Whole Sea Catalogue

By Michael Demarest

CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT by EVERETT S.ALLEN 302 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

Between the cozy certitudes of 19th century New England and the savage, uncharted Arctic Ocean, there was a compelling connection. It was the bowhead whale. A fat, amiable, elegant creature who wound and warbled (in middle C) through the ice pack on his northward journey each spring, Baleana mysticetus grew up to 75 ft. long, weighed about a ton a foot, and returned fortunes to the Quaker entrepreneurs of New Bedford who sold his blubber and bones to make candles and corsets.

The bowhead today is a hard-to-find mammal, and so indeed should be a number of writers who blubber over the fate of the whale. But not Everett S. Allen. In Children of the Light, Allen, a New Bedfordman and writer for that town's redoubtable Standard Times, has put together a marvelous book about everything that went into the financing, building and provisioning of whaling ships, the men who sailed and lost them, the "overweening pursuit of wealth" that drove them to riches and ruin. Allen writes poetically but with a naturalist's restraint about the climate, flora and fauna of the forbidding, fickle northwest corner of Alaska. As few writers have, he describes with nose-to-nose empathy its native Eskimos, an incredibly robust and good-natured people inhabiting one of earth's coldest hells.

Allen's title alludes to the Massachusetts Quakers' view of themselves as a chosen people who assumed "responsibility for economic, political and moral leadership [and] had unflagging faith in the future." Ironically, the Eskimos whose food supplies the whalers had mercilessly decimated also considered themselves the chosen people, and, unlike the whale, have so far survived all the white man's depredations.

Allen discourses with equal ease about walruses and carpenters, shoes and ships, and, yes, sealing wax, about profits and prophets and peaceful coexistence (the Quakers invented the notion), countinghouses and fo'c'sles. Finally, in a chapter that begins on page 210, this whole sea catalogue reaches the subject announced in the second half of its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet.

It is worth waiting for. With the drama of a Melville (a writer, says Allen, who was greatly scorned by whaling men), it re-enacts the entrapment in ice and then the abandonment, in the summer of 1871, of 32 New England whaling ships, the biggest and costliest such fleet ever assembled. The ice closed round the ships and wrecked them. The crews escaped in small whaleboats and were eventually picked up. Of 1,200 men aboard the vessels not a soul was lost. But many a Yankee countinghouse was foreclosed, many a proud harpooner sent back to the plow.

Worse, perhaps, the bowhead had been hunted to death-that leviathan of the Quakers' psalmbook that God put in "this great and wide sea ... to play therein."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.