He was so moved by this chance brush with the slaver that he could not sleep and spent the night on deck, peering off into the direction of Africa, hoping that God would vouchsafe him a flash of light indicating that the blackbirder had exploded. Toward morning he was visited by Keoki Kanakoa, who said, “Reverend Hale, you worry so much about Africa. Did you not know that there are also slaves in Hawaii?”
“There are?” Abner asked in astonishment.
“Of course. On my father’s island there are many slaves. We call them foul corpses, and they may touch nothing that we touch. They are kapu. Not long ago they were kept for the human sacrifices.”
“Tell me all about them,” the stunned young missionary said, and as Keoki explained the various rituals and kapus involving the foul corpses, Abner felt an impatient fury mounting in his throat, so that before Keoki finished he cried, “Keoki, when I get to Hawaii there will be no more slavery.”
“It will be difficult,” the giant Hawaiian warned.
“Keoki, you will eat with the foul corpses.” He told none of the other missionaries of this resolve, not even Jerusha, but as dawn came he knew in his heart that that strange tall ship, that cruel Brazilian slaver, had been sent across his path at the equator for a purpose. “There will be no more slavery in Hawaii,” he swore as the sun rose.
It was on the long, dreary run to Cape Horn, more than six thousand miles in almost a straight line, that the famous “missionary’s disease” struck in earnest, so that long after seasickness was forgotten, missionary families would recall with embarrassment and discomfort the illness which really prostrated them.
They called it, in a blush of euphemism, biliousness, and day after day Jerusha would inquire cautiously, “Reverend Hale, do you still suffer from biliousness?”
He would reply, “Yes, my dear companion, I do.”
Since all the other couples were conducting similar inquiries, with identical responses, the missionaries began to look with truly jaundiced eyes at their doctor, as if Brother Whipple ought by some miracle to be able to dispel the tormenting biliousness. He studied his authorities, especially the Family Medical Book, and prescribed various time-honored cures. “Two tablespoons of ipecac and rhubarb,” he advised.
“Brother Whipple, I’ve been taking ipecac for weeks,” a worried missionary reported. “No good.”
“Have you tried two grains of calomel, Brother Hewlett?”
“It helps at the moment … but …”
“Then it’ll have to be castor oil … and walking.”
“I can’t take castor oil, Brother Whipple.”
“Then walk.”
So the dreadfully constipated missionaries took ipecac and rhubarb and calomel and castor oil. But mostly they walked. After breakfast all who were able would stride purposefully up and down, up and down the cramped afterdeck, turning on the animal pens at one end, and the foremast at the other. Sometimes they walked for hours, trying to shame their recalcitrant intestines into action, but nothing really cured the biliousness.
The after quarters contained one latrine, unbearably foul, and if each missionary occupied it for only fifteen minutes at a time, which was not excessive in their condition, five and a half hours were automatically consumed, and the day was half spent with no time allocated for emergency cases on the part of those who in extreme desperation had taken a master dose of ipecac, rhubarb, calomel and castor oil, all together.
It therefore became necessary for Brother Whipple, with Captain Janders’ amused consent and with able help from Keoki Kanakoa, to rig an unclosed improvised privy aft of the stern. At stated intervals all females would go below decks, and one minister after another would test his good fortune on the open seat, his hands wrapped desperately about the timbers Keoki had hammered into place, his pallid white bottom winking at the whales.
Day after day they walked. The boisterous sailors, whose bodies were kept functioning by the extraordinary amount of work they had to do, irreverently made bets as to which of the brothers would next try his luck on the precarious perch, and they referred to the constant walking as “the missionary waltz.”
One day, in despair, poor, tied-up Abner demanded of Brother Whipple, “Why is it that God afflicts us so and does nothing to those impious sailors.”
“It’s simple, Brother Hale,” the doctor laughed. “We all got seasick and cleaned our lower quarters completely. Then we ate little and allowed it to compact itself. Lacking fruit and vegetables the compacting became harder. But most of all, we did no work. Sailors work, so God looks after their bellies.”
Abner wasn’t sure but what Brother Whipple had indulged in blasphemy, but he was too uncomfortable to argue, so he merely said, “I feel dreadful.”
