The Beluga

Hartson Hartlett Bodfish was one of the most experienced American Arctic whalers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born on Martha’s Vineyard in 1862, he first went to sea in 1880 aboard the steam whaling bark Belvedere and spent much of the next four decades working in the Arctic. He eventually commanded vessels including the Beluga, Herman, and William Baylies, making repeated voyages through the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, with stops and wintering grounds that included Point Barrow, Cape Smyth, and Herschel Island. His contemporaries recognized the extent of this experience: in 1908 the Vineyard Gazette described him as “one of the most able and successful Arctic whaling masters of the present time” and noted that he had spent twenty-three successive summers in the Arctic. According to his 1945 New York Times obituary, while commanding the William Baylies he brought 113,000 pounds of whalebone from sixty-three whales into San Francisco, described as the largest such cargo ever landed there.

Bodfish’s historical significance extends well beyond his success as a whaling captain, as he was also a prolific observer of the Arctic world in which he worked. His surviving logbooks record weather and temperature, navigation, sea and ice conditions, whale catches, shipwrecks, trade, wildlife, encounters with Indigenous communities, and the routines of daily life aboard Arctic vessels. Such records now provide historians with evidence for reconstructing the commercial, environmental, and social history of the Arctic, while the systematic meteorological and ice observations contained in whaling logs have also proved valuable for studies of past Arctic climate. Bodfish also photographed his surroundings extensively. The New Bedford Whaling Museum preserves more than one hundred photographs attributed to him depicting vessels, whaling operations, Arctic landscapes, and the people he encountered. Together, these visual and written records make Bodfish not simply a participant in the final decades of American Arctic whaling, but one of its important chroniclers.

The 1900-01 voyage of the Beluga offers a particularly vivid example of the breadth of Bodfish’s Arctic experience. The voyage was part of his much longer whaling career, but it also produced an unusual episode of natural-history collecting. After the ice broke up in 1901, Bodfish acquired two muskox calves in northern Canada. Although one died while still in the Arctic, the surviving animal, affectionately called “Oliver Jones” by the crew, was carried aboard the Beluga to San Francisco and eventually sold to the Bronx Zoo. This marked the first surviving muskox ever brought to the United States. After retiring from whaling and Arctic trading around 1920, Bodfish drew upon decades of experience for his memoir Chasing the Bowhead, published in 1936. Cumulatively, he led one of the most successful careers as an Arctic whaler in American history as part of the last generation of whalers, and his detailed records provide great insight into the life and affairs of whaling voyages around the turn of the century.