The 38-year-old commanded a ship and crew that roamed the Pacific Ocean at a time a growing fleet of elegant sailing vessels was putting Hawaii on the map as a major stopping point in an expanding global trade.

Hawaii, and particularly the two tiny villages of Honolulu and Lahaina, became an essential economic hub in a business that was changing the world.

Griswold, a member of a wealthy family from Wethersfield, Connecticut, was said to have been drawn under a whale that had been harpooned and was submerged long enough to have drowned almost anyone else. But he was rescued and he recovered, according to the History of Ancient Wethersfield, published in 1904.

On Nov. 1, 1847, Griswold died. His remains were placed in a coffin made out of koa wood, at a cost of $18, and buried in Nuuanu Valley Cemetery, according to records kept by the U.S. consul in Hawaii.

The story of Griswold’s last days is contained in a largely forgotten set of documents shipped to the East Coast from distant Hawaii during the 1800s, when the island nation was a kingdom. The poignant records, stored away by the U.S. State Department and deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., represent the letters and papers left behind when Americans died as foreigners in Hawaii in the 1800s.

Wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with string, they reveal where people were buried and include inventories of what they owned when they died, usually subject to a hasty auction to raise money for funeral costs. The packets also hold photographs, sentimental items and treasured letters, lending a vivid window into life in Hawaii in those days.

The scant information on Griswold in the consular records didn’t mention how he’d died.

But newspapers in the United States reported the stark facts, stating that he committed suicide in “a fit of temporary insanity.” Griswold had slashed his own throat. He did not die right away. He was rushed to a hospital in Honolulu where he survived for more than a week under a doctor’s care before expiring.

The last records of Griswold’s life include a list of his belongings and receipts for the purchase of the coffin and for the medical services he received. An inventory of his estate in the consular records help stitch together a picture of what life held in store for a ship’s captain making his living off the booming whaling industry.

Griswold’s assets totaled $2,702 at the time of his death, including 2,780 gallons of sperm oil and a 5% stake in the ship’s profits. But the debts against inventory were $2,935, and Griswold was declared insolvent, according to the Newport Historical Society.

This was not an uncommon outcome, for while some whaling ships hit the jackpot and returned home laden with valuable cargo, many other ventures went broke, leaving whalers in despair.

Griswold’s ship, the Audley Clarke of Newport, returned to the East Coast and was sold to a group of Rhode Island residents who traveled to California to take part in the Gold Rush.

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"We should live apart"

This inventory of Capt. Henry Griswold’s possessions indicates he was transporting trade goods available for sale at ports along the way or to sailors aboard his ship. This listing includes more than three dozen palm-leaf hats, 16 silk handkerchiefs and nine sole-bladed knives. Knives were an essential tool for sailors, and if they needed to buy a new one, they could expect to pay top dollar when they were far out at sea. This was one of the ways ship captains and shipping companies boosted their profits.

Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024

In the 1800s, tens of thousands of sailors, many of them Americans, flooded into the islands as New England whaling ships, first from Nantucket and later largely from New Bedford, expanded their search for the giant marine mammals, taking the hunt to the farthest reaches of the Pacific, while increasingly using Hawaii as a key transshipment station.

“Hawaii was the key point of resupplying and picking up new crews,” said Naomi Slipp, chief curator and director of museum learning at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. “It was a major stopping point for all the whaling ships in the Pacific.”

But dismal working conditions in the whaling industry also produced a steady stream of broken, sickly and injured men. Many of the sailors ended up dying in Hawaii, or died at sea and, under U.S. law, had their estates settled by U.S. consuls stationed in Hawaii by the U.S. State Department.

Whaling dramatically changed the population of Hawaii. In 1816, there were only 3,000 people living in Honolulu, almost all of them Hawaiians, clustered within just a few blocks. There were 44 Americans in the islands, 16 of them on Oahu, according to the Hawaiian Historical Society’s “Honolulu: Centre of Transpacific Trade.”