“Let me see your eyes,” Whipple ordered, and when he saw the bleary yellow stains he said, “You are dreadful.”
“What can I do?” Abner pleaded.
“Walk,” Whipple commanded, and the missionary waltz resumed.
Brother Whipple took most of his walks at night, when the stars were out and when his interest in science could be freely indulged. His long discussions with the mates over astronomy came so to occupy his mind that he frequently absented himself from evening prayers, a dereliction which caused Abner to detail two brothers to investigate.
“We are a family, as you know, Brother Whipple,” they said. “Our prayers are family prayers.”
“I am sorry I was forgetful,” Whipple apologized. “I’ll attend prayers.” But as soon as the first worshiper cried, “Amen!” the young doctor was up the hatch and talking astronomy.
“How does a mariner feel when he crosses the line and sees that the North Star has vanished?” he asked.
“Well,” Mister Collins reflected, “no matter how well you know the southern stars, it’s a wrench to see old reliable go down over the horizon.”
From his work with the mates, Whipple learned to work Bowditch for both latitude and longitude, and occasionally his calculations coincided with those of Captain Janders, which led the latter to predict, “You’d make a better navigator than you ever will a missionary.”
“We’ll trap your soul yet,” Whipple retorted. “If I could get Brother Hale up here …”
“Leave him where he is!” Janders urged.
Nevertheless, Captain Janders had to admit surprise at the success Abner was enjoying in converting the crew. He had five Bibles out and two more pending. Six men had been cajoled into signing temperance pledges, at which Janders growled, “Easiest thing in the world is to get sailors on board to become temperance. Trick is to do it in port.”
The sailors appreciated Abner’s curious gift of raising exactly those questions they had often pondered, so that even men who were not religious would stand about as he argued: “Suppose this voyage occupies four years. On the first week you are away, your mother dies. You don’t hear about it. Now what is your relation to your mother during the next two hundred weeks? She is dead, yet you think of her as living. She is dead, yet she has the capacity to help you. Is it not possible that she is indeed living? In Jesus Christ?”
“I didn’t think about it that way, Reverend,” an unbeliever said. “But in another way I did. Suppose I’m married, and when I leave Boston my wife is … well … if you’ll excuse me … expecting. Now I never see that baby for four years, but when I come home he looks like me, has my habits, and in some unknown way has come to love me.”
“Only sometimes he don’t look like you,” the old whaler observed from his own experience. “What then?”
“Have you converted Captain Janders?” Cridland asked.
“No,” Abner replied sorrowfully. “ ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ ”
“Wait a minute, Reverend!” an old hand corrected. “Cap’n believes. When you ain’t aboard he conducts services.”
“True believing requires that you submit your will entirely to God’s,” Abner explained. “Captain Janders will not confess that he li
ves in a state of abject sin.”
“I don’t classify him as no sinner,” the old whaler reflected. “Not a proper, hard-working sinner, that is. Now you take a man like Cap’n Hoxworth of the whaler Carthaginian … I seen Cap’n Hoxworth get four naked Honolulu girls into his cabin at one time … Well, as a sinner, our cap’n just don’t compare.”
Nevertheless, Abner waged relentless campaigns against Captain Janders, particularly in the matter of novels, which the captain read ostentatiously immediately after each Sabbath sermon. “You will learn to call such books abominations,” Abner mournfully predicted.
Janders fought back with irony: “You converting any more old whalers, Brother Hale?”
The question infuriated Abner, symbolizing as it did the world’s pernicious habit of rejoicing over the downfall of sanctimonious men. Actually, he could have turned the tables on the captain, so far as the old whaler was concerned, for the man was agonizingly eager to win back his Bible before reaching Cape Horn. “Many’s a sailor’s been lost at the Horn, Reverend,” he constantly pleaded. “Don’t make me round the Horn without a Bible!”
But Abner had absorbed one fundamental lesson on this trip: the established church must not be maneuvered into a position of danger by the backsliding of fools who were never truly saved in the first place. It is such who have the greatest power to damage the church and they must be denied the opportunity of doing so. Frequently, on the long leg south Abner would sit on a trunk in his stateroom and analyze this case with his seven companions: “I was too prompt to accept this man … too eager for merely another number rather than for a secured soul. We must never repeat this foolish mistake in Hawaii.”
