This whaling log kept by Alfred Washington Foster (1822-1886) chronicles two voyages on the barks Columbia and Roanoke between 1845 and 1861.
The Columbia sailed from Sag Harbor under Capt. Samuel Pierson on July 9, 1845, returning from the Pacific Northwest in 1848, although Foster recorded only the first year of the voyage. Foster also logged his voyage with Sag Harbor Whaling Capt. Jared Wade Jr. (1811-1889) on the Roanoke, departing from Greenport on June 12, 1857, and traveling to the Pacific and Indian Oceans before returning in February 1861. Foster’s accounts include the traditional whale stamps, which were used to record captured whales.
Between these accounts of weather and drama on the high seas, Foster handwrote more than 30 pages of poems and lyrics, some of which are believed to be his original creations. Many of the writings are particularly poignant, such as the prose-like “Anxieties of a Sailor’s Life.” Others are lighthearted, such as his humorous take on the common struggles of family life, “The Wife’s Commandments.”
Foster also made a couple of drawings, including one showing the U.S.S. Colorado, a three-masted steam screw frigate he saw in 1861 during the Civil War. Another drawing is unidentified, and a third shows the None Such, which appears below his signed poem or song “To One Believe.” Adding to the scrapbook nature of this log is a fin of a flying fish, attached over a page recounting the Columbia’s voyage.
Foster and his wife, the former Eliza Cook, raised their family, including four sons who lived to adulthood, in Amagansett and East Hampton. An ancestry search suggests that Foster lived in poverty as a child in Manhattan; he appears in almshouse records between the ages of 9 and 15.
After the whaling industry collapsed, he worked as a fisherman, and his family took in three other fishermen as boarders, according to the 1870 census. By the 1880 census, Foster worked in the “fish factory,” presumably at Promised Land.
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Andrea Meyer is the head of the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library.
