Rolling down to old Maui, me boys,
rolling down to old Maui.
We’re homeward bound from the Arctic Ground,
rolling down to old Maui.
~
Azores Islands, Ship Cambria
Sept. 20th, 1851
“Dear Parents,
You may be somewhat surprised
to receive a letter from me dated at this place
but here I am on board of the ship Cambria
of New Bedford, Cotrell, Master, bound on a two
year cruise for right whales in the arctic ocean.”
-Letter of Joseph A. DuBois to his parents Samuel and Sarah DuBois.
Joseph DuBois was never destined to become the wealthy banker his father wanted him to be, and somewhere deep down his mother Sarah must have known so from the start. She had named her first born son after her father, and in so doing cursed young Joseph with the same independent streak and proclivity for adventure that had brought her father fame, fortune, and no small amount of near-misses and brushes with the varieties of death a sailor finds at sea.
Captain Allen’s spyglasses and backstaff lying on the lawn in front of the Allen House in Jefferson Heights circa 1970. Photo from the Katherine Decker Memorial Collection.
Joseph’s grandfather, Captain Joseph Allen, had retired to a stately home in Catskill before the close of the War of 1812. Catskill was a change for him, having been born on the coast of Rhode Island and brought up before the mast in the years prior to the Revolution. Like all sailors the sea was never far from Captain Allen’s thoughts, and young Joseph must have read much in his grandfather’s faraway gaze when the old man looked at the dusty spyglass and navigation instruments tucked away in the study at the Captain’s home in Jefferson Heights.
Captain Allen led a tumultuous life. His career as a merchant sailor had been put on hold by British blockades along the eastern seaboard in the 1770s when he was still a young man. Not satisfied with waiting out the English, Allen enlisted in the fledgling United States Navy and found himself serving as an Acting Lieutenant on the sloop-of-war Dolphin in the late spring of 1777. He returned to the life of a merchant sailor at the close of the American Revolution, but the late 18th century was not a time of peace on the high seas. Harried by the English and French as pawns in their great chess match of Empires, American ships were frequently attacked, impounded, or the crews impressed to bolster the ranks of the Royal Navy. This policy of impressment made the European trade difficult for Captain Allen, and he often found himself ordering unfavorable changes of course in order to run from distant sails on the horizon, lest they prove to be English warships.
Captain Joseph Allen in a portrait circa 1810. Image from the Katherine Decker Memorial Collection, made from a portrait in the collections of the Newport Historical Society.
Running from the Royal Navy was an insufferable prospect for a Patriot like Allen. His disdain for the British was fanned to flames during combat in the Revolution, and subsequent slights against American sovereignty stung Allen like personal insults. Even American triumphs in the War of 1812 were not enough quell the Captain’s prejudice towards all subjects of the Crown. In 1814 William Pullman, an English neighbor, called the Captain a liar following a business deal. In response Captain Allen (who was not an imposing figure) heaved Pullman bodily from his porch into a puddle of mud. To a judge the Captain subsequently stated “Often, when beating up the British Channel, I’ve had to douse my peak to every English vessel… Today I have doused an Englishman; peak, hull, and all!”
Such was the character of the elderly family patriarch who regaled young Joseph with stories of the high seas when the former was in his eighties and the latter an impressionable boy. Recalling the Captain’s oft-told tales given during the quiet hours of winter nights in Catskill, Sarah DuBois must have realized Joseph’s recent letter from the Azores was a natural byproduct of his upbringing.
Captain Allen’s home in Jefferson Heights and the New York State Historical Marker commemorating him. In the background is the porch from which Captain Allen launched William Pullman and claimed a final victory over England. Palmer Photo.
Samuel DuBois, Joseph’s father, was a man of unimpeachable character and of a physical stature that made men think twice before challenging him. He won the election as County Sheriff in 1846 primarily on his own merits despite being a son of one of the region’s most well-connected and deeply rooted families. He was a man who espoused force of words ahead of force of arms, and was once so incensed by the disciplinary striking of his son S. Barent by a schoolteacher that he forced the man to issue written and verbal apologies in an age when the consensus was that the rod should be applied liberally.
