James Tilton
James Tilton was employed by the Pacific Steam Whaling Company. The company’s manging agent, Josiah Knowles, convinced that he should send ships to explore for whales in the shallow Beaufort Sea, sent first officers James Tilton and Albert Norwood to winter in the north. Norwood had the Grampus, the lightest of the company’s ships, and Tilton had a smaller tug, the Mary D. Hume.1)
The Hume reached Herschel Island in August 1889 and unloaded lumber and supplies on a sandspit on the southern side of the island. The crew built a storage house and then joined the whaling fleet that had passed them going east. The Grampus and Hume took no whales that fall and were frozen in unexpectedly at Pauline Cove on 18 September 1898, twenty miles from the storage house. The schooner Nicoline, commanded and owned by Louis and Ned Herendeen, arrived from the west and was frozen in at the same place. Pauline Cove proved a safe harbour from the crush of the pack ice. As winter set in, the ships’ crews tore down the storehouse and rebuilt it at the Cove. They found a source for water in a freshwater pond in the middle of the island. In October/ they were surprised by a group of Van Tut Gwich’in who came from south of the mountains with caribou meat and skins to trade.2)
On 15 March, Robert Coleman, the Hume's fireman and three men from the Grampus deserted for the Yukon River basin gold fields, 600 miles away. The men were poorly provisioned and would have perished but captains Tilton and Norwood overtook them, badly frostbitten and exhausted. On 4 November, John A. Drayton, the first mate of the Grampus, died of dropsy. George Leavitt was with the whalers and in June he set out in a whaleboat to cruise 150 miles of coast from Icy Reef, in Alaska to Tent Island on the delta, looking for whales but finding none. On 10 July, the Nicoline headed back home empty to San Francisco and the Hume and Grampus sailed east. On July 24th, they discovered whales near Cape Bathurst. The Grampus caught twenty-one whales and headed to San Francisco with the whalebone from the Hume as well.3)
The Hume wintered at Herschel alone. John Meyers, a 60-year-old black seaman from Baltimore died on 17 May 1892 of “inflammatory rheumatism.” The crew of the Hume had received no mail since 1890 and William Mogg, the third mate, walked 300 miles to the Rampart House Hudson’s Bay Company post. The Yankee was delighted to learn that Queen Victoria was still alive and Lord Salisbury the prime minister. Captain Tilton was able to sail on 4 July 1892 and, after taking thirty-seven whales, arrived in San Francisco on 30 September. The Hume’s cargo was valued at $400,000.4)