Rascals in Paradise

His name was Samuel B. Comstock, Harpooner, of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and he is remembered today because at the age of twenty-two he engineered the most horrible mutiny in the annals of the Pacific. Compared to his gruesome one-man uprising, more notorious ones like that of the Bounty seem commonplace and lacking in passion.
 
Sam Comstock was a Quaker, son of a respectable schoolmaster of Nantucket. The blond-haired, sallow-faced boy had his early training at a fine Quaker school, the Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, where his father was teaching at the time. Here he learned mathematics, reading and other basic subjects which constituted an education for young gentlemen of the day, but the lesson that completely gripped his imagination, and which in time set fire to his brain, was one he heard by the fireside while growing up in Nantucket.
 
Captain Mayhew Folger, a resident of the town, used to thrill the youngsters with the amazing story of how in 1808, as master of the sealer Topaz, he had by chance discovered on lonely Pitcairn Island the survivors of the Bounty mutiny against Captain William Bligh. Young Sam Comstock listened with intense concentration as the story of this famous mutiny unfolded.
 
In Captain Folger’s version, the inescapable moral of this yarn was that mutiny never pays, for he described the pitiful aftermath that transpired on Pitcairn, where the successful mutineers quarreled about their native women and brutally stalked one another to death or fell to the muskets and spears of the brown men whose women had been taken.
 
Young Sam did not listen to this part of old Captain Folger’s narration, for dreams of mutiny, high adventure on the seas and sovereignty over some savage island had already inflamed his imagination. He was impatient to be off.
 
His first sea voyage was a relatively tame one. At thirteen he ran away and joined an inconspicuous ship which carried cargo from New York to Liverpool, but he quickly ditched this job. He had heard that if a boy was to gain great adventure, he must join the whalers.
 
Sam was fifteen, his education behind him and the blessings of his proper Quaker parents upon him, when he trod the deck of his first whaling ship. His inaugural trip was exciting enough to please even Sam, for in the first months of the voyage the ship was seized by Chilean pirates. Sam, thrown ashore in South America, beat his way back to Nantucket.
 
Ablaze with dreams, he haunted the water front until, in 1819, he found a berth with the whaler Foster, new-built and starting on her maiden voyage. On her he first saw the thundering expanse of the South Seas. From her decks he first spotted a lonely tropical island, rising slowly through morning mists. We are not required to speculate on the deranging effects of such sights on Sam Comstock, for it is recorded that on the voyage he rushed up to Captain Shubael Chase of the Foster and pleaded to be set ashore at any one of the islands the whaler was passing. Captain Chase ridiculed the idea and refused.
 
But Sam never overcame that first almost uncontrollable urge to break loose, invade an island and establish his own kingdom. Pondering the rude manner in which the captain had rejected his friendly request to be put ashore, Sam, who was a brooding boy incapable of forgetting a slight, concluded that there was only one way by which he might succeed in his life’s dream. He would have to murder the entire officer corps of some ship, seize it, sail it to some island paradise and then murder the survivors one by one until only he remained, as king.
 
Sam’s plan had three virtues. It was so bizarre that no one would suspect him of it. It was simple and straightforward. And, as we shall see, it was completely practical.
 
It is possible that Sam contemplated putting his master design into operation against Captain Shubael Chase, in which case Comstock’s savage and improbable tale would have lived in history as the mutiny of the Foster; but Sam was a wily lad and was the first to realize that as a mere youth of eighteen he lacked one of the prime essentials for success as a mutineer. He could not navigate and would thus be at the mercy of whomever he stationed beside the helmsman of a captured ship.
 
Accordingly, Sam became a model young mariner. He studied navigation diligently, practiced the difficult art of harpooning until he was one of the best hands in the Pacific, learned to ingratiate himself with ships’ crews, and studied patiently for the day when he would commandeer his own ship and send it hurtling through the waves toward some South Pacific paradise, of which he would be king.
 
When the Foster returned to Nantucket, at the end of a successful cruise, it deposited on the docks of that famous port a trim, twenty-year-old harpooner with curly blond hair a little longer than usual, eyes a bit sharper and a burning determination that would never subside as long as he lived.
 
