The North Atlantic Ocean, 250 miles west of Bermuda, October 1841. The whaling brig William and Joseph of Holmes Hole is heading back to the Vineyard with a disappointing haul. “We put away for home with 200 barrels of sperm, and 12 barrels of black-fish oil; low in spirits, for this was a very inadequate recompense for 14 months of hard toil.”
The captain is Elisha Dexter of Tisbury. Of the 19 men aboard, seven are Vineyarders: Dexter, Dexter’s first mate and brother-in-law Benjamin Merry, second mate Gershom Dunham, ship-keeper Francis Cottle, boat steerers (and brothers) Peter and Charles Dillingham, and deckhand William T. West.
The weather had been clear, but a powerful storm — later known as “the Key West Hurricane of 1841” — struck unexpectedly overnight. “As we were hoisting up the sail, and had gotten it about halfway up, a squall from WSW struck us, and blew tremendously hard,” wrote Dexter. “It seemed as though the whole air had burst into one, wild, roaring wind. In the whole course of 26 years service on the ocean, I never before saw the like. This squall immediately knocked the brig about one-third over. She would easily have recovered herself from this, and righted; but another, and another, and another squall, each fiercer than that preceding it, came in a moment of time, and over she went, keel out, and masts under.”
Three men were knocked overboard. Two of them, including ship-keeper Cottle, did not resurface. By morning, the masts were broken, the sails were shredded to ribbons, the cabin was flooded, the two whaleboats were blown away, and the vessel was slowly sinking.
The 42-year-old captain had spent his whole life at sea. He entered the merchant service by age 15, the whaling trade by 19. By 30, Dexter was master of his own whaling expedition — the Stephania of New Bedford — and he had served as master aboard a half-dozen or so voyages since. He had become captain of the William and Joseph of Holmes Hole in 1839; this was his second voyage aboard the brig, pursuing whales mostly near the Azores.
Now he was on a sinking ship, far from home and far from land. They salvaged only one barrel of dry flour, which they found impossible to eat without water. They lashed their spars together to form two rafts, which they planned to use once the ship finally submerged. On their fourth day aboard the slowly sinking wreck, a vessel passed within a mile of them. Two men jumped upon the smaller of the two rafts and paddled within half a mile. “It was not unreasonable to expect that they would either hear or see us,” wrote Dexter. “They were so near, that we distinctly saw a man go aloft to loose the main-royal. Yet she kept on her course, apparently taking no notice of us. How she managed not to see us, if that were the case, I cannot tell; as the sea was not only smooth, and the sky clear, but the flag upon the large raft was at an elevation of full 30 feet. Perhaps nine persons in 10 would say that she did see us. But others might think it impossible that it should be in the nature of man to forsake his fellows in such an awful extremity of distress as this. But yet it has been done.”
The survivors spent a total of six days on the wreck before it finally sank from beneath them. They then took to the rafts, which consisted of “a few broken pieces of spars and plank, held together by a few spikes, and frail cords, which are continually chafing away.” The two rafts passed in sight of four more vessels, but none spotted the wrecked men.
“We were now in strength and disposition reduced to mere children. As great as our hunger had become, it was nothing compared to our thirst. Our tongues were as dry as chips.” They killed and ate the ship’s dog. Two men, including second mate Gershom Dunham, drank seawater and died soon afterward. “My throat and tongue were so dry and swollen,” wrote Dexter, “that I could speak but with great difficulty. When I spoke, my voice resembled the sound of a bugle.”
On the 28th of October, after two days on rafts (which had by now drifted out of sight of each other), the white flag upon the smaller raft was spotted by the crew of the whaleship Triton of Warren, R.I., heading home from New Zealand with more than 2,000 barrels of oil. By nightfall, the second raft was also discovered. The survivors, who had lashed themselves to the rafts, were “nearly perished,” according to news reports of the time. One was in a “state of delirium,” and “many of them could not stand, their flesh scarified and bruised, and their limbs and tongues swollen.”
The Triton made port in Rhode Island six days later, and Dexter immediately returned by railroad and steamer to the Vineyard, only to receive bad news. “I owned one-eighth of the brig, and supposed it insured, as it had been the voyage before. But I was mistaken. Not a cent was insured. I now am penniless. I put everything I had afloat, hoping to receive it all back, with large profits. But I have lost it all; and with gray hairs, and a shattered constitution, I am now compelled to commence life upon the land, anew.”
