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Nature of Casualty
Abandoned after trapped in ice. Tornfelt, Evert E., Burwell, Michael, Shipwrecks of the Alaskan Shelf
and Shore, U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region, 1992
The next day [10th] some of the captains sent their men four or five miles father south to the San
Francisco trading brig Victoria. As she was only 149 tons, they hoped she could be lightened enough
to work around the love of ice that rested on shore south of the southern fleet. They failed. With their
last hopes dashed, the men knew that they would have to abandon their ships..... There was no
improvement on the fourteenth. At noon the remaining crew on board the Emily Morgan paid out all the
chain on both her anchors, and at 1:30 P.M., wrote William Earle, "with sad heart [I] order all the men
into the boats and with a last look over the decks abandoned the ship to the mercy of the elements."
The Emily Morgan's men worked their way south in light airs with a hundred other whaleboats insight.
All the ships they passed were already abandoned or their crews were in the last stages of leaving
them. The last ship they saw inshore was the brig Victoria, "hard aground and lying well over on her
side." Bockstoce, John R., Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic,
University of Washington Press, Seattle Washington, 1986:156, 158
William Earle, the [Emily] Morgan's first officer, wrote: The wind being light at SE, were enable to carry our sails,
but one of the boats being very slow, our progress was not very rapid. All of the ships we passed were abandoned or their
crews leaving in their boats. Hundreds of boats were ahead of us, as far was the eye could search. The last vessel we
passed was the brig Victoria of San Francisco, hard aground and being well over on her side. Allen, Everett S.,
Children Of The Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet,
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1973:252
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