Samuel was a staunch Jacksonian Democrat, and as an elected official he was well acquainted and connected within the dominant political party in Greene County at that time. Zadock Pratt, the epicenter of this Democratic political vortex, was just the man that Samuel wanted his son Joseph to associate with - as opportunity came only to those young men who had good connections.
Thus young Joseph found himself in Prattsville in 1846. He was hired as a clerk in the Prattsville Bank, hunched over ledgers five or six days a week balancing the accounts and debts of a small but well-organized financial establishment. Hemmed in by the Mountains, his range of sight extended only as far as the nearest bend in the Schoharie Creek. All around him were bare hills and pastures, farms, lumberyards, and the foul smoking tanneries from which spouted all the wealth of the region. Prattsville was a stark contrast to Catskill in no uncertain terms, and Joseph no doubt soon concluded that his time in Prattsville would not extend beyond the time necessary to learn his lucrative trade.
View of Prattsville in 1844, Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Bookkeeping and scholarship in the 19th century brought a variety of ailments as equally detrimental to the human body as the ubiquitous hard labor that drove the economy of the age. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., a man destined to become one of America’s more influential lawyers, found his eyesight failing him following an infection while studying at Harvard in 1833. In an effort to save his eyesight Dana forewent further study, sparing his eyes the futile struggle of reading at all hours by dim candlelight, and decided to go to sea as a merchant sailor in 1834. This was an unusual decision, as it was far more commonplace for young men of his station to take a leisurely tour of Europe to broaden their horizons. Instead Dana chose a ship in the fur trade bound for California, and in 1840 his memoir of the voyage was published, titled Two Years Before The Mast.
Whether or not Joseph Allen DuBois got his hands on a copy of this rather popular book during his time in Prattsville is not known, but he doubtless heard of Dana, the bookish Harvard scholar who went to sea and returned to make a remarkable success of himself practicing Maritime Law.
Events of national significance beyond the control of the Honorable Zadock Pratt plagued his little community of Prattsville during the last years Joseph DuBois drew his pay there. The disappearance of the mighty hemlock groves that drove the tanning business was an issue Pratt had already been grappling with, and as the trees grew scarce so too did the capacity of his Prattsville tannery to generate leather at marketable quantities. Prattsville had already begun to hemorrhage workmen because of this, and many found themselves moving westward further through Delaware and Sullivan Counties and into the hills of Eastern Pennsylvania where the tanner’s work was still plentiful. Pratt himself was invested in a Pennsylvania tannery and enough other ventures that such market shifts wouldn’t effect his bottom line, but when Gold was discovered in California in January 1848 even those workmen with steady employment began to flee the mountains and their reeking tanneries for easy money in the West.
Notice in the Greene County Whig of the departure of prospectors from Prattsville for California, November 1849. Vedder Research Library Collections.
Notice in the Greene County Whig of the departure of one of the owners of Prattsville’s newspaper, the Advocate, November 1849. Vedder Research Library Collections.
Commentary in the Greene County Whig concerning the decline of Prattsville’s prospects in the wake of the California Gold Rush, while also making jabs about local Democratic losses to the Whig party. November 1849. Vedder Research Library Collections.
Joseph DuBois did not immediately abandon the mountains when news of the gold strike broke. Instead he followed a gang of Prattsville men through Sullivan County chasing tannery work, leaving the Prattsville Bank on good terms and taking his bookkeeping skills with him on the road. It is easy to imagine Joseph, his path in life suddenly laid before him, again recalling the sea stories of his late Grandfather. The life of a clerk and bookkeeper was not a game of high stakes, nor one fraught with the sorts of peril in which a young man could prove his worth. In a moment of crisis Joseph DuBois looked eastward, and without telling a soul he departed the mountains for the legendary whaling port of New Bedford in 1851 with a mind to prove himself worthy of his late Grandfather’s name.
“An old Whaler hove down for repairs near New Bedford” by Frederick Schiller Cozzens, 1882. Public Domain
- Jonathan Palmer, Deputy Greene County Historian
Banner image is “Whale Fishery - Attacking a Right Whale” by Currier and Ives, 1860. Public Domain.