past Jan Mayen Island and Cape Farewell, and into the North Water—brings the crew into contact with profitable hunts, migrating whales, and increasingly perilous ice. It also exposes the tension between Arthur Brownlee’s confidence in the fishery and the changing markets and conditions that make that confidence difficult to sustain.

A fishery in transition

Brownlee’s voyage begins in an industry already looking back on its most lucrative years. Jacob Baxter recalls that thirty years earlier a comparatively modest ship and harpoon could bring back a rich cargo, and describes twenty-five years of strong profits. By 1859, however, whale oil has lost ground to petroleum and coal gas. The technology required to pursue whales has grown more expensive: a modern hunt calls for a powerful steam engine, harpoon guns, and luck, without any guarantee that a ship will return with a catch. Brownlee rejects the idea that the trade is finished, insisting that whales remain available to a capable captain and crew.

The changing distribution of the whales sharpens the problem. Brownlee explains that waters which had held many whales twenty years earlier have become less productive as the animals move north, into ice where pursuit is more dangerous. The whales’ movement and the industry’s technical response are connected: steam power might extend the chase, but following the animals into more hazardous waters shifts risk onto ships and crews. The North Water appears as the season’s promising destination precisely because the older grounds have become less reliable.

From Lerwick to the sealing grounds

The narrative gives one exact opening date: the Volunteer enters Lerwick harbor on April 1, 1859. Brownlee goes ashore to meet the local shipping agent and select Shetland crew members. Patrick Sumner spends the morning distributing tobacco and tending to a deckhand with a painful stricture before resting aboard ship. The harbor stop is a practical stage in preparing the expedition, rather than a pause from its work.

After leaving Lerwick, the ship sails north through prolonged fog, sleet, and wind. Sumner remains in his cabin, repeatedly seasick and unable to read or write. Two easterly gales batter the ship before the weather moderates on the eleventh day and the crew encounter scattered sea ice, with Jan Mayen Island visible in the distance. They bring out sealing equipment, distribute rifles and ammunition, and prepare knives. Two days later they sight the main seal pack; the boats are lowered at dawn the following day.

The sealing hunt is organized as labor on a shared, competitive ground. Henry Drax works alone among the seals, while the five whaleboats return with their loads. Brownlee counts the skins and estimates that four hundred will yield nine tons of oil, worth roughly forty pounds per ton if the market holds. The catch is a promising beginning, but the pack is scattering and Dutch, Norwegian, Scottish, and English ships are also competing along the floe edge. Brownlee surveys the ice from the crow’s nest to choose the next day’s hunting ground, measuring the season’s prospects against both the shifting animals and the rival fleet.

The summer whale hunt

After the sealing, the crew travels for three weeks from Jan Mayen Island to Cape Farewell. The successful hunt has lifted morale, and Brownlee sees the men at work preparing lines, boat falls, lances, and harpoons. Cavendish has proved competent despite remaining a source of irritation, while Black is ambitious and shrewd. Sumner, recovering from a near-fatal immersion, regains his appetite and energy, though frostbite remains visible on his cheeks and nose. The Hastings, commanded by Campbell, waits farther up the strait; the two ships are not to communicate until the moment is judged suitable, since the Volunteer’s unusually heavy insurance could invite suspicion.

By the last week of June, the Volunteer has crossed into the North Water. Near dawn the next day, Black strikes the ship’s first whale. Sumner watches from the crow’s nest as the wounded animal resurfaces and Otto’s boat approaches. Otto throws another harpoon; the whale’s movements throw the boat’s crew off balance, and the other boats join the attack. The hunt turns the expectation of a northern catch into a dangerous collective operation, with the whale resisting while the men coordinate their boats and weapons around it.

Once the whale is alongside, Brownlee measures it and estimates a yield of ten tons of oil and at least half a ton of whalebone, worth nearly nine hundred pounds at market if prices remain firm. Otto and Black work on the carcass, and the crew store the blubber. Brownlee orders an additional ration of rum for each sailor after the work is complete. Two more whales are killed and processed the following day. Sumner is assigned to carry heavy blocks of blubber from the foredeck and pitch them into the hold for storage. He slips several times and nearly falls into the hold, but Otto saves him. The strenuous task leaves him bruised and aching; that night, for once, he sleeps without laudanum, and the next morning he eats breakfast despite his stiffness. The episode makes the fishery’s returns inseparable from the repeated physical labor that produces them.

Ice, delay, and the limits of the season

The route does not offer an uninterrupted succession of hunts. Foul weather brings drenching rain and thick fog, concealing prey and preventing fishing as the Volunteer moves south through loose ice. After passing Jones Sound and Cape Horsburgh, the ship reaches the entrance to Pond’s Bay, where Brownlee is eager to proceed but dense seasonal ice forces a delay. The Hastings and three other ships—the Polynia, the Intrepid, and the Northerner—moor nearby. With work suspended while they wait for the wind to change, the captains visit one another’s cabins and exchange stories and arguments.

The ice makes delay an immediate test of shipboard labor. Around midday, the wind shifts from south to north, driving drift ice that had seemed harmless toward the ships. Cavendish orders the crew to cut an ice dock for protection. They bring up saws, ropes, poles, and gunpowder, mark out the dock, and use a fourteen-foot steel saw worked by teams of men on its ropes and handles. The ice is six feet thick and the dock’s sides are two hundred feet long. After two hours of cutting, the floe has been divided into four large sections. The maneuver shows how a whaling season depends not only on finding animals, but also on collective work to hold a ship in place as navigable water closes around it.

The year’s commercial promise remains entangled with the voyage’s dangers and uncertainties. The later encounter between Sumner and Baxter gives that risk a personal aftermath: Baxter has read a letter from Lerwick and greets Sumner as a man believed lost to drowning or freezing. Sumner asks only for his wages before leaving. The brief exchange returns the expedition’s calculations of cargo and profit to the human question of who survives the voyage, and what remains owed when he does.