"This vessel, with all sail set, is evidently in haste to reach her home port, the signals perhaps announcing her success on the whaling grounds. As Captain Timothy C. Packard was in command in 1868 it is safe to say that this water color was done about that time. Captain Frederick S. Howland was in charge of her five years previously.
Her owners were Henry Taber & Co., one of the leading firms in the industry. During her career a few accidents occurred, one being occasioned when a whale, after being struck by the harpooner, turned on one of her boats and sank it. It is recorded that in one instance a seaman actually spent a night on a dead whale before being rescued.
This bark was one of the thirty-four whalers lost in the ice floes in the Arctic in 1871.
Several authenticated and amusing stories of whaling voyages might be introduced here. Captain Frederick Fish, father of the late Frederick P Fish and Charles H Fish, of Boston, was one of the best known and most respected of the whaling captains sailing out of New Bedford. He commanded the 'Montreal' and the 'Columbus' when only twenty-two years old, made nine voyages around the world, and was one of the most successful whalers of his day. Captain Fish was an excellent story teller, and a yarn has been handed down in connection with one of his cruises. The voyage had been very unsuccessful, and as he was looking over his chart he tossed his dividers down in a disgruntled manner, and by accident they chanced to stick in the chart. He then conceived the novel idea of sailing to the very place where his instrument happened to land, and curiously enough he was rewarded by a very large catch.
Once when one of his whaleboats had been overturned by a fighting whale, Captain Fish hurried to the assistance of the crew, who were struggling in the water, and to his amazement he found two of them squabbling over the ownerships of a pair of old shoes!
Llewellyn Howland adds an interesting tale concerning Captain Fish. 'One evening, after a meeting in Boston, Mr. Frederick P. Fish and I shared the same cab on our way home to Brookline. In the course of conversation I congratulated him on his success in life, both as a lawyer and a man. Sighing, he replied: 'Success -- yes -- as a lawyer but, I shall never know as to being a man -- as my father did; for once in the Indian Ocean he hung on, all night, to the plug-strap of a capsized whaleboat with one hand and supported the only surviving member of the boat's crew with the other until they were rescued by the ship the following forenoon. After that father knew he was a man.'"
See Allan Forbes, Whale Ships and Whaling Scenes as Portrayed by Benjamin Russell. Presenting Reproductions in Color of the Paintings of the Foremost Artist in That Field (Boston: Printed for the Second Bank-State Street Trust Co, 1955), 61-2.
