Maritime Book Review: Peter Nichols' "Final Voyage"
25-Sep-2010 
By Capt. Phil Leblanc
In the summer of 1871, thirty-two whaling ships, carrying 12-year-old William Fish Williams, son of a whaling captain, and 1,218 other men, women, and children, were destroyed in an Arctic ice storm. In a rescue operation of unparalleled daring and heroism, not a single life was lost, but the impact on America’s first oil industry was fateful and catastrophic.
The harvesting of whale oil, which grew from occasional beach combing into a multi-million dollar industry, made New Bedford, Massachusetts, the wealthiest town in the world. Quaker brothers George and Matthew Howland, the town’s leading whaling merchants, believed they were toiling in a pact with God. As whale oil lubricated the industrial revolution and turned New Bedford into the Saudi Arabia of its day, this belief only grew stronger. But as their whaleships pushed ever farther into uncharted seas in putsuit of a fast-diminishing resource, this oil business was overtaken by new paradigms. When the search for cheaper energy sources produced a new and apparently inexhaustible resource--petroleum oil--the Howlands and many others did not see the change coming, or the devastating effect it would have on an industry that has flourished for two centuries. Almost overnight, it seemed, the world changed. Business and financial institutions collapsed. This implosion spelled the end of the industry, exhausted by overhunting of whales and walrus and disrupted by the Civil War. In addition, whaling had devastated the ecosystem, causing widespread starvation among the native peoples that had relied upon the animals for centuries. The Howland brothers, among the most successful in the industry, saw their fortune vanish and ended their lives as paupers.
For Willie Fish Williams, and the whalers and their families in the Arctic who watched as their floating community was crushed by the ice closing around them, that change came more swiftly.
Though Nichols alternates continuously between the actual disaster and the rise of whaling in America, most readers will be pleased with the way he places this single event amidst the historical rise and fall of the industry in New England.
In addition, unlike many armchair sailors, Nichols spent 10 years at sea working as a professional yachting captain before turning to writing full time. His nautical knowledge and experience is reflected in his detailed writing and the anecdotes that are scattered throughout the story.
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