eBay Tuesday: Letter From The "Georgia"

While I do enjoy digging through online archives and e-mail resources for eBay Tuesday, this week the seller has done much of the work for me. The listing for this 1846 letter from steersman David Henry Chapman gives a look at what it was like to work on a whaling ship.

Chapman served aboard the whaling ship Georgia, and wrote this letter to John Henriques from the ship on July 14, 1846. At this point, the vessel was one month into its voyage out from New London under Captain Charles Hull. By the time Chapman pens the letter, the Georgia is near the Azores and the crew has done some training with lowering and rowing the boats. Chapman relates that quite a bit of the crew are greenhorns, one getting knocked overboard by an oar during the exercises, but that he is doing his best to get them into shape.

"The old man is death on the green hands," Chapman confides. "I would not sail with him as a green hand for the ship and cargo."

Chapman also finds a few things to complain about in the solace of the letter besides the rookie crew. These include the difficulty in writing a letter on a dark, pitching ship as well as the lack of women in the North Atlantic. He also mentions how he is afflicted with a severe sore throat, but is stoic on this point.

"I have not eat a mouthful, I could not swallow my spittle, but I say never give up the ship as long as there is a shot in the locker," he writes.

The seller, deadmanspocket, pieces together the background of the people and vessels in the letter through sources such as the Mystic Seaport website, the National Maritime Digital Library index of American offshore whaling voyages, and Ancestry.com. Charles Hull, according to the National Maritime Digital Library, had captained the Georgia on two other occasions from 1841 to 1843 and 1843 to 1846.

As for Henriques, mistakenly referred to as Hendriques, he was born in 1826 but had already been in the Merchant Marine for five years. He would eventually become a captain in the United States Revenue Service and, according to the , Henriques ran the first cadet training ships and was first superintendent of the Revenue Cutter School of Instruction (later the Coast Guard Academy), serving until 1883. He would also serve in the Spanish-American War before his death in 1906.

Chapman was only 20 when he received his Seamen's Protection Certificate in New London on June 19, 1846. The Georgia's voyage took it into the Pacific, where it sailed near Hawaii, Chile, and the northwestern coast of the United States. The ship headed back to New London with 25 barrels of spermaceti and 2,300 barrels of whale oil, arriving in May of 1848. It would be the last voyage of the ship, built in 1805 in New York City; the vessel was broken up the next year.

It would also be the last voyage for Chapman. According to the seller, he died on Jan. 19, 1848 while still aboard the Georgia, and was buried in New London.

The seller tells me he purchased this in an antique store in Windham County last year. The writing is described as "bold and very legible," the paper in good condition with some minor damage from where the wax used to seal it stuck a little too well. The starting bid asked for is $150, with free shipping from Ashaway, R.I. The auction ends at 11:30 p.m. tonight.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.