Enoch's Voyage

The journey took Cloud around the world - from New England to Portugal, around Africa, to New Zealand and across the Pacific. Encounters with native peoples, mutinous crew members, and the elements are depicted in the peculiarly colorful and detailed language of the time. Cloud writes touchingly of his bouts with homesickness and "ship fever." Readers vicariously experience his awe and admiration for the ship's quarry in numerous accounts of whale chases, including the heroic, and ultimately failed, attempt of a mother whale to protect her calf from death. In the middle of August, 1851, young Enoch Carter Cloud, of landlocked Columbus, Ohio, cast his fate literally to the winds and signed up to sail out of New Bedford on the whale ship "The Henry Kneeland." For nearly three years he kept a journal detailing the glory, hardships, and dangers of life at sea. Five generations of Cloud's descendants have reveled in this personal history, reading aloud from the manuscript; now, edited by the author's great-great-granddaughter, the story is told for the first time outside the family.