But then the whalers came. One ship arrived in Honolulu in 1820, 62 arrived in 1822, 98 arrived in 1829 and 110 anchored there in 1833. In Lahaina, then little more than a hamlet, 17 whaleships landed in 1824, 62 in 1830 and 80 in 1832, the study reported.

The ships typically had crews of about 30 men. They would visit once or twice each year when their supplies were restocked. Often brawling and carousing, they flooded through the streets of Honolulu and Lahaina, often bringing chaos in their wake.

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Enoch L. Hatch

U.S. consuls kept close records of the number of American ships arriving at Hawaii's ports. This logbook for Lahaina showed dozens of ships landing there in the last quarter of 1857.

Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024

Rev. Samuel Chenery Damon, a chaplain from Holden, Massachusetts, sent to the Hawaiian Islands by the American Seamen’s Friend Society of New York, arrived in 1842 and was there to greet each ship that came to Honolulu.

He had been recommended for the job by Rev. Hiram Bingham, one of the original missionaries sent to the islands, who had returned home to the United States. Damon went aboard to greet arriving sailors personally, and he published death notices of those who had perished in a newspaper he owned called The Friend.

In 1851 alone, he reported, some 15,000 men had arrived in Honolulu.

Damon is a recurring figure in the accounts of the final days of deceased Americans in the consular reports. When someone was sick or dying, he was often called to help them get medical care or provide spiritual counseling and his presence is reflected in the packets now in storage at the National Archives.

Two years before his death in 1885, Damon calculated that he had officiated at over 1,200 burials during his 40 years of service and only 334 marriages.

He welcomed sailors into his home and provided them with pen, paper and postage to write letters home. He became a beloved figure on the waterfront.

“It’s unbelievable what he did, how dedicated he was,” says Karl Hedberg, historian of Central Union Church, a successor institution to the Bethel Street church that Damon had founded. “Never tiring.”

The discovery of whale oil revolutionized the world economy. Whale oil introduced a new, rare and affordable source of night-time illumination to homes, stores and factories and produced lubricants for new kinds of mechanical equipment that could make manufactured goods more quickly and cheaply.

In addition, whale bone became a critical component in creating bendable, pliable manufactured goods such as umbrellas, corsets, hoop skirts and box parts.

These products in turn spawned a slew of other businesses, from candle-making to oil refineries making lubricants that were used to keep new kinds of machinery, like sewing machines and spinning jennies, operating smoothly. Merchants in ports everywhere, including Hawaii, prospered by buying and selling the products and providing supplies to whaling ships.

But the ordinary seamen didn’t fare so well. At the end of a long voyage, after paying back what they owed to ships’ owners and others, some sailors earned nothing at all and ended the trip empty-handed.

The consular records in the National Archives underscore the fact that many of the sailors had very little when they died, but that ships’ officers did considerably better.

Smith Harris, age 17, had probably been on his own for a while before his death in 1843. His father, John, had paid $8 for his son’s lodging for four weeks in 1841, according to a receipt Harris had kept with him.

But sometime after Harris turned 16, he joined the crew of the whaleship Columbus, out of New Bedford, and was discharged in Tahiti in February of 1843. He signed onto another whaleship, the LC Richmond one week later and traveled to Hawaii. But by June he was dead, felled by consumption.

His only possessions were his clothing, including a pair of shoes, a pair of socks, five pairs of trousers, three shirts and a monkey jacket, which was the traditional short jacket favored by mariners. Combined, they were valued at $18.75, and after they were auctioned, there was not quite enough money to pay for his medical care, $7, his coffin, at a cost of $9.75, $1 for pall bearers and $2 for the cost of digging his grave, according to the documents in the packet labeled “Harris, Smith.”

G. H. Sherman and another man named Smith, both sailors, were reported to have died in 1844. The two owned little more than a chest, a bag, some bedding and three old hats, valued at $4.60, according to the consular records.

Sherman’s assets at death were $3.28, according to U.S. Consul William Hooper. Smith’s assets were valued at $2.85.

It seems likely, however, that Smith’s records had gotten mixed up with records belonging to yet another dead man named Smith. In the same packet, there is a well-worn Bible, inscribed to a man named Larnie S. Smith from his grandmother.

