Sea of Gray - Softcover

Tom Chaffin's other books include Giant's Causeway: Frederick Douglass's Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary and  Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire. His writing have also appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, Harper's, and other publications. He lives in Atlanta.

Excerpted from Sea of Gray by Tom Chaffin. Copyright © 2006 by Tom Chaffin. Published February 2006 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
One

Of Ice Floes and Arctic Fires

It was just past 1:00 a.m., June 28, 1865, a few tilting spins of the earth beyond the year’s longest day. And in the Bering Strait the hazy summer dawn breaking over the blue-white ice floes crowding its waters revealed a curious tableau: framed by the dark, distant, snow-crowned headlands to the east and west and, at a lower elevation, the two flat- and sheer-sided Diomede Islands tucked between those mainland heights, rose a forest of masts, sails, and rigging. Closer inspection revealed a listing three-masted whaleship. Moored to it by a web of radiating ropes bobbed five smaller vessels, the thirty-five-foot whaleboats that, on better days, the whaleship dispatched to harpoon the bowhead whales that brought white men to these remote climes. And, completing the scene, forming its outer perimeter, nine other whaling vessels swung at anchor in the eerily calm waters of this 37° F cloudless Arctic morning.

A day earlier the winds that often slice through this storied icy gut dividing North America and Asia had roiled those waters; swells had blown the Brunswick—the now-listing ship from New Bedford, Massachusetts—against one of the ice floes. During the summer these chunks of ice drift northward from the Pacific to the Arctic through this fifty-mile-wide passage between Siberia’s western and Alaska’s eastern shores.

The collision stove a hole below the Brunswick’s waterline, breaching the wooden planking and the copper-alloy sheathing of her hull. Afterward the ship’s officers and crew had done their best to still the rush of seawater into the ship’s holds. But the ship’s master, Alden T. Potter, knew that, with more than a thousand miles of water between them and the nearest shipyard, he and his crew had little hope of repairing the vessel. In the meantime, all he could do was what American captains had always done in such situations: raise Old Glory upside down to signal their distress to any ships that might sail by.

This being a busy passage in a busy whaling season, nine other vessels, all flying the U.S. flag, soon lay anchored along side the crippled Brunswick.