Requiem for Ahab

Chapter 1

Loomings 


I was not quite seven years old when my father died. His name was Ahab, and he was captain of the whaleship Pequod out of Nantucket. She sank off the Solomon Islands in March 1843, with all hands lost save for one sailor who was picked up two days later by another whaleship—the Rachel, captained by Josiah Gardiner—that was searching for its own lost crewmen in yet another of the mishaps that made whaling a dangerous and often fatal enterprise. The Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford never lacked for new names to be engraved on the markers that adorned its spare white walls … markers that would never see a graveyard, memorializing sailors who would never again see the land. My father’s name was not among them. Ahab was an outcast, this being the result of the unspoken sentiment of a whaling community that resented the loss of ship and sailors not in the normal course of a dangerous trade but rather because of one man’s madness … or so it was said. The only available facts were collected during a brief official inquiry into the loss of the Pequod, facts derived mainly from the testimony of the lone survivor, a sailor identified only by the name Ishmael.

These things I was to learn much later in life. I knew nothing of them as a child growing up. I entered the world kicking and screaming on an unseasonably warm mid-June day in 1836. I was named Thomas, after my mother’s father … also a whaling captain … also lost at sea. Ahab was there to witness the blessed event and no doubt held me as any new father would, but I was still a babe in arms when he set off on yet another of the seemingly continuous whaling voyages that resulted in his being largely absent from my life from the time of my birth until his death. My mother Hannah was much younger than my father, by some 20 years. I knew very little of the circumstances of their meeting or their life together as a married couple, my mother being reluctant to talk of that time in her life, especially that period after Ahab received a terrible wound from a whale that resulted in the loss of his leg below the knee. Upon Ahab’s return home, the mood in the household changed to the point where, even as a child, I was able to understand that some terrible and sad cloud now hung over us. One of my few strong memories from that period is the sound of his ivory leg thumping against the wooden floor as he paced restlessly from one room to another, long into the night.

The death of Ahab at sea left my mother alone and without means of support by which to raise a small child. She returned to live with her mother, but both soon realized that New Bedford was not the ideal place to raise a small child. It was decided that we would go to Cohasset—a small town located about 20 miles south of Boston along the coast—to live with an aging maiden aunt who could provide a home for mother and me in return for cooking and housekeeping. After two years of caring for Aunt Polly, my mother met and married the man I came to consider my father, Aaron Stoddard. Soon after that, my grandmother in New Bedford died unexpectedly from scarlet fever, leaving us no reason to return to the place of my birth. I was by then twelve years old and had very little memory remaining of New Bedford or of Ahab. The one thing I have from that time is a piece of scrimshaw that he carved on one of his voyages: a whale tooth that depicted a ship sailing past an island under scudding clouds. I used to stare at it on my dresser and wonder what it was like to sail the Seven Seas in search of whales, but that life would remain forever a mystery to me, as would Ahab.

The father I did know and love was as tireless as he was energetic. A compact man with a strong body and a friendly demeanor—but don’t get found to be cheating or lying, for then the storm clouds would swiftly gather across his brow—he ran a ship chandler’s business that provided comfortably for my mother and myself and my half-sister, Abby. After Abby was born, we moved to a larger house that could better accommodate the needs of a growing family. That would have been in 1848, when Stockbridge Street was little more than a widened pathway bounded at both ends by the harbor. Our house was set on a small hill that overlooked a cove and the wider harbor beyond it. Behind us were marshes and woodlands perfectly suited to a small boy’s thirst for exploration and adventure. As befitted a man of my father’s growing importance in the town’s commercial affairs, we lived in a comfortable two-story clapboard house, with a first floor living area and basement that held a kitchen. The second floor held three bedrooms, two of which were arranged such that my sister had to walk through my room to get to hers … but at least I had the larger of the two.

At the back edge of the property sat a barn, where the horse and carriage were kept. Hay would drift down from the loft above, where my mother often found me stealing a nap on a hot summer afternoon. I used to love swinging open the wide doors of the loft and hanging on the block and tackle used to haul hay bales to the loft … but only when mother was not watching. In winter, the slope behind the house became a place for sledding and snowball fights between my sister and I and the other children who lived on our street, mostly the sons and daughters of the recent wave of Portuguese immigrants who provided many of the captains and crewmen who manned the fishing schooners that set out in search of mackerel. In summer, my mother maintained a vegetable garden where the fruits and vegetables we ate and preserved for winter were grown and harvested. A rose garden shaped like a horseshoe adorned the front of the plot facing Stockbridge Street. I still remember the fragrances from those roses, as sharp in my memory as the thorns that would occasionally prick my overeager fingers reaching for an especially full bloom for the vase my mother liked to have at our table.

