It’s 1842. Most of the crew of a whaling ship sets out in smaller boats to pursue their prey. Only four crew members are left behind, plus their tyrannical, often violent captain. When the crew returns from their pursuits that night, they discover the three men left behind have mutinied and the captain has been murdered. The crew cowers in shark-infested waters in their little boats. Then one man acts: a third mate, 23 years old, named Benjamin. He climbs aboard and single-handedly wrests back control of the ship. As a reward, the grateful owners give young Benjamin his own command.
The story of Benjamin Clough reads like an adventure novel, but it’s all true, told by author Paul Magid in the new Pursuing the Leviathan: The Heroic Life of New England Whaling Ship Captain Benjamin Clough (Naval Institute Press, June 2025).
Pursuing the Leviathan is the story of one remarkable man but it’s also a vivid recounting of an important era in American and Vineyard history. Magid details the life aboard the whaling ships, its daily deprivations, brutality, and financial rewards. The sections on what happens during a whale hunt and after—the “cutting in” and “trying out” that turns the great sea mammal into a profitable product—are particularly fascinating.
The story of how Magid came to write Benjamin Clough’s story is just as interesting. It’s a writing project launched by a chance discovery:
…it was a yellowed envelope tucked away in a box of memorabilia on a vender’s table at a flea market on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. It had an 1860 Holmes Hole postmark.… It was addressed to a Benjamin Clough, captain of the ship Northern Light, in Honolulu, Hawaii. It had no return address, though I later decided that it was from the captain’s wife. Intrigued by the address and the postmark, I paid the seller’s asking price and took it home.
“Holmes Hole” of course is Vineyard Haven’s name from its pre-tourism time. The name “Clough” brought two references to Magid’s mind: a local tree-lined side street and a Vineyard artist with the first name Marston.
Magid details in his preface the story of how he went from a single letter to putting together the full story of Benjamin Clough and American’s whaling era.
Early chapters focus on his upbringing in Maine, how stories of whaling he heard from an older cousin sparked his desire to go to sea, and that daring act during the mutiny “worthy of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler,” as Magid puts it.
But becoming a captain while still in his twenties is only one of many interesting events in Benjamin Clough’s life. He went on to marry the daughter of a Vineyard whaling ship captain and become a prominent citizen of Vineyard Haven. He farmed, joined the Ag Society, and won prizes for his fruit crops at the fair. He represented the Island in the Massachusetts legislature. The section about the secession of Cottage City from Edgartown is both detailed and entertaining. (It also brought Clough into conflict with the son of the murdered captain.)
Pursuing the Leviathan is a book for lovers of biography and Vineyard history, one that resurrects in its pages the people who walked the same Island streets we do but who lived in a world gone long before any of us landed here. This book is a stellar work of scholarship and storytelling, a rare combination.
Paul Magid will be speaking on his new book at several events this summer, including the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on July 8 and Edgartown Books (at The Carnegie) on July 24.