A Whaler's Whaleman

THOMAS WELCOME ROYS was no Captain Ahab.

But like Herman Melville's fictional whaler, the real skipper from Southampton was singleminded in his obsession with cetaceans. And like Ahab, he paid for it with a limb and, ultimately, his life.

Ahab lost a leg to Moby Dick; Roys lost an arm in his quest to modernize and prolong the 19th-Century whaling industry. How that happened is told best matter-of-factly by Roys himself in his memoirs. He was in command of the brig W.F. Safford, sailing off the coast of France in 1856, when he picked up a piece of the latest in whaling technology: a large harpoon gun built for him by one of England's leading mechanical engineers. He fired a practice shot and the charge exploded. But so did the gun. Roys was blown backward 8 feet but remained standing.

``I then saw lying upon the deck,'' he wrote, ``a finger with a ring upon it which I knew, and looking I saw my left hand was gone to the wrist, but for the moment it had given me no pain, only a sensation of numbness. Walking into the cabin, I sat down and had it amputated.'' The gruesome deed was done with razors by his first mate. Roys headed for Portugal for further medical attention but bad weather stretched the voyage to 17 days. Doctors amputated his badly infected lower arm and predicted he would not survive.

But Roys recovered, resuming his work of learning more about whales and discovering better ways to find and kill them. There were successes - a succession of patents and ideas adapted by modern whalers, and world travels that established him as a pioneer of the high seas. But eventually there was failure and heartbreak: The captain died penniless and nearly forgotten.

With his red beard and bright blue eyes, Thomas Roys was a charismatic and determined captain who sailed to places others didn't dare. Guiding his small bark, the Superior, through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean to discover new untapped populations of whales, he resuscitated a flagging industry - and led the way toward the United States' purchase of Alaska.

Yet despite a life of oceangoing romance, adventure and accomplishment, Roys' significance has been largely overlooked, notes the 1980 biography ``Thomas Welcome Roys: America's Pioneer of Modern Whaling,'' by Frederick Schmitt, former curator of the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, and his co-authors.

``It is one of those peculiar ironies of history,'' they wrote, ``that Captain Thomas Welcome Roys, who was well-known to virtually every other skipper in the Yankee whaling trade in the 1850s and 1860s and who contributed more toward the advancement of his industry than any other Nineteenth-Century American whaleman, should have lapsed into the obscurity of perhaps a mere line or two in most whaling source books. Even his name has been mispelled - `Royce' - in all save a few such references . . .''

It's only in Norway, the cradle of modern whaling, that Roys has some fame as a link between the days of whaling under sail and modern industrialized whaling on steel factory ships.

Roys is believed to have been born on a farm in the tiny hamlet of Pultneyville near Lake Ontario about 1816. His old Yankee family traced back seven generations in America. Roys came to Long Island as a teenager and shipped out on the Sag Harbor whaler Hudson in July, 1833. The farmboy's first exposure to life at sea was far from pleasant.

``I had been seasick from the first, lying on the deck, utterly regardless of the men running over me,'' he wrote. He also recalled his first pursuit of whales: ``I did not know how to row and made bad work of it . . . ''

He got used to the sea and learned the trade; eventually he decided to make it his life's work. After returning to Sag Harbor in January, 1835, Roys made two more voyages on the Hudson, working up to the position of harpooner or boat steerer. By 1841, he was in command of his own whaler, the Crescent, proving his mettle when the ship grounded on a reef in the East Indies. When natives gathered, Roys thought it was to prey on the seamen and their cargo. With the ship still immobile after provisions were thrown overboard, Roys ordered all sails set in a gale. The 340-ton vessel was blown completely across the reef and back into deep water.

The Crescent returned to Sag Harbor in August, 1843, after sailing entirely around the world in 23 months. The cruise yielded 1,500 barrels of whale oil and 18,000 pounds of bone worth a staggering $40,000. Roys won raves as a skipper and the heart of Ann Eliza Green, daughter of his first captain. They were married the same month at Southampton.

Roys returned to sea on the Josephine that October and had more adventures. He later wrote of one episode when he thrust his killing lance into a whale and struck a bone. According to Roys, he was caught in a loop of rope and pulled overboard into the middle of the pod.

``A whale buoyed up under me and I was sitting on his back,'' he wrote. ``Thinking this a poor place to rest I sprang up and jumped as far as I could from him . . . right upon the head of another whale. I tumbled off this whale's head and was thrown by the flukes of a third whale back into the boat again entirely unharmed, and catching up my lance I killed 3 of them at a single lance each . . .'' Later in the voyage Roys was in a whaleboat that was cut in two by the flukes of a whale; he ended up with two broken ribs.

