Effie M Morrissey in the Pacific-a Letter from Sea, 1928 -lnrroduction by Chester Brigham hile going through some old family letters, Liz Lockyer discovered one from a Mr. Harry Whitney to her great uncle, Rollin S. Ketchum, of Mystic, Connecticut. It was on Easter Sunday, 8 April 1928, th at Harry Whitney, en route to Seattle in the schooner Effie M. Morrissey, took pen in hand to write a letter to his friend Ketchum. The 55-year-old Whitney h ad been issued a license to hunt great brown bear in Alaska, both the coastal species and the inland bears better known as grizzlies. Whitney was a New Haven sportsman who, "born to wealth sufficienr to buy for him every luxury," as the New York Times put it, "... preferred over and over again to swathe himself in furs and plunge into the Arctic night, at the sacrifice of every comfort and the imminent risk of death." Whitney traveled the world in search of the thrills of big-game hunting, a risky pastime made popular, for those who could afford it, by former US president Teddy Roosevelt.
In 19 10, Harry Whitney (left) and fellow Arctic hunter and adventurer Paul Rainey returned to New York from a hunting expedition in Greenland, bringing with them live animals from the polar regions to donate to the Bronx Zoo. Captain Bob Bartlett skippered the steamer, SS Beothic, for the expedition.
Newfoundlander Captain Bob Bartlett (above) was already a veteran sea captain and polar explorer when he purchased the 31-year-old fishing schooner Effie M. Morrissey from a cousin in 1925. Bartlett had an auxiliary diesel engine installed and the hull reinforced by sheathing it in two inches of Greenheart, a dense tropical hardwood, so it could take the abuse he would put the ship through in the Arctic. lhe 1928 Stoll-McCracken Siberian Arctic Expedition to the Aleutian Islands, Bering Strait, and into the Arctic was the ErnestinaMorrissey' sonly foray into the Pacific. Harry Whitney hitched a ride to Seattle onboard, en route to a hunting expedition in Alaska.
Why did Harry Whitney opt for a long sea voyage in a wooden schooner when he could have taken a train cross-country to Seattle? Love of adventure, probably, and he and the Morrissey's captain, famed Arctic navigator Robert "Bob" Bartlett, had already been through a great deal together. In 1908, Bartlett was in command of SS Roosevelt, the three-masted auxiliary-sail steamship that took Robert E. Peary on his final-and, he claimed, successful-attempt to reach the North Pole. Whitney traveled partway with that expedition but left to hunt musk ox, and spent the Arctic winter alone in a shack he built of packing materials. The following summer, Bartlett and his crew picked him up on his way home. W hitney later became embroiled in the dispute between 10
SEA HISTORY 15 1, SUMMER 2015