And then, on the evening of November 24, just as Keoki placed on the half-moon table the Saturday night suet pudding, an unexpected gale from the southwest struck the Thetis port-side and threw her well onto her beam ends. Since the storm had come without warning, the after hatch had not been closed and torrents of cold gray water cascaded into the cabin. The lamp swung parallel to the decking. Food and chairs and missionaries were swept into a jumble and buried in new floods ripping down the hatchway. There were screams, and from the stateroom where Jerusha lay ghastly ill, Abner heard a plaintive cry, “Are we sinking?”
He stumbled to her and found her berth drenched with water, and everything in confusion. “We shall be safe,” he said firmly. “God is with this ship.”
They heard the hatchway being hammered into place and smelled the loss of air. Then the cook shouted, “Cape Horn is rushing out to meet us.”
“Will the storm last long?” Brother Whipple inquired.
“Maybe four weeks,” the cook replied, picking up the debris of his meal.
On Sunday, November 25, Abner ventured on deck to survey the damage, and reported breathlessly, “All the livestock was swept away. That first big wave almost capsized us.” One by one the missionaries, those who were not confined to their bunks, viewed the storm and discovered what the cook meant when he said that Cape Horn had come to meet them. A cold, dismal fog enveloped the ship where the warm waters of the Atlantic met the icy wastes of the Antarctic, and the waves rose high in the gloom, falling away into icy depths.
“I’m fearfully cold,” Jerusha told her husband, but there was nothing he could do. The little Thetis kept probing southward toward the Cape itself, and each day took her into colder waters. The thermometer stood at thirty-nine degrees, with no fires allowed on board. Bedding was wet from the dousing and all gear was molding in unaired boxes. Most of the time the hatchway was covered, so that no air swept into the dank confined cabin, and with no freedom for walking, griping biliousness overtook the missionaries.
On Tuesday, November 27, John Whipple hurried below with heartening news. “We can see Staten Island to port, so we must be approaching the Cape. The waves aren’t as big as we feared.” He led his companions aloft to view one of the bleakest, loneliest lands on earth, lying off the tip of the continent. Through partial mist its low treeless hills were visible, and Whipple said, “We are seeing it in summer. Imagine what it must be like in winter.” But the missionaries were looking not at Staten Island, but rather at the terrifying waters that lay ahead.
There, at the southern tip of the habitable world, in a latitude of fifty-five degrees, the earth-girdling southern currents that thundered in from the lower Pacific crashed into the turbulent swells of the Atlantic, and the missionaries could see that the resulting waves were mountain-high and clothed with fog and fear. If a sailor were lucky enough to hit Staten Island with an easterly at his back, he could penetrate these monstrous waves with some hope of success, but when, as in late November of 1821, both the set of the Pacific and the bearing of its winds were from the west, there was slight chance of doubling the Cape.
But Captain Janders, face grim within the rim of sandy whiskers, was stubbornly determined to prosecute every chance. “I’ll not be the captain who has to write in his log, ‘Today abandoned hope of doubling Cape Horn and turned back across the Atlantic to try Cape Good Hope.’ If you write that in your log, they never let you forget it. You’re the Yankee who couldn’t double the Cape.” So he gambled that either the wind would veer to the east and blow him through, or that the Pacific swell would somehow abate and allow him to beat into the wind, no matter where it stood.
“I am convinced that one or the other will happen,” Janders repeated doggedly. But on the evening of Thanksgiving Day he stumbled down into the cabin and said dourly, “If any of you missionaries have personal knowledge of God, I would appreciate your prayers now.”
“Do the winds continue against us?” Abner asked.
“Never seen ’em so bad,” Janders growled.
“Will we have to turn back?” one of the wives inquired.
“No, ma’am, we won’t!” Janders said firmly. “There’ll be no man say I tried the Cape and failed.”
When he was gone back to the deck John Whipple said, “I see no fault in supporting him with our prayers.”
