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[106] chapter 14 Tumbez and More Cruising Now we are bound into Tonbas [Tumbez], that blasted whaling port, And if you run away, my boys, you surely will get caught. —from “Blow, Ye Winds,” whaling song The passage from Chatham Island to Tumbez, Peru, although not direct, was brief, requiring a week for the Acushnet to make good something more than 600 miles.1 Winds were either fresh or moderate, and the weather remained pleasant. By Sunday afternoon, November 28, the littoral of Ecuador was clearly in view. During the night the ship passed within 14 miles of the island of Salango, where she would recruit in February 1843,2 and the next day she sailed into Santa Elena Bay, possibly in search of whales. With Point Santa Elena bearing south,twelve miles distant,and Ayangua Point eight miles due east at noon on Monday, November 29, the Acushnet steered to the westward, better to clear the land and move toward her intended anchorage. Sperm whales were seen not far offshore on Tuesday, November 30, and the boats may have been lowered, but if so, the chase was apparently unrewarding .3 The next day, sailing on a course of east-southeast, the ship glided into spacious Guayaquil Bay, passing within twelve miles of the island of Santa Clara, where a newly erected lighthouse, 230 feet high, could be seen.4 On Thursday afternoon, December 2, the Acushnet moved to the southwest and “came to Anchor at Tombey [Tumbez] in 6 fathoms water.”5 From the Acushnet’s deck the crew observed a scene of physical grandeur that 314 years before had inspirited the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his small band of Spanish followers, the first white men to behold it. Inland the mighty chain of the Cordilleras swept abruptly from the coast, leaving “but a narrow strip of emerald verdure, through which numerous rivulets, spreading fertility around them, wound their way into the sea.”6 What Pizzaro and his followers saw, the Acushnet’s people saw: “Chimborazo, with its broad round summit, towering like the dome of the Andes, and Cotopaxi, with its dazzling cone of silvery white, that knows no change except from the action of its own volcanic fires; for this mountain is the most terrible of the American volcanoes.”7 The very green of the land and the apparent cool Tumbez and More Cruising   [107] of its island heights must have excited the pent-up spirits of the Acushnet’s crew, so recently arrived from the scoriated Encantadas. But expectations aroused by the appearance of land from a ship at sea are sometimes deceptive. The men of the Acushnet may well have been disappointed in Captain Pease’s choice of an anchorage, for although Tumbez was an excellent place for recruiting, it was far from being a desirable liberty port. James A. Rhodes, a whaleman who visited Tumbez a few years after the Acushnet stopped there,8 felt that his captain deliberately chose the anchorage with the view of preventing members of his crew from escaping. The Tumbez roadstead was, Rhodes believed, “the spot which of all others was least inviting—principally on account of the paucity of people, who did not number more than fifteen or twenty, beside children, dogs and fleas, which were very abundant.”9 Clouds of mosquitoes filled the air, and not even the heaviest of woollen garments afforded protection from them. Rhodes found no difficulty in believing a tale of the virulence of these insects, that a man who had been stripped and tied to a tree at night was a corpse before sunrise, killed by mosquitoes.10 Rhodes’s perception is echoed by Ansel Weeks on the second voyage of the Acushnet. He visited Tumbez in August 1847 and writes of the Peruvian port,“The inhabitants are a mixture of Spanish and Peruvian blood. they are poorly educated generally. and live in the most simple and uninviting manner . . . .They subsist Chiefly uppon Potatoes, Bananas, little or no bread. with an occasional soup.” However, he goes on to say, “The most part The Girles are quite pretty have black hair and eyes. and on the whole are quite attracting or should be to a lover of the fair sex. But I’ll not judge on so limited acquainten[ce] haveing been ashore but two days . . . I’ll bring this page to a close by bidding Goodbye to Tombez and the folks not excepting the black eyed Dona Angela Somontes.”11 The ingenuity...

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