Hastings

Hastings is Captain Campbell’s whaling ship and the Volunteer’s crucial counterpart in a voyage shaped by declining whaling profits, insurance concerns, and Arctic ice. Its role changes from discreet partner in a commercial scheme to the apparent means of escape for the Volunteer’s stranded crew; when it disappears and wreckage is found, that hoped-for refuge becomes another maritime loss.

Identity and Early Role

At the outset, Hastings is positioned ahead of the Volunteer, somewhere beyond Disko Island. The ships are not to meet or communicate until the moment is judged right. This separation is deliberate: the Volunteer is disproportionately insured, and the underwriters are alert to signs of conspiracy. Hastings is therefore more than another vessel in the fleet. Its distance helps preserve the appearance that the Volunteer’s voyage is ordinary, even as Brownlee and Campbell coordinate their actions.

The wider commercial pressure behind the arrangement is made plain in conversations between Brownlee and Jacob Baxter. The older model of whaling, in which a boat and harpoon might bring substantial returns, has given way to expensive equipment and uncertain catches. Baxter’s papers put twelve thousand pounds divided three ways before Brownlee, a sum presented as exceeding what he could hope to earn by killing whales. The money does not make the whaling business disappear, but it redirects the purpose of the voyage: Hastings and the Volunteer are drawn into a plan in which the appearance of an accident matters as much as the hunt.

Meeting and Coordination

After the Volunteer’s successful sealing, the crew travels north toward Cape Farewell. Brownlee believes morale has improved and expects a productive season, while Hastings waits farther ahead. The two ships are still not to meet until the timing is right, a precaution tied to the scrutiny of the insurers and the conspicuous scale of the Volunteer’s insurance.

Later, when bad weather and dense ice delay the fleet near the entrance to Pond’s Bay, Hastings moors alongside the Volunteer and other whalers. The captains dine and talk between ships. In a private conversation with Brownlee, Campbell asks whether he is ready, then reminds him that the whales are a relatively minor part of the undertaking. The Volunteer must be sunk in a way that looks convincing, without making the underwriters suspicious. Brownlee argues for another week in Pond’s Bay to kill whales before searching for a suitable place to be trapped by ice; Campbell agrees to the delay but presses for a northward route afterward.

Their proposed destination is Lancaster Sound or nearby. Campbell advises Brownlee to find a sheltered lead near substantial land ice and wait for the wind to drive the floes in. He also warns that the Volunteer’s crew is unlikely to help much. This exchange fixes Hastings as a partner in the plan, but also reveals the plan’s dependence on a narrow set of conditions: the ships must reach the right place, the ice must make the loss plausible, and the disaster must not look too deliberate.

The Volunteer’s Expected Refuge

After Henry Drax attacks Brownlee and is taken out of command, the Volunteer continues north with Hastings. Many crewmen regard the late-season route as reckless: whales are moving south, ice risk is increasing, and they would rather return to Pond’s Bay than press farther north. Cavendish, now in command, disregards these objections. At the entrance to Lancaster Sound he crosses by boat to confer with Campbell, then tells the crew that they will enter the sound when a suitable passage opens.

The ships’ proximity takes on a new meaning once the Volunteer is caught by moving ice. Hastings is moored four miles to the east, at the edge of the land floe. Cavendish walks across to it with a small knapsack containing biscuits, tobacco, and rum, and returns reporting that Campbell has offered refuge and hospitality. The survivors are to transfer men and supplies in three gangs, using the whaleboats as sledges. For the stranded crew, Hastings is no longer merely a counterpart in a scheme: it is the practical route away from the damaged Volunteer and the ice closing around it.

Disappearance and Consequences

The transfer does not proceed as planned. When the crew asks where Hastings is, Otto reports that it is gone. Cavendish initially offers the possibility that it ventured into the pack to escape the icebergs and will return to the floe edge, insisting that Campbell knows their position. His reassurance cannot settle the matter. The expected refuge is absent, and the survivors have no confirmation that its crew is safe.

The following afternoon, the men find a capsized whaleboat and a scattered trail of empty blubber casks and broken timbers. They row in slow circles, recover pieces of debris, inspect them, and let them drift away again. Cavendish, ordinarily blustering, is silent and shaken. Sumner recognizes that the crew’s best hope of rescue has disappeared. Otto’s navigation places them beyond Cape Hay, within reach of Pond’s Bay before night; Cavendish says that, if they find no other ship there, they will have to winter over.

The evidence establishes the loss through wreckage rather than through survivors or a witnessed sinking. Earlier, Cavendish had speculated that Hastings might have gone out into the pack; later, the crew concludes that it was smashed by an iceberg and that all aboard drowned. That conclusion is reported as a certainty among the stranded men, but the debris is the concrete evidence they actually find. Hastings’s disappearance thus closes the route of escape without resolving every detail of its fate. Its narrative importance lies in this reversal: the ship once kept at a calculated distance becomes the crew’s only anticipated shelter, then vanishes into the same dangerous ice that has already trapped the Volunteer.