Remembering the sinking of New Bedford’s last great whaling ship
Contrary to the motto on the city seal, New Bedford was no longer the city that illuminated the world in the 1920s.
America’s lamps ran mostly on electricity and kerosene. Whale byproducts still had some commercial uses: the oil served as a base for various face creams and machine lubricants, ambergris was a fixative in perfumes, and vendors tried to promote whale meat as a cheap food alternative.
But the industry that had made so many of New England’s founding fathers rich had all but disappeared. New Bedford’s fleet of some 350 whaling ships had dwindled to a few boats, some of which earned extra income as movie props.
The Wanderer, the last of New Bedford’s square-sail whaling ships, whose sinking would soon serve as a symbolic death for the city’s whaling industry, was one of those beautiful ships in the film. The 116-foot barge stars in the 1922 silent film Down to the Sea in Ships, which was promoted even then as a tribute to a lost way of life. The film includes footage of an authentic whale hunt, but it was unclear whether the Wanderer would ever hunt whales again after production wrapped.
“The newspapers predicted it would probably be sold to a film company or something,” said Connor Gaudet, curator of the Mattapoisett Museum.
Through next summer, the museum is hosting an exhibit that looks at the methods people have used to keep the Wanderer’s memory alive. One of the items Gaudet is displaying is a Wanderer cot that a local family kept for their children’s sleepovers in the 2010s. The exhibit includes paintings, parts of the ship and even a postcard from a midtown Manhattan cocktail bar built to resemble the Wanderer’s interior.
Gaudet said the Wanderer continues to be a powerful symbol because it evokes nostalgic memories of an era when New England coastal residents earned their wealth through a dangerous struggle with the sea. The Wanderer, built in 1878, was the last whaling ship built in Mattapoisett before it became the summer settlement it is today.
“Whaling had already passed its peak 20 years ago,” Gaudet said, “so in a way it was a miracle that it was created.”
The Wanderer proved to be a sturdy ship. During her 46-year career, she made 23 whaling voyages and brought ashore more than 900,000 gallons of oil. She survived an attack by an aggressive whale in the Caribbean, was frozen solid several times in the Arctic Ocean, and evaded German submarines during World War I. Some scholars, including former New Bedford Whaling Museum curator William H. Tripp, believe that in 1917 the Wanderer brought ashore the largest cargo of whale oil ever brought ashore in a single voyage.
Captain of many of these adventures was Antone Edwards, an immigrant from the Azores island of Flores who first joined the crew of a New Bedford whaling ship in 1898 at the age of 16. Edwards eventually purchased a share in the Wanderer in 1920, after the city’s Yankee aristocracy had largely abandoned the industry.
“Antone Edwards didn’t have the infrastructure to put a drilling rig in Pennsylvania. He was a whaling captain,” Guadet said. “He was a whaling captain. So, you know, he just kept going until he couldn’t make a profit anymore.”
Edwards did not remain as ship owner for long, however. In 1924, he told newspaper reporters that the Wanderer was preparing for what was likely her last voyage—and possibly the last voyage of any New Bedford-based whaling ship.
Edwards tried to find willing sailors for the voyage, but on the day the wanderers were scheduled to depart, Edwards only had a skeleton crew. Nevertheless, a traditional sea service was held to mark the ship’s departure.
The organ from Seamen’s Bethel, still in use today, was rolled onto the Wanderer for a round of hymns. Hundreds of people crowded onto Pier 3 to see the ship off. But the voyage was beset with problems from the start: The ship left its cat on shore, and Captain Edwards wasn’t quite ready to depart, even when a tugboat pulled the Wanderer out of the harbor.
After anchoring the Wanderer near Mishaum Point in Dartmouth, Captain Edwards jumped back on the tug to New Bedford, where he may have recruited additional deckhands at the last minute or processed immigration papers for his Cape Verdean crew.
While Edwards was away, an unexpected storm came up.
“August 26, 1924, will be a day long remembered in New Bedford, for on that day one of the worst storms that the old residents can remember swept through the city,” a local publisher wrote in a short book about the storm at the time. “There had not been a storm like it since 1869.”
Newspapers reported winds of 60 miles per hour and 15-foot waves in Buzzards Bay, an astonishing height for such a sheltered body of water. The force of the storm tore off one of the Wanderer’s two anchors and drove the ship about seven miles across the bay until it reached the Middle Ground shoal near Cuttyhunk.
Near the shallows, the crew of the Wanderer decided to abandon ship and took two smaller boats, which are normally used to approach whales at close range and kill them with a harpoon.
One boat reached the shore of Cuttyhunk safely. The other disappeared for a night before being rescued by a lightship stationed near the dangerous Sow and Pigs Reef.
In the end, everyone survived except the Wanderer, which ran aground on Cuttyhunk, completely destroyed. The next day, a salvage company came to scrap the Wanderer and preserve valuable parts.
Some of the ship’s wood became a commemorative display case in the office of a bank president of the State Street Trust Company in Boston. The ship’s mast became a flagpole in downtown Mattapoisett. Its figurehead, a golden eagle, ended up in the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
The Cuttyhunkers, who often risked their lives to save shipwrecked sailors, also stole whatever they could from the Wanderer. The trypots, which were originally intended for cooking blubber, became planters that still adorn a private garden on the island. An oar stolen from the Wanderer hangs in the rafters of the Cuttyhunk Fishing Club. Captain Edwards’ chair also stands on the Cuttyhunk, in a private home.
Allie Thurston, a volunteer with the Cuttyhunk Historical Society, said other items recovered by the hiker are likely kept secret by islanders.
“They don’t want you to know what treasures they have,” Thurston said. “These are treasures that belong on the island.”
Captain Edwards kept few memorabilia for himself, which were passed down to the family after his death in a car accident in 1936.
George Alexander, his great-nephew, said he inherited Edwards’ brass knuckles and a lamp made from one of the ship’s winches. Alexander, who still lives in New Bedford, said Captain Edwards visited his mother’s house and told stories about the wanderer.
“He came one time and was still upset about losing the ship,” Alexander said. “He came over with a couple of gold coins, threw them in the air and said, ‘That’s all that’s left. That’s all that’s left.'”
However, there is one important detail that has been lost in all the lore: The Wanderer was not the last whaling ship to leave New Bedford. It was just the last of the square-sail whaling ships immortalized in Moby Dick, which could sail for four to five years at a time. Smaller ships like the John R. Manta continued to make short whaling trips out of New Bedford until 1927.
Still, for many people, the dramatic demise of the Wanderer is too fitting an end to such a legendary industry to pass up. Who doesn’t like to say goodbye with a bang?
This story is a production of the New England News Collaborative. It was originally published by The Public’s Radio.
