While transcribing the log book of the whale ship Newport as it wintered on Herschel Island the winter of 1894-1895, I happened upon what was labeled a journal that was kept that winter by a captain’s wife who had accompanied him on the whale ship that year and the next. The “journal” had been transcribed by a professor at McGill university, and, as it was to turn out, was not a faithful and complete transcription but only a partial transcription and that because his attention was on the indigenous people and, as a doctor who worked with First Nations people, anything medically related to them. As a result there are instances where whole paragraphs were reduced to single summarizing sentence or two.
Unaware of this I did become very familiar with what the Professor had transcribed as the details in the “Journal” were more specific about the daily life on the Island than the logs of the Newport and other wintering ships, so vague mentions of the crew “employed in ship’s duties” while generic in the logs were described in great detail in the “Journal” of Sophie Porter, wife of Captain William S. Porter of the Jesse H Freeman.
Where a log might mention a crew member, Mrs. Porter would mention him by name.
Because I was constantly cross referencing, especially after the discovery of the log entry dealing with the steward being sent forward for sodomy and onanism looking for any parallel event Mrs. Porter might have mentioned, I became very familiar over the last six years with Mrs. Sophie Porter’s life on the island that winter.
The classic image of hunting for whales usually includes whales in the distance being approached by ships driven in the most romantic pictures at great speeds by the wind while in reality not so much with smaller boats out ahead chasing a whale. We assume that, knowing the migratory patterns of various whales, the ships in the Pacific would head out after them either from Hawai’i or later SanFrancisco and Washington after being fitted and rigged in preparation for the migration, chasing the whales around the Pacific and getting news of the best places to go from passing ships with their holds filled or close to being so.
We assume there was the constant “thrill of the chase” after long periods of nativity and boredom and it is the romantic view od this that added a of a cover up of the real event, slaughtering a species close to extinction for money when there was a cheaper land based source of fuel especially in 1895. We assume whalers were only practical to a certain degree when it came to their trade, but we too often ignore they also had a good deal of common sense and those who ran the business were doing quite well.
If every year from May to September Bowhead whales headed toward the arctic feeding grounds, wouldn’t it be better, rather than get behind them and chase the whales there, if the ships waited for them to show up. All it would take was a definite place to settle in for the wait.
The Bowhead whale was valued for its baleen which was used much the same way plastic, which replaced it, is used today, and that, along with their oil, brought these whales close to extinction. However, as long as the baleen and oil brought in money, the Bowheds were targets.
And, so it was that in the late 19th century whalers established a base in the Beaufort Sea on Herschel Island which lies at the northern edge of Canada about 600 miles East of Barrow, Alaska.
This community began as a place for whale ships to hug the land, have dirt and snow packed against their hulls to act as a cushion as ice shrunk, expanded, and thickened over the winter, get restructured into housing waiting for the spring thaw and the return of the whales reached its height in 1893 when the population totalled 1,500 residents, both permanent and transitory.
By the time Sophie Porter arrived and kept copious notes about the goings on at the settlement over the 1893-1984 wintering, permanent structures had been constructed for housing and social space, but as they had become quite proficient at making their ships into housing most crews continued to stay on their ships.
This was the winter that the Pacific Steam Whaling Company constructed a building called the Community House at Pauline Cove that had a recreation room, an office for the manager and storekeeper, and storage facilities. Although the Community House became the most prominent building on the island, with the crews remaining on their ships and with the arrival of Reverend Stringer to meet the needs of the Christian whalers and convert the locals, in 1896 the company offered the house to the Anglican church who used the building until 1906.
Living on the Island had its mixed reviews as Sophie Porter recounted many happy social events among the more depressing happenings, while Reverend Stringer’s wife was not vague in the reasons for her dislike to being there.
Although referred to as Sophie Porter’s Journal, it turns out that Sophie had been the log keeper of the Jesse H Freeman of which her husband, Wiliam S., was the captain. This would explain why, unlike most log books which are dry notations of facts related to ship and company business, the log book of the JH Freeman also includes descriptions of people, mentioning names when known, and other goings on aboard ship that would not usually be included in the very often poorly written and dry entries.
She may have fulfilled the obligation to include weather, climate, wind, ship directions and business related activities, but sitting still from October to early May eliminated the need to record this information as Latitude and Longitude would remain constant and the weather did not affect the progress of the hunt, freeing her to write of the colony’s social life.