“Dear Larnie,” she wrote, “it is the earnest prayer of your loving grandmother that you read and study this Holy Book. On it depends your salvation. Remember the same God watches over us all.” It was signed “Your loving grandmother, A. E. Smith.”

But the dates here don’t match up. The Bible was published in 1860, 16 years after the death of the other Smith.

Capt. George P. Dority, the 33-year-old master of a ship called the Giovanni Aplante, was an affluent and well-loved man, and his surviving papers including many sweet letters from his family back home in Sedgwick, Maine. He died in the Arctic Ocean on June 29, 1876, where he was probably buried at sea. Dority’s estate was later adjudicated in Honolulu, which is how his final papers made it into the consular records from Hawaii.

But to his family back in Maine, every day of Dority’s life had mattered. On the gravestone they erected to honor his memory in Sedgwick, they noted that he had died at sea “on board his vessell,” having lived “33 years, seven months and 12 days.”

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Enoch L. Hatch

Capt. George Bumpus, who died in 1862, kept a careful list of his ship’s efforts to capture and kill whales, and their mixed success at doing it. Within a decade, the whaling industry had begun to fade as manufacturers turned to fossils fuels.

Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024

Conditions at sea were often brutal, especially in the bone-chillingly cold Arctic waters far north of Hawaii that had become prime whale hunting grounds. Hypothermia, frostbite and injuries were common and many sailors were reported to have been killed by the whales they were struggling to kill or capture.

A. Giffords was an elite sailor known as a “boatsheader,” the person who led the crews out in small rowboats when they were in hot pursuit of a whale. He died in Honolulu in January 1852, after falling ill from pneumonia and typhus fever, according to the consular records.

But the doctor also partly blamed Giffords for his own demise, according to a surviving statement in the consular records.

“His conduct of late on shore was rather irregular being much accustomed to spiritous liquors,” the doctor reported, adding that “from the beginning his prognosis” had been bleak.

Thomas Reynolds was a sailmaker who died of undisclosed causes in March 1846, according to the consular records. Among his surviving possessions were a series of receipts for visits to a gin joint called Hungwa’s, where he typically consumed a bottle of alcohol each time, usually while he smoked cigars. One recurring expense was for an activity called “Time in the Alley.” He went to “the alley” frequently in December 1845, sometimes several times in a week.

By the end of January he was said to be under a doctor’s care, and six weeks later he was dead.

The whaling industry declined over time, as competition in the industry grew and whales, hunted nearly to extinction, became more difficult to catch. And, in an effort to maintain their profits, ship owners reduced wages and took steps to cut costs, making the work even less attractive.

Many sailors deserted and found ways to remain on shore in Hawaii. Some stayed only a short time and left on other ships. But others stayed and started families in Hawaii, ultimately adding to the growing population of Native Hawaiians with English last names.

Even the officers at the top of the food chain felt the economic pressure, the consular records suggest.

Capt. George W. Bumpus, master of the ship Hibernia, which sailed out of New Bedford, had been ship’s mate but took the helm of the ship in 1860, when the previous captain died of a brain fever he had contracted in Hong Kong.

Bumpus sailed immediately toward Oahu, he wrote in log notes that were saved among his papers and stored away in consular records. Now in charge of the ship, he frequently came up short in his whale-hunting efforts, according to hand-written reports he had prepared and that ended up among his last surviving possessions.

In early January 1861, he and his men caught and killed three sperm whales, according to his records.

The next two times, the whales got away by diving deep or because their harpooning equipment failed. A few days later, he noted he had spotted a pod of whales in the distance. But then he recorded successes and failures over a three-month period in the summer and fall of that year.

On May 19, 1862, Bumpus died in Honolulu, according to a news report in The Friend, which did not say how he died.

But his estate inventory suggested he had become prosperous as a whaling captain. A lengthy inventory of his possessions at the time of his death listed what he owned, and the auction to sell it all off netted some $578.

This accounting was sent back to the State Department, but with no notation about where the money went.