Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet

Everett S. Allen, through diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts of the period, follows the Quakers from Plymouth Colony to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where these "children of the light" lived and founded an enormously lucrative whaling industry and elevated it to an almost holy activity ordained by God for the enrichment of the "chosen." Allen recounts the full story of the 1871 Arctic disaster, in which thirty-two vessels in the whaling fleet, carrying 1200 officers and crew, found themselves trapped in gale-driven pack ice. The shipwrecked victims were miraculously rescued without a single loss of human life. The damage to the fleet, however, was something from which New Bedford never fully recovered.