Description
Everett S. Allen, through diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts of the period, follows the Quakers from Plymouth Colony to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where these “children of the sunshine” lived and founded an enormously lucrative whaling industry and elevated it to an almost holy activity ordained by God for the enrichment of the “chosen.” Allen recounts the entire story of a famous 1871 Arctic disaster, through which thirty-two vessels within the New Bedford whaling fleet, carrying 1200 officers and crew, found themselves trapped in gale-driven pack ice. The shipwrecked sufferers were miraculously rescued with no single lack of human life. The wear and tear to the fleet, then again, was once something from which New Bedford never fully recovered.