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

Allen, Everett S.

ISBN 10: 1938700260 / ISBN 13: 9781938700262

Published by Commonwealth Editions, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 22184479-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Children of the Light : The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet
• Publisher: Commonwealth Editions
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1938700260
• ISBN 13: 9781938700262
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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 a famous 1871 Arctic disaster, in which thirty-two vessels in the New Bedford 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.

About the Author

Everett S. Allen was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1916. He moved to Martha's Vineyard when he was eight years old. After graduating from Tisbury High School, he attended Tabor Academy and Middlebury College. He was hired as a waterfront reporter by the New Bedford Standard-Times on the day before the hurricane of 1938, which became the subject for his book A Wind to Shake the World. After enlisting in the US Navy, where he served in Europe and participated in D-Day, he returned to the Standard-Times, where he worked until his retirement in 1979. The author of seven books, Allen died in 1990.