Introduction: Outward bound

Soon after nightfall on 19 August 1727 four men attacked Charles Rambouillet, an officer of the venerable First Regiment of Foot Guards who was out walking in one of London's wealthiest districts. Having taken his wallet, watch, cane, hat and a ring, and leaving him badly hurt, Rambouillet's assailants vanished unrecognised into the night.1 Rambouillet's mugging was one of a string of crimes encouraged by the fact that London was among Europe's darkest cities. One resident, the writer Daniel Defoe, complained in 1729 that "London, that used to be the most safe and peaceful city in the universe, is now become a scene of rapine and danger". Defoe demanded that the streets of London be brightly illuminated at night in order to make life in the city after dusk as safe as it was after dawn.2

At the time of Defoe's death in 1731 the state of London's street lights had barely improved, with no more than approximately one thousand municipal lights in the whole city. Though London - alongside Ayutthaya, Edo, Constantinople and Paris - was one of the world's largest cities, in a sense it comprised two completely different places - "one by day and another by night", as the historian Eric Dolin put it.3 Yet by the early 1740s - when Charles Rambouillet, having survived his ordeal, was looking forward to retirement - London was considered probably the best illuminated cities in the world. In the space of only a few years the authorities had erected no fewer than five thousand oil lamps, to which were added another ten thousand in the 1760s and 1770s. By 1780, the Oxford Road alone could boast more street lamps than all of Paris, where street lighting had begun a hundred years earlier. Illuminating London brought about a marked decline in nocturnal crime and set an example for the country as a whole, with thousands of street lamps put up in Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere.4

England's streets were at first illuminated chiefly by rapeseed oil. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, however, whale oil and spermaceti became the fuels of choice instead. Whale oil, which was obtained from the blubber of whales, burned more brightly than rapeseed oil and came with the added benefit of not producing soot. Spermaceti, a waxy liquid found in the "case" (forehead) and "junk" (the "melon" or nose) of the sperm whale, was considered a particularly valuable fuel and could be used in lamps as well as being turned into candles.5 In order to encourage production of whale oil - few British vessels were fitted out for whaling in the early eighteenth century - the government doubled its bounty on whalers from twenty to forty shillings per ton in 1750.6

Combined with increasing demand, this measure caused a precipitate rise in British whaling from 1753 onwards. Yet demand continued to exceed supply, as Britain's nascent manufacturing industry required whale oil as a lubricant and detergent. At this time most of Britain's whale oil was imported from the North American colonies, especially from Massachusetts, where whalers specialised in the particularly valuable oil of the sperm whale. "The purest sperm oil lubricated the finest machines of the industrial revolution, illuminated the nation's lighthouses and along with spermaceti candles lit the interiors of factories and the better houses", notes the historian Dale Chatwin with regard to the economic significance of sperm whale products.7 In 1754 the New England colonies exported some 4,000 tuns of whale oil to London alone, rising to 5,000 tuns in 1763 and 8,000 tuns in 1771.8 Unlike their British counterparts, Massachusetts whalers set sail not for the seas between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans but rather southwards, where whaling vessels had hitherto barely ventured. Charting the hunting grounds of the central and south Atlantic Ocean marked the beginning of the ascent of America's whaling industry, which was to remain the largest in the world for more than a century.

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As the first London streets went up in lights, in May 1739 slavers in Anomabu, an entrepôt on the coast of modern Ghana, loaded eighty-seven human beings onto the Charming Susanna, which had sailed from Rhode Island. Among them was Broteer Furro, a boy from the hinterland barely ten years old for whom the ship's steward, Robertson Mumford, had paid an intermediary four gallons of rum and a piece of cloth. In so doing, Mumford had taken advantage of an ancient privilege allowing seamen to run their own little sidelines in the course of trading voyages. These transactions were known as "ventures", and "Venture" was the name Mumford gave to young Broteer Furro, whom he brought to the coast of Connecticut as his domestic servant in August 1739.9

Venture was sold on several times in his adult life. Although his work as a slave was by definition unpaid, he undertook other jobs and was able to save enough to buy - as only very few slaves in the American colonies could at the time - his freedom from his master in 1765. Venture adopted the surname Smith and moved to Long Island, where he earned enough money to buy the freedom of his wife and three children. For several years he cut timber by day and caught fish by night, occasionally also finding time to sell watermelons to seamen.10

In 1770 Venture signed aboard a whaler. Aware of the growing demand for whale oil, the last of his owners, Oliver Smith, a merchant and shipbuilder from Stonington, Connecticut had put together a crew of some twenty African and Native American workers and arranged for their hire by a Nantucket shipowner, William Rotch, who fitted out whaling vessels for Atlantic voyages.11 "After being out seven months", Venture Smith later recalled, "the vessel returned, laden with four hundred barrels of oil."12 This was a very rich haul indeed by the standards of time, and with his share, in addition to the money saved up from his previous jobs, Smith was able not only to buy his family out of slavery, but also to purchase a plot of land in Stonington. Venture's eldest son Solomon also shipped out on a whaler in 1773. Yet this voyage, unlike his father's, brought only misfortune to the family when Solomon died of scurvy.13

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On 30 September 1791 two ships left the port of Nantucket, an island south of Cape Cod and not far from Venture Smith's property on the coast of Connecticut. The Asia and the Alliance were headed for the Indian Ocean, where they were to explore new whaling and sealing grounds. These, it was hoped, would contribute to reviving Nantucket's economy, which depended heavily on whale oil and related products and had suffered greatly as a result of the American war of independence (1775-1783). After stops at the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands and Trinidade the two vessels reached the Cape of Good Hope in January 1792. In order to make essential repairs and to take on board water, timber and cattle, they put to anchor for days at a time first at Cape Town and then at Saldanha Bay, continuing their eastward journey in February. The Alliance and the Asia crisscrossed the Indian Ocean for several months using a copy of the chart drawn up by James Cook on his third voyage and finally reached Australia. However, they caught only few whales along the way. After putting in at Port Louis in Mauritius, where merchants told the crew about the annual migration of humpback whales along the coast of Madagascar, the two vessels set sail for that island's north-eastern shore. There, in August they discovered a rich hunting ground for humpback whales off the island of Sainte-Marie. The Asia and the Alliance were probably the first whaling vessels to reach that part of the Indian Ocean.14

Early in the morning of 29 August - the crew had just spent the night trying out the carcass of a humpback whale caught the day before - the Alliance was approached by canoe. Fifteen men clambered over the gunwales, one of whom, "an exceeding old Gentleman with a long beard" according to the ship's log, introduced himself as a representative of the "king" of Sainte-Marie. Though the seamen marvelled at the men's peculiar dress and curiously platted hair, they accorded no great significance to this visit, such deputations from local potentates and merchants being fairly commonplace occurrences on board whalers in coastal waters. Bartlett Coffin, master of the Alliance, agreed to receive the king the next day, whereupon the visitors left the ship.15

The following morning the crew were storing away their recent batch of whale oil in the ship's hold when they saw five large canoes heading straight for the Asia and the Alliance. On hearing shell trumpets sound from the canoes and musket shots from the island, the officers of the two ships lost no time in responding. One of them recalled reading in the journals of Captain Cook that "the Blowing of the Shell never was known to denote peace".16 Bartlett Coffin gave the order to cut and run. Meanwhile Elijah Coffin, his counterpart in command of the Asia, had begun to hoist up the anchor before realising...