I was given a good education through high school—where I was an average student save in the mathematical disciplines, where I displayed a natural facility for numbers and calculations—and was well positioned to assume a hard-working and hopefully successful position in my father’s ship chandlery business. Perhaps due to some residual fear instilled in me because of Ahab’s death at sea, I was a confirmed landlubber. The other children could handle a skiff as easily as walking across the street. I preferred to keep my feet on the ground, and so never worked at getting my sea legs. Despite my aversion to the sea, I soon found myself immersed in things maritime as a consequence of working in the chandlery. My nonexistent aptitude as a seaman was more than offset by my practical skills in the keeping of the accounts and the inventory. I also developed no small ability as a bargainer, such being the nature of our business that trade was as often barter as it was cash money. I was content in my life as Aaron Stoddard’s son, until something happened that compelled me to think again about my father … my real father. That something was the War of the Rebellion.

Chapter 2

Brook Farm 


Sentiment against slavery had always run strongly in Cohasset, as it did in the whole of Massachusetts and New England. My younger sister Abby was especially strident in her feelings about the issue, the result being more than one meal that ended in tense stares across the table between her and father. Not that his feelings were any less abolitionist than Abby’s. His was more the stolid resolve of maturity, the flint upon which the fiery enthusiasm of youth strikes itself. As a result, sparks flew on more than one occasion. The issue was complicated by my father’s traditional views about women and their role in the anti-slavery movement that had swept across the region over the previous decade. My sister was full of ideas about modern women, ideas my father was none too pleased to hear or discuss, certainly not over his beefsteak, where debate often lead to choleric outbursts upsetting to the digestion.

My mother tried to make peace, and I just tried to stay out of it. That ended in April 1861, when President Lincoln—the descendant of a long line of Cohasset Lincolns, a branch of which went west many years before—called for volunteers to fight in support of the Union against the rebellion that was instigated by the attack on Fort Sumter. War had been brewing for several months, and when it finally came I knew immediately that I wanted to enlist. My family was as unprepared for my decision to volunteer as I was to fight, with all of us feeling the anxiety of not knowing what comes next. My father blustered and asked many questions, but always with the resignation that came from a debater who knew his argument was lost. My mother gave me a look and then burst into tears and fled the room, much to my father’s and my own chagrin and astonishment. As for Abby, she looked at me with a new sense of interest, as if I were some creature who had just ambled out of the woods, a creature that she was seeing for the first time.

I missed the first round of volunteers, but in May 1861 I found myself at Camp Andrew—located at what was formerly known as Brook Farm in West Roxbury, a site created to pursue a Utopian dream now turned to the arts of war—assigned to Company C of the Second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a position I attained by virtue of a well-placed word from our minister, the Rev. Trueblood, to the man most responsible for organizing the regiment, Colonel Gordon. The days were long, beginning with Reveille at 4:45 a.m. and ending with Taps at 9:30 p.m. We drilled and marched and drilled some more, in between times having meals, guard postings, and rifle practice with our Enfield rifle muskets … Springfields when we could get them. This was the first time I had fired a weapon of any kind—my father not having had firearms in his household—and I found the experience to be quite an adventure. I displayed better than expected marksmanship, although the business of reloading the rifles was difficult to master, especially in the rapid manner urged upon us by our drill sergeant. The time spent mastering the skill of rapid reloading was time well spent, as I would soon enough find out. When we received our uniforms—the blue uniform of the regular army instead of state-issued uniforms, this at the insistence of Colonel Gordon—I felt like a proper soldier, even if only in appearance.

At length, we received orders to move out for battle. Trains and wagons, steamboats and feet carried us southward through New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland until we reached Martinsburg in western Virginia, all of which travels took six days. We spent the winter operating in and around Harper’s Ferry and near Frederick in Maryland. After months of ranging throughout the Shenandoah Valley, we got our first real taste of battle at Cedar Mountain in early August 1862. The weather was as hot as the fighting would prove to be. We were outnumbered nearly two to one, and the enemy drew our blood in large numbers, with nearly one-third of our regiment killed or wounded.

By then, my views on war and on being a warrior had matured considerably. War itself seemed a process of blindly stumbling through a strange and often hostile countryside, chasing after an enemy that was first here, then there, but rarely where you were, and when finally met in battle, blindly fired at until one or the other side called it off and was gone as suddenly as they appeared. My chief concern was to avoid injury and to not shame myself in front of my fellow soldiers.

Despite my inner fears, I must have conveyed some sense of competence because I received a promotion to sergeant after Cedar Mountain, our ranks having been sorely depleted. Then, in September of that year, we met the enemy in the cornfields of Antietam, where again our losses were heavy. I entered Antietam a sergeant and came out a Second Lieutenant as we approached what for me became a fateful encounter with the rebs at a small town in Pennsylvania—Gettysburg. Here the fog and confusion of battle came together with disastrous results for me and my fellow soldiers of the 2d Massachusetts.


End of Sample

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