As logs mention ships encountered, whether just in passing or joining when the whale population eliminated competition, Mrs. Porter not only listed the names of the ships wintering and their captains, but she also lists the names of the captains’ wives and children, specific members of the various ships that interacted with her husband, various crew members performing good and bad acts, and the names of the local indigenous people who brought meat and traded with the ships including births and deaths of those she had become familiar with. While other logs might describe crew members by such things as race or country of origin, one log book refers to some crew as “the Mexicans, Sophie would refer to people by name, no matter how inconsequential in the ship’s hierarchy.
It was at the height of Pauline Cove’s existence, 1893-94, that the incident with Scott, the steward, took place aboard the Newport, and with a population that winter of whalers alone having reached 1500 people, the odds that Mr. Scott was a one time event become unfavorable and would lead one to think that with no women but captain’s wives and their pre-teen daughters as well as the few women among the indigenous people coming to the settlement, a six to seven month period of chastity would not be realistic.
A Captain Levitt arrived at Herschel Island on one voyage and never left, having married an indigenous woman. He became a prominent person and has things named after him, so there is evidence of less advertised sexual activity beyond what the Captains and their wives obviously were able to engaged in.
I originally thought that needing something to do during the long hours with little activity, Sophie spent part of this time writing her journal. Its being a personal journal was bolstered by personal entries and things she wanted her friends back home to know such as how anyone could enjoy wintering on an island on the northern edge of the Yukon 60 miles East of Barrow, Alaska.
I read of her love of husband and child and the family things they did together. I read of parties and funerals, and of the motherly attitude she had toward the indigenous people and members of the crew. I basically spent a year with her from the beginning of the wintering in the fall to the resumption of whaling with the spring thaw.
While I was doing yet another cross referencing in preparing an article for the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology website in which I wanted to include links to whatever ship logs I could find for the other 11 ships beyond that of the Newport I had already transcribed, I found that what had been labeled a “journal” was actually a partial and targeted transcription of the log book of the whale ship Jesse H Freeman whose keeper was Mrs. Sophie Porter. Further research showed that there were a lot more entries and they and the ones already transcribed actually contained more information than assumed.
Although she may have mentioned the weather, the direction of the ship, the ports they entered, and the usual information that is included in a form of bullet points in the standard log book, her log was in a more narrative form with the business information mentioned where they fit in the story.
I am now transcribing the log book of the Jesse H Freeman which begins months before the wintering and with many more detailed entities than what has been available. I am relatively familiar with what the journal contains but have seen that the original contains so much more than in the available transcription. While a transcribed entry on Herschel Island in the available version states that the steward was replaced, the actual extent entry explains that as the crew were suffering boredom the captain decided to shake things up and shuffled the positions of those more involved those whose duties had them close to the captain and his mates to keep them occupied by learning a new job. Obviously more interesting and complete than the one sentence summary.
After having transcribed some of the earlier entries in the actual log, I have found references to things that will become details of future events unknown to Sophie but, having already read about those future events previously, are known to me. One entry lists items obtained from trading with the “natives” and local merchants at Indian Point, Alaska, among which were 500 pairs of boots whose disposition I know as boots are referred to in an entry from months in the future.
And I have had the privilege to know before she wilo how Sophie Porter’s attitude toward the Natives and she herself will change.
In early entry where the JH Freeman had stopped to get some clothing item that would be useful during the wintering and at which she encounters the “natives” for the first time, Sophie described the “Natives” as “pitiful”, “disgusting”, and “filthy”, noting that those who approached her daughter, Dorothy, frightened her, and Sophie herself wished they would stay away from her.
If this is as far as you get, Sophie seems to have a huge White Privilege attitude which she very well might have had. However, the entries I have already encounter in the “Journal” and have yet to reach in the actual log reveal a woman whose attitude has become more enlightened as she speaks of the “natives” kindly and in a motherly fashion, mentioning many by name and recounting both happy and sad events in their lives and deeply mourning the loss of a child and her deep sympathy for the mother.
I have seen the woman this person becomes and now I get to see the voyage to get there.
Because of Sophie, we know what ships were present that winter, and we do not have to comb the record to find the list or comb the log to learn them because along with the expected log information, Mrs. Porter listed the ships, the captains, and their spouses and children they had with them. She left us the community’s roster.
We know of at least one specific reference to Homosexual activity worded in such a way as to imply it was not the only one, and we have four extant logs of ships listed in Mrs. Sophie Porter’s log in which others might be included regardless how described or couched, and a fifth which hints of more as well.
And we know Mrs. Sophie Porter will become a better person.
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