To continue filling their holds, whale ships in the Pacific Ocean were moving closer and closer to the Arctic but none had ventured as far as the Bering Sea. Many whalers believed anyone who fished north of the Bering Strait would be crushed in the ice or killed by natives.

But after Roys learned from the captain of a Danish whale ship in 1845 about an unusual type of whale in far northern waters, he was determined to investigate. His opportunity came when he took command of the Superior in 1847. No other captains would accompany him, so he ``then resolved to go it alone.'' He made this decision soon after learning that his wife had died in childbirth.

His course for the Bering Strait sparked the mental breakdown of his chief officer and a near mutiny among the rest of the crew. Roys pressed on and soon confronted the ``polar whale'' he had heard about. Roys noted that the hunt could not have been easier: The whales, now known as bowheads, acted ``tame'' and were easily harpooned.

Roys returned after a month in the Arctic with 1,800 barrels of oil, and the following year 154 ships followed his lead to the Arctic and returned with cargoes worth $3.5 million. The influx of American mariners helped set the stage for the United States' purchase of Alaska in 1867.

Roys was a leader whose great charisma led many officers and crew to sail with him on voyage after voyage. But the harsh trips to the Arctic were something else. Even though he had hand-picked a complement of officers and crew filled with relatives and friends after his problems on the first trip to the Arctic, not all his crew was as determined as its captain. In February, 1850, Roys had to put down a threatened mutiny by placing the six ring leaders in irons. He learned of the plot after climbing out of a cabin window and hiding near the bow ``where I heard the planning of my own death, all my officers and all my crew excepting these six.''

Commanding the Sheffield, the largest whale ship ever to sail from Long Island, Roys also endured a fierce storm in the eastern Pacific. ``The typhoon was upon us in all its withering power,'' Roys wrote.

``Sails, masts, yards, boats, bulwarks, all are flying in wild confusion over the lee, while the ship broaches and defies the helm.'' Conditions in the Arctic could also be terrible. Storms were frequent and even in calm weather, Roys said, the Sheffield once dragged her 3,000-pound anchors at a rate of 6 miles an hour.

After returning home in January, 1854, after 54 months, Roys lost his zeal for whaling for pure economic gain and became more interested in researching whales and discovering new whaling grounds. Saying that whaling had become ``the whole study of my life,'' Roys would often stop his ship to observe marine creatures. He eschewed killing whales that were overhunted - right, sperm and bowhead whales - and concentrated on untapped rorquals instead. He began trading information with scientists and produced a 29-page manuscript illustrated with his own drawings, describing 16 species, including the first writings on a whale type he called the Bunch Back because of its large hump. It turned out to be a sub-species of the bow head that was later named in his honor.

Roys also spurred interest in the orca or killer whale, at the time virtually unknown to Americans. He wrote an account of how the killer whales would attack other types of whales by seizing their tongues and drowning them. Roys married a second time after meeting Marie Salliord in France. She was about 20 - half his age - and they were married in 1860, settling among other whaling families on ``Blubber Row'' in Peconic. But Roys suffered another mutiny of sorts: His young wife later ran off with one of his former mates.

Meanwhile, despite his concerns about declining populations of whales, Roys continued tinkering with better equipment for killing them. In January, 1861, he received his first U.S. patent for improvements on harpoon guns, devising a way to shoot harpoons connected to large rockets weighing up to 20 pounds with accuracy and without injuring the shooter.

Later that year, Roys teamed up with Gustavus Lilliendahl, a New York City-based pyrotechnist, and they spent several futile years in Iceland trying to fine-tune their equipment.

They were more successful with other ventures. In 1865 the partners set up the first modern shore whaling station in Iceland, using small steamboats to go out after whales that were killed with the rocket harpoons. Their experiments proved that large quantities of oil could be extracted from parts of the whale previously discarded, such as bones and entrails.

But Roys sold his interest in the Iceland whaling venture and returned to the United States in 1866. He tried selling his inventions in New York, but then, restless as a salesman, shipped out to try whaling again in San Francisco, British Columbia and Hawaii. In 1876 he arrived in San Diego, joined a ship and contracted yellow fever. He was put ashore at the rundown Mexican fishing port of Mazatlan, where an American doctor found him on the street, broke and mentally incapacitated. The doctor took Roys to his home, where he died a week later from a stroke.

The local American consul collected $60 from expatriate Americans to pay for the funeral.