Forties by way of Cape Horn—Eliza, Mary Lawrence, and the other whaling wives became, each in her own fashion, champion tourists.
“It will be a pleasant sight to me to see land, even though it be a bleak, foreighn Island of the Sea,” Eliza had written in October 1858, as the Florida approached the first landfall after leaving New Bedford. It was the island of Brava, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. After weeks aboard ship, and in complete ignorance of what it would take to get there, Eliza agreed to accompany Thomas ashore. It was no pleasure trip:
OCTOBER 12TH [1858].
The wind not fair to get the Ship in to the harbor; concluded to row there in one of the small boats. My Husband said I could go with him, but I most repented it before we got there. It got quite rugged, and they had to go some ten miles to get into harbor—
Any sailor will appreciate that “rugged” would be an understatement to describe a ten-mile upwind row and sail in a light whaleboat off an Atlantic island. The small boat was frequently swamped with waves that drenched Eliza, the captain, and the crew. Eliza was frightened, but Thomas told her there was no danger, and the she believed him.
They had stopped at Brava to buy food and supplies, and to recruit additional crewmen from among the fishermen in the port where their boat landed, but business kept them there overnight. The only accommodations were in “the city,” a three-mile ride by donkey up a steep mountain trail. At times on the way up, Eliza “could hardely refrain from screaming, for it seemed to me that the poor faithful animal must fall.” But her terror was relieved by the sight of her husband close behind: “I would look at him once in a while and laugh in spite of my fear, for he looked so comical on that little Jackass and he so tall, with his long legs coming most to the ground.”
Eliza’s gaze at the islanders, and her description of their clothing, were clear and—rare for a New England whaling wife—without any kind of censuring prejudice. She was even capable of seeing herself through native eyes: “I suppose we looked as strange to them as they did to us, dressed so different as we were.”
Mary Lawrence’s attitude toward natives everywhere was framed by a rigid Christian superiority. She could not see a people and their culture, only a substandard race of creatures that needed uplifting: “I confess that I am disappointed in the appearance of the natives,” she wrote from Lahaina, in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, in 1857.
They are not nearly so far advanced in civilization as I had supposed. Why, the good folks at home pretend to hold them up as a model from which we would do well to copy. I do not doubt but that there has been a great deal done for them, but there is a vast deal more to be done to raise them very high in the scale of morals. From what I saw and heard of them (and I made many enquiries) they are a low, degraded, indolent set. They have no apartments in their houses; all huddle in together. Many of them go without clothing; both sexes bathe in the water entirely naked, unabashed. As I am writing, two men are close by my door without an article of clothing.
(Mary Lawrence’s first view of the edenic island of Maui and the mountain slope rising through the clouds behind Lahaina was just as blinkered: “I looked in vain for a resemblance to my own dear native land.”)
This was the normal, accepted Victorian perception, which, even after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, tended to see Adam and Eve as rather Teutonic-looking northern Europeans, and everyone else, particularly darker races, as benighted, fallen versions of the Scripture-credentialed ideal. A view easy to take issue with 150 years later, but it underscores the freshness and open-mindedness with which Eliza Williams saw the world. In Hakodate, Japan, Eliza described Japanese harbor officials as “dressed
“It will be a pleasant sight to me to see land, even though it be a bleak, foreighn Island of the Sea,” Eliza had written in October 1858, as the Florida approached the first landfall after leaving New Bedford. It was the island of Brava, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. After weeks aboard ship, and in complete ignorance of what it would take to get there, Eliza agreed to accompany Thomas ashore. It was no pleasure trip:
OCTOBER 12TH [1858].
The wind not fair to get the Ship in to the harbor; concluded to row there in one of the small boats. My Husband said I could go with him, but I most repented it before we got there. It got quite rugged, and they had to go some ten miles to get into harbor—
Any sailor will appreciate that “rugged” would be an understatement to describe a ten-mile upwind row and sail in a light whaleboat off an Atlantic island. The small boat was frequently swamped with waves that drenched Eliza, the captain, and the crew. Eliza was frightened, but Thomas told her there was no danger, and the she believed him.
They had stopped at Brava to buy food and supplies, and to recruit additional crewmen from among the fishermen in the port where their boat landed, but business kept them there overnight. The only accommodations were in “the city,” a three-mile ride by donkey up a steep mountain trail. At times on the way up, Eliza “could hardely refrain from screaming, for it seemed to me that the poor faithful animal must fall.” But her terror was relieved by the sight of her husband close behind: “I would look at him once in a while and laugh in spite of my fear, for he looked so comical on that little Jackass and he so tall, with his long legs coming most to the ground.”
Eliza’s gaze at the islanders, and her description of their clothing, were clear and—rare for a New England whaling wife—without any kind of censuring prejudice. She was even capable of seeing herself through native eyes: “I suppose we looked as strange to them as they did to us, dressed so different as we were.”
Mary Lawrence’s attitude toward natives everywhere was framed by a rigid Christian superiority. She could not see a people and their culture, only a substandard race of creatures that needed uplifting: “I confess that I am disappointed in the appearance of the natives,” she wrote from Lahaina, in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, in 1857.
They are not nearly so far advanced in civilization as I had supposed. Why, the good folks at home pretend to hold them up as a model from which we would do well to copy. I do not doubt but that there has been a great deal done for them, but there is a vast deal more to be done to raise them very high in the scale of morals. From what I saw and heard of them (and I made many enquiries) they are a low, degraded, indolent set. They have no apartments in their houses; all huddle in together. Many of them go without clothing; both sexes bathe in the water entirely naked, unabashed. As I am writing, two men are close by my door without an article of clothing.
(Mary Lawrence’s first view of the edenic island of Maui and the mountain slope rising through the clouds behind Lahaina was just as blinkered: “I looked in vain for a resemblance to my own dear native land.”)
This was the normal, accepted Victorian perception, which, even after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, tended to see Adam and Eve as rather Teutonic-looking northern Europeans, and everyone else, particularly darker races, as benighted, fallen versions of the Scripture-credentialed ideal. A view easy to take issue with 150 years later, but it underscores the freshness and open-mindedness with which Eliza Williams saw the world. In Hakodate, Japan, Eliza described Japanese harbor officials as “dressed
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