“Nor do I, Brother Whipple,” Jerusha said, and Dr. Whipple prayed: “Let us recall the reassuring words of Proverbs: ‘I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the holy. Who hath ascended up into the heavens, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name?’ Brethren, we who stand at the ends of the earth, where the winds are gathered in God’s fist against us, let us not forget that it is the just man whom God tries. The evil man passes and repasses this Cape with no concern, for he has already been tested. It is you and I who have not been tested. Let us pray that these winds abate in our favor, but if they do not, let us doubly rely upon the Lord.”
By Saturday, December 1, the Thetis had spent seven full days negotiating a distance of one hundred and ten miles. During breaks in the storm, the forlorn missionaries had seen blunt and brutal Tierra del Fuego to the north and had retired to freezing berths, huddling together in fear and seasickness. The tempest from the west did not abate.
On Sunday, December 2, the Thetis turned due west to find a channel which would carry them north of Cape Horn itself, perched on an insignificant island to the south, but this day the waves from the Pacific were terrifying even to Captain Janders. Once, when the Thetis heeled far over onto her beam ends, he looked in dismay at Mister Collins, who was brave enough to say, “I’ve never sailed in a worse sea, Captain. We’d better run for it.” In an instant Captain Janders swung his tiny brig about and sent her running before the violent storm, eastward past dangerous rocks, and within three hours, at the amazing speed of nearly thirty knots, the little Thetis lost all the westward progress she had acquired in eight days.
On December 3 Mister Collins asked the fatal question: “Shall we run across the Atlantic, sir, to Cape Good Hope?” and Captain Janders replied, “We shall not!” and he trimmed his sails once more for the westerlies that roared in upon the great Pacific swells. At noon of that day
John Whipple reported startling news to the frightened and freezing missionaries: “I think we’re right where we were eight days ago! I’m sure that’s Staten Island to the south and the point of Tierra del Fuego to the north.” His wife asked weakly, “You mean to say that we’re being driven backward?” When her husband nodded, she said softly, “John, I have to fight so hard to stay in my berth that my elbows are bleeding. Do see how poor Sister Hale is.” And when John looked, he saw that her elbows and knees were bleeding, too. But there was nothing anyone could do but lie in his cold, wet berth and fight the frantic rolling of the ship.
On December 4 the Thetis reached far to the south, so that the sun barely set at all, and night consisted only of a mysterious ashen haze, holding low upon the turbulent sea. And when it looked as if there might be better wind toward the Antarctic, Captain Janders tried his next trick. Running boldly on a tack that carried him away from the protecting island behind which mariners customarily doubled the Cape, he led his tiny brig into the waters of the Drake Passage, roughest in the world. It was a gallant move, but toward morning a vast Pacific accumulation swirling with sleet and snow swept down on the Thetis, lifted her high, and threw her sideways, so that water rushed into the terror-stricken cabin and filled the lower berths. “Abner! Abner!” bruised Jerusha screamed from the floor, forgetting his proper title. “We’re drowning.” He replied calmly, picking her up gently and moving her into John Whipple’s upper bunk, “No, my beloved companion, God is with this ship. He will not abandon us.” The terrifying shaking continued, accompanied by fresh torrents of water slopping aft from some ruptured forward area. “We cannot stand this!” a hysterical wife screamed. “God is with this ship,” Abner quieted her, and in the weird darkness, with water about his ankles and the sobbing of those who thought they would soon be dead, he prayed in a strong voice and reminded the missionaries that they had come on this voyage to do God’s work and it was notorious that God tested His chosen and that their way was never quick or easy. “We shall ride through this storm and see the pleasant valleys of Hawaii,” he affirmed. Then he went to each freezing stateroom and helped lift luggage out of berths into which it had been swept. No attempt was made to serve meals, but when Captain Janders looked below and saw the work Abner was doing, he shouted to the cook, “Bring some cheese aft to these poor people.” Abner asked, “Are we rounding the Cape?” and Janders replied, “Not yet, but we will be.” However, toward six in the evening it became apparent that the night’s waves were to be even more tumultuous, so he said at last to Mister Collins, “We’ll run for it,” and once more within less than an hour they lost all they had gained in two days.