"I hear by some of the folks that is right out from home that the Ladies have got to wareing tailes. If you ware one look out there that you do not get trod upon. I should like first rate to be at home and see the Ladies tailes hanging out behind. you must make allowance for Sailors, that is so."

So wrote William A. Ashley, first mate on the whaler Governor Troup, to his wife Hannah in 1864. The Troup was "about as far north as a ship can get," and within two weeks of being jammed in ice when young Ashley, who managed to keep up a "faint lively hart" in plights as dismal as most whalemen would care to imagine, began on June 15:

"In the ice blowing like fun and no whales. My dear wife Hannah A. Ashley we are all well at present and hope and pray that you are so to . . . I think sometimes if I ever get home again alive I will never leave you again.

"Oh what is the use to talk all this. I want to see you awfully and I cant help it. We have had rather hard luck so far, havent seen a whale since we left the islands but never mind. I do not fret a mite about it. I only say let her rip. I think more about you than anything else how you are getting along out there to Long Plain with a Baby and all those scalawag things to look out for."

Hannah Crapo had been married to William Ashley of Acushnet, near the Rochester line---where some of their descendants still live--on July 4, 1860. On a cold morning in early December, 1862, William shipped out of New Bedford on the Troup as next in command to his brother, Captain Edward R. Ashley, "the old man" of his letters.

"We have had very bad thick weather here for the week past," he wrote Hannah on June 17, 1864. "We have not seen any whales yet but we have got up whare they ort to be for it is cold enough and ice around enough . . . Oh Han I am getting real homesick and am in hopes that we shall get enough oil this season to come home if we do not I do not no but I shall run away or do something despret. Kiss Willie for me."

Willie, the Ashleys' only child, was then about fourteen months old. In a diary kept during the year of his birth, 1863, his mother reveals the flintiness for which she was to become regionally famous when she tells, on March 7, of "whitewashing the kitchen," and then writes, on March 8:

"Today felt some pain. Our son William was born this evening."

Willie's father's reaction to this event is missing, but we do know that he spent his next wedding anniversary, the fourth, somewhere in the Arctic Ocean, where he wrote his wife on July 5:

"here we are tied up to the ice and have been for the last week. I have been thinking of you a great deal lately as it was about the forth of July in the larst letter you wrote to me. You asked me if I remembered three years ago then and now I ask you if you remember 4 years ago last night.

"last night to me was a night never to be forgotten. the ship was in ice sose we could not handle her and going around the north pole like a streak, we was pretty well north when we got jamed in it but it is brighter now for getting out but I do not no as we might as well be around the north pole as any whare else if we do not get any oil we have not got any yet and do not no when we shall but we are all tuff and harty and that is the most I think of . . . There is a great many that have been taken away by death this season.

"we have seen some whales since we have been in the ice but could not catch them the ice is so thick but we are in hopes to find it thinner by and by and the whales thicker."

The frustration of being "in the ice" is reflected ten days later in "all the Ships up here has got a

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