For several weeks young Sam Comstock loafed along the water front, trying to select a ship for his big adventure. Like a cautious trader picking a horse, he inspected, listened and waited. Then, not long before his twenty-first birthday, he found his ship.
 
The famous whaler Globe, rich in incident and records of sperm oil, was being refitted in Nantucket waters, and Sam Comstock’s heart beat wildly. For the Globe, only four years before, had opened up new whaling grounds a thousand miles west of Peru, and she was a ship on which any young man would have been proud to sail. Eagerly Sam presented his papers and was signed on as boat steerer, for a cruise of two or more years through the Pacific. His hour had arrived.
 
Whaling, when Sam Comstock decided to use it for his purposes, was the great American industry. Its ramifications were manifold. For example, the nation was lighted by whale-oil lamps or spermaceti wax candles. Machinery was lubricated by sperm oil, which was also used to make soap and paints. Ladies of fashion were scented with an essence of ambergris, coughed out from the stomach of a sick whale. Their crinolines and bodices were stayed with whalebone.
 
Big fortunes were made pursuing the largest of all mammals through the most distant oceans. But although there were many families of whale, only two provided real riches: the sperm whale and the right whale. The sperm was found in the more temperate waters of the world. He averaged forty to fifty feet in length, but sometimes ran to eighty-five. A lucky captor might ladle out of the monster’s head case as much as thirty barrels of waxy oil. Blubber from his hulking body, when rendered out in kettles on the smoky half-deck, would average 125 barrels of oil, sometimes twice as much. His cousin, the right whale, was found more often among the bergs of the Arctic or Antarctic, and was almost as huge as the sperm. The right whale was sought not only for his oil but also for whalebone. Hundreds of thin blades of this flexible stuff hung in his maw, to be used for umbrella ribs and corset stiffeners. At one time whalebone brought five dollars a pound.
 
Killing any whale was dangerous work, but killing a sperm whale was especially dangerous. His toothed jaws were quite capable of splintering the hull of a double-ended boat, and tossing out the seamen in the topsy-turvy fashion that Messrs. Currier & Ives loved to depict. The right whale was less dangerous than the sperm, but could defend himself by thrashing his mammoth tail. An old whaling maxim ran: “Beware of a sperm’s jaw and a right whale’s flukes!” But the rewards were so great that mere men volunteered to row their frail boats close enough to Behemoth to strike his vitals with a needlelike harpoon, and then pursue him with lances until the sea was crimson and the waves violent from his death struggle.
 
The Pacific, from 1820 to 1870, was to be the main hunting ground of the whalers. Not long after Sam Comstock’s day, more than two thirds of the world’s whaling fleet prowled this ocean. Most of the ships were American, and most of these were from a few towns on the New England coast. The greatest whaling port, of course, was Nantucket, on an island south of Cape Cod. In the seventeenth century, whaling had been carried on there as an offshore venture by boats which put out from town. But later the seven seas became the Nantucketer’s pasture; his herd was Leviathan. In the 1820’s Nantucket sent out about seventy ships a year to pursue the whale.
 
It was a Nantucket ship, the Equator, that along with the Balaena of New Bedford was the first American whaler to reach Honolulu, the tropical town that later became headquarters for the Pacific whaling industry. In 1819 these two ships killed a whale off Hawaii. Another Nantucket vessel, the Maro, was the first American whaler to cross the middle Pacific; in company with the Syren of London it discovered the famous grounds that teemed with whale eastward of Japan. Soon the other main Pacific grounds were discovered. They were scattered within a rough triangle from Cape Horn, at the foot of South America, west to New Zealand and north—including the “on Japan” grounds—to the Arctic, beyond the freezing waters of Bering Strait. Although many whaling operations had to be carried on in cold waters, in winter the favorite cruising belt was along the Equator, where a counter-current stirred up the rich ooze of the ocean floor and attracted the whales. The trade was big business. In the year 1852, for example, the masts of 131 whale ships forested the port of Honolulu, and a man might clamber from one end of the harbor to the other across the decks of the anchored vessels.