A whaleship at war

Retired teacher's book follows New London vessel forced into milital}' service

0n Sept. 29, 1846, the whaleship Stonington, three years out of New London, was off the Pacific coast when it arrived at San Diego, then a small town.

The plan was to make some quick repairs and head home. But the place had become swept up in a war between Mexico and the United States, and residents needed the crew's help.

What followed was apparently unique in the annals of American whaling. The Stonington was commandeered by U.S. officials and pressed into government service, taking orders from the Navy.

The incident has been a footnote in local maritime history, never explored in any depth. It's now the subj ect of a book by a retired teacher who spent a decade researching what happened.

"Course Change: The Whaleship Stonington in the Mexican-American War" reveals a strange adventure in which men who had gone to sea for profit instead found themselves aiding a military operation, no longer in control of their fate.

Author Peter J. Emanuel Jr., who taught for 29 years at the Williams School in New London, found the obscure story by chance and realized it was worth telling.

In 2012, Mystic Seaport was looking for teachers to research neglected items in the museum's vast collection. The goal was to find new material to enhance its website.

"That got my attention right away," said Emanuel, 71, who taught music and history at different times.

The application process involved picking three things from a list of topics. "One of the items in the list that caught my eye was 'logbook of the whaleship Stonington,"' he said.

The name suggested a local connection, which turned out to be a personal one as well. The Stonington belonged to Williams & Barns,a New London firm owned by Thomas Williams II. He is the namesake of the Williams School.

Intrigued, Emanuel started browsing the logbook, which had been digitized and put online. At first, every page had three or four days' worth of entries noting latitude and longitude, weather and whale sightings. In a word, it was boring. But that soon changed.

"I get to this one page, and it's all one day," he said. "And it's all the description of people coming to the ship from the town of San Diego, different people at different times, saying, 'You have to help us. We're being essentially run out of town by the Mexicans, and we don't have anyplace to go.' It was sort of a Dunkirk moment for them."

As he kept reading, Emanuel saw that the logbook never returned to routine but continued to detail the ship's unexpected involvement in San Diego's troubles.

"So I realized, there's a whole story inside here that I don't know if many people know about," he said.

That launched the Waterford resident on an 11-year odyssey of research about everything fro m square-rigged sailing to the Mexican-American War. The distant conflict, fought from 1846 to 1848, is remembered mostly for the enormous territory gained by the victorious United States. Land that's now California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico was ceded by Mexico whenit was over.

But to tell the tale properly, Emanuel knew he had to focus on the Stonington. That meant using the logbook as his main source.

"Course Change" depicts dayto-day events during the ship's

four months in service and afterwards, set against the broader backdrop of the war. The Stonington was mostly stuck in San Diego, though it would occasionally be ordered to move troops along the coast or help gather food and supplies.

In one chapter, soldiers crowd onto the ship and are packed uncomfortably into every available space. In another, crew members awkwardly herd sheep into small boats for delivery back to San Diego. In both cases, the resulting sanitary consequences are depicted vividly.

While the logbook’s entries from San Diego were more involved than what came before, they were still just the bones of the story. To flesh it out, Emanuel needed detail, dialogue and characters.

For detail, he conjured the nitty-gritty of routine events beyond what was recorded. If the book noted a visitor to the ship, for example, he asked himself how the person would have gotten there. The Stonington was anchored offshore, and there were no docks in San Diego at the time. So a visitor had to get into a small boat, be rowed out, face questions about his business, then climb a rope ladder.

Emanuel researched how things like that would have played out in the 1840s, then added in specifics.

For dialogue, he again started with the logbook. The activities it describes, however small, probably didn’t occur in silence, he said, but accompanied by crew members talking.

“So that’s how I built the dialogue,” he said. “And the way that I did it … I just imagined myself standing on deck with those people and listening to them, and then keep them in their time frame.”

He relied on his ear for language, with help from period journals by several military men. Other sources included “Whale Hunt” by Nelson Cole Haley, a crewman on the Charles W. Morgan, and “Two Years Before the Mast,” the famous sea memoir by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

When he wanted someone to say “OK,” he first checked when the ubiquitous expression came into use and was happy to learn it was a decade earlier.

Rounding out the characters of those on the Stonington required a different approach. A crew list was available, and everyone named in the book was a real person. Physical descriptions allowed him to infer that the crew included Black and Native American sailors. But little additional information was available, so Emanuel built personalities from people he knew more about.

The protagonist is Alanson Fournier, the ship’s second officer and keeper of the logbook. All Emanuel could find about him was that he was later the captain of a different whaler who died in 1853 and is buried in Greenport, N.Y.

So he thought of his stepfather, who spent 27 years in the Navy, was on submarines during the Korean War, and retired as a senior chief radioman.

“His manner, his style of communication and rapport is where Fournier comes from,” Emanuel said.

An intermediary between the crew and a distant, ill-tempered captain, Fournier is a wise, patient man who keeps order without being overbearing and gets respect in return.

The baseball-loving Emanuel modeled a crewman named Peter McDonnald on Brooklyn Dodgers great Gil Hodges, an admired figure about whom he has read several biographies.

“He was just an upstanding guy, no-nonsense, but with a good sense of humor, and a way to deal with people,” Emanuel said.

He decided to pair McDonnald with someone who’s mentioned only once in the logbook: a young stowaway named James Rice who deserted another whaleship because he thought the Stonington would get him home faster.

The older McDonnald takes Rice under his wing, and when the crew is granted a day ashore, the two avoid the bars and brothels that lure everyone else. Instead they explore the countryside on horseback, which Emanuel said was inspired by an episode in “Two Years Before the Mast.”

After the Stonington’s release by the Navy, the book follows the ship around Cape Horn and back to New London, an eventful trip that included an unexpected change of command and a lightning strike that badly injured a crewman.

Emanuel said he could find no record of another whaleship being pressed into military service.

But the most extraordinary thing about the Stonington’s experience may have been the financial toll. The crew was forced at the outset to dump its store of whale oil. The book’s beginning and ending highlight this unfortunate necessity, which was like setting money on fire.

As for the title, it reflects the unexpected direction taken not only by the ship, but also by the author. Emanuel’s original plan was to start the book with the Stonington’s departure from New London in 1843. But everything before San Diego was routine and uninteresting.

“So, I thought, ‘OK, I’m sure that the reader will be bored because I’m bored,’” he said. “‘So I’ve got to change this up.’”