Capt. Dexter was finished with the sea. Broke, he sold his new house on the corner of William and Center Streets, built just before he departed. He moved in with his father, together with his wife Elizabeth and son Ben.
Dexter turned to secretive West Tisbury author and deaf general store merchant James Athearn Jones, for help in his next enterprise. Jones’ books and poems, many anonymous, had seen considerable success until allegations of plagiarism destroyed his writing career and mental health. The eccentric and lanky Jones, whom the acclaimed English author Mary Russell Mitford once described as “a deaf and most disagreeable scarecrow,” was hungry for a writing project, and Dexter had a gripping tale to tell. Capt. Dexter’s 11-year-old son Ben — a young man who would later become Vineyard Haven’s legendary eccentric whittler “Ben Chuck” — had lost his hearing to scarlet fever as a child, so Dexter had plenty of experience communicating with the hearing-impaired.
Jones and Dexter conspired to turn the story of the shipwreck into a profitmaking publication in the genre later described as “Beggars’ Books” — tales of woe and wisdom designed to tug at readers’ sympathies in exchange for some ready cash. With Jones’ help, Dexter’s tale became the slim book “Narrative of the Loss of the William and Joseph, Whaling Brig, of Martha’s Vineyard, and the Sufferings of Her Crew for Seven Days on a Raft in the Atlantic Ocean,” published in 1842 by a small Boston printer. “Now being no longer able to follow the seas, I am trying to turn even my bitter misfortunes to some account, by the sale of this ‘Narrative,’” he wrote. The book was successful enough that Dexter published a second, lengthened edition in 1848. True to form, Jones’ name appears in neither version.
Jones went on to write a second privately printed booklet in 1848, “Biographical memoir of Ichabod Norton of Edgartown, Mass.,” probably his last book project. He was hired as editor-in-chief of the short-lived newspaper Journal of Commerce in Buffalo, N.Y., but died in Brooklyn in 1854 of cholera.
While Dexter never whaled again, he soon embarked on more bold new adventures. In 1849, he left the Vineyard for San Francisco on the Nantucket schooner Two Brothers in search of gold, together with hundreds of other Vineyard “Forty-Niners.”
But California gold mining quickly revealed itself to be disappointingly unprofitable, so Dexter moved onward and became the proprietor of a candy store in Honolulu for several years. Returning to the Vineyard, Capt. Dexter and Ben, his only child, opened a confectionary store in Holmes Hole (later Vineyard Haven) at the corner of Main and Spring streets. Here, the Dexters made and sold coconut cakes consisting simply of grated coconut, coconut milk, and sugar, boiled together and cooled on a pan, but the cakes took on a local fame of their own. “Oh! what delicious ice cream and cocoanut cakes were sold by the Dexters to us girls,” recalled Mrs. Howes Norris decades later in her booklet “Sketches of Old Homes in Our Village.”
Well into his old age, Capt. Dexter gave popular lectures about the William and Joseph disaster. He dabbled in inventing, and became one of Tisbury’s earliest patentees, developing a self-counting yardstick for dry goods merchants in 1856, a ventilated refrigerator for preserving meats and vegetables in 1861, as well as brewing and selling his own line of patent medicines. A Boston Herald article later recalled, “for a time he plied the barber’s trade, with this distich to entice possessors of beards into his chair: The water’s hot / The razor’s in it, / Walk in gentlemen, / Shave you in a minute.”
Ben, who communicated mostly with sign language, took over the confectionery and ice cream saloon after Capt. Dexter’s death in 1871. He continued producing his father’s famous coconut cakes, and then made cups, dippers, and cream pitchers out of the coconut shells until the Great Fire of 1883 incinerated the center of town. “He was a short, thick-set man with bowed shoulders,” recalled Gratia Harrington of Vineyard Haven. “[A childhood fever] affected his speech so that only those who knew him well could understand him.”
“Ben Chuck,” as he was known, became a master whittler. He carved model ships and perplexing puzzles, together with full-size human figures which he would position around his property. The 1904 Boston Herald profile noted, “Capt. Dexter used to keep an ice cream saloon on Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, and his son carried on the business until the fire of 1883 burned him out. The shop was surrounded by mounds of earth, on each one of which perched one of the wooden [human] images. When the fire came, these images were consumed, and so lifelike were they, that people at Eastville, watching the ravages of the fire through night glasses, were certain that they had seen the bodies of humans in the flames.”
