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Captain John Orin Spicer
74 Ko
John Orin Spicer of Groton, Connecticut, was a legendary figure of the Eastern Arctic whaling industry. He adopted Inuit ways and was as comfortable travelling on the land with a dog team or drinking a cup of fresh seal blood on the sea ice as he was putting an iron into a bowhead whale. On one occasion he broke his nose and almost drowned when a sperm whale twice attacked his boat. On another, he risked his own life as he faced down some forty Inuit men, armed only with a belaying pin, to save the life of his Inuit helper Amiko. But perhaps Spicer is best known to have taken Johnnibo, Kimilu, and Kallaarjuk to New London to have Johnnibo testify in a court case over three stolen whales.
It is also interesting to note the less than heroic side of the whaling captain. We know that in 1881, Spicer sailed to the Arctic on the schooner Era with a crew almost entirely composed of men shanghaied out of New York City. Only two of his mates and two boatsteerers were voluntary sailors. (Colby 1990: 156)
Spicer had a good teacher during his first trip to the Arctic in 1857, when he sailed north with Captain Christopher B. Chapel, one of the first American whalers to winter in Cumberland Sound. Chapel had been left there by the McLellan in 1851, in the company of George Tyson and Sidney O. Budington, among others. The significance of this voyage lies in how it changed forever the methods of whaling. Chapel had to learn to survive the winter by incorporating Inuit customs, such as wearing Inuit fur clothing, eating country food, and driving dog teams. It was at this point that the Inuit and their arctic survival skills became an essential element of the successes enjoyed by New England and Scottish whalers.
On that first trip, the ambitious Spicer killed nine of the twelve whales harvested on the voyage. In 1863, as his country was engaged in the Civil War, he became captain and returned to the Artic in command of the whaler the Actor. Upon arriving at the Labrador coast near Bell Isle Strait, the Actor encountered two boats (Colby 1990: 145); in one of them was Spencer's former captain, Christopher Chapel. Chapel's whole crew had abandoned their ship, the George Henry, when she was crushed upon the rocks in the Hudson Strait.
Eventually Spicer earned the command of a flotilla of three whaling ships, the Nile, the Era, and the Roswell King, for C.A. Williams & Co. of New London. He established a whaling station that he called Akuliak in the Hudson Strait in 1880, on an island known to Inuit as Iqaqtilik, just west of present day Kimmirut (Lake Harbour). The Roswell King was used as a floating trying works near Akuliak, where Inuit camped seasonally. It was here that the Alainga family played an important role in working with Spicer and the Americans (Eber 1989: 43-68). American whalers would live aboard the ship year round, while the Nile and the Era would bring up fresh supplies and load Akuliak's cargo of oil, baleen and furs for transportation back to New London.
John O. Spicer, in his turn, became the mentor of another young sailor who became famous in the Eastern Arctic's whaling industry. In 1875, at the age of seventeen, a young George Comer sailed to the Arctic for the first time aboard the New London whaler the Nile, under the command of Captain Spicer. Comer sailed again with Spicer as a mate on three successive voyages from 1889 to 1892, this time aboard the Era, the ship Comer would himself command from 1895 onward. George Comer went on to have a fascinating career and lasting relationships with the Inuit, and was the last important American whaler in the Eastern Arctic.
These would be the last whaling voyages of John Orin Spicer. The Captain retired to his farm in Connecticut in 1892, where he passed away in 1917.