To be a whaler was to gamble with one’s life. Many of the grandest houses in Sag Harbor were built by whaling captains who made their fortune on the open sea, but for every captain who returned rich, there were just as many who did not return at all. Capt. David Smith (circa 1807-1852) was one who never came back.
Smith was the master of the Cadmus for four voyages before he took command of the Mary Gardiner, which was built in Sag Harbor. The ship was named after Mary Elizabeth Gardiner Cooper (1822-1905), the wife of Gilbert H. Cooper (1819-1890), a partner of the firm that owned the ship.
This crew list, which Smith put together on July 22, 1851, for Marcus Aurelius Starr (1806-1865), the customs collector in Sag Harbor, identifies the members of Smith’s last whaling voyage. The height, complexion, age, birthplace, and country of citizenship are given for each man. The crew was international, as most of them were then, with sailors from Portugal, Great Britain, Brazil, and the United States.
At a later date, someone wrote in pencil the status of each sailor at the end of the journey, most noticeably marking Capt. David Smith as “dead.” According to The Corrector, Sag Harbor’s newspaper at the time, Smith had contracted “coast fever” and died off the coast of Annobon, the smallest island province of Equatorial Guinea. Command of the ship then passed to Smith’s first mate, Jacob Barrows.
It would seem that Smith’s death cut the voyage short, as the Mary Gardiner returned to Sag Harbor by October 1852, having departed only 15 months earlier. This was an unusually short trip, as many whaling expeditions stayed at sea for years at a time. When the Mary Gardiner docked at Sag Harbor, it had taken 190 barrels of whale oil, lost its captain, and discharged two crew members on Faial Island in the Azores and one on St. Helena in the South Atlantic.
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Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the Long Island Collection.
