Twenty-four hours after she had sailed bravely from New Bedford on what was to be her “last voyage,” the staunch old bark, Wanderer, last of New Bedford’s once glorious fleet of square-rigged whaling vessels, came to a tragic end off Cuttyhunk island late Tuesday afternoon, when mountainous seas and a shrieking northeast gale drover her on to the jagged teeth of Middle Ground shoals.
Capt. Ellsworth Luce West, last of the Vineyard whaling captains, died at his home on the Middle Road, Chilmark, on Sunday nigh, following some months of failing health. He was in his 85th year and although feeble physically for some time, his faculties had remained active until his death. As an authority on the Arctic, his last days had been spent in the dictation of a volume on Arctic phenomena and his Alaskan experiences. He was also collaborating with Vilhjalmur Stefansson the explorer, in recreating in print various phrases of the whaling era.
You can name the place, date, and even the hour that whaling died as an industry on Martha’s Vineyard -- 1:30 in the afternoon of Sept. 14, 1871, in a strip of icy water only 18 feet deep and barely wide enough for a whaling ship to swing in a full circle around her anchor.
On Wednesday the former whaling schooner Hattie Smith was granted new documents at the Custom House here and her port of hail changed to New York. She is the last of Edgartown’s once extensive fleet of whaling vessels, and the present is the first time since the days of the Ship Apollo in 1818 that Edgartown has not had a vessel of the above character hailing from the port.
Hon. Samuel Osborn, Jr., of Edgartown, died at his residence on Summer street last Friday evening at about eight o'clock, after an illness of several months of Bright's disease and accompanying complications.
No single event finished off whaling, of course. It was doomed from the moment in 1859 when geologists discovered oil in the crust of Pennsylvania. Then came the piracy and scuttling of whaling ships during the Civil War (including the Edgartown whaler Ocmulgee, sunk by the Confederate raider Alabama), the loss of most of the New England fleet to Arctic ice in 1871, and the transfer of investment by the richest Vineyarders from whaling to the resorts at Oak Bluffs and Katama during the post-war building boom.
