“Catching Porpoises,” by Herman Popp, from Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler Alcyone, by George Barker (1916). [Google Books] Colorized by A.I.
“Cutting off the Blubber,” by Herman Popp, from Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler Alcyone, by George Barker (1916). [Google Books]
“Strung Up by the Thumbs,” by Herman Popp, from Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler Alcyone, by George Barker (1916). [Google Books]
Left: Capt. Collin Stephenson aboard Carrie D. Knowles. He commanded Alcyone from 1890 to 1894. [Knowles family photos / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 5091] Right: The captain’s house today. [2022, Dunlap]
Updated on 28 August 2026 | Named for the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster, Alcyone was a Provincetown whaler through and through, having been constructed in 1866 at the John G. Whitcomb Shipyard, 467 Commercial Street. Its first agents were E. & E. K. Cook & Company, succeeded in 1880 by George O. Knowles. The two-masted schooner was 82 feet long and had an internal volume of 9,200 cubic feet (or 92 gross tons). Its masters from 1866 to 1890 were William T. Hudson, Foster Brown, William H. Baldwin, Seneca G. Ewell, Joseph Fisher, John W. Atkins, John A. Dunham, and Antone E. Mello.
In 1890, under Knowles’s ownership, command of Alcyone passed to Capt. Collin Stephenson, of 4 Race Road. The captain (whose first name is sometimes rendered Colin, and whose last name is sometimes rendered Stevenson) came from the Lesser Antilles, though his birthplace is not entirely fixed. A contemporary account of his ship’s disappearance in The New York Times stated that he was a native of Dominica, but Laurel Guadazno has determined that he was from St. Vincent, about 140 miles south of Dominica. He was born in the late 1840s and came to the United States in the 1850s or early ’60s.
Stephenson is a prominent figure in the story of the Cape’s African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American mariners. He also left a haunting legacy, as his last command — after Alcyone — was the whaling ship Carrie D. Knowles. It vanished in 1904, leaving one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in Provincetown history.
Besides its long history of service, Alcyone is remembered as the setting of George Barker’s 1916 book, Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler Alcyone; Killing Man-Eating Sharks in the Indian Ocean; Hunting Kangaroos in Australia — an account intended for young readers; boys in particular. In October 1868, at age 16, Barker shipped on Alcyone out of Boston, when it was bound for the vast Indian Ocean with a crew of 23 men and boys. The weather on the first day was so miserable that some boys threw pots and kettles overboard, in the hope that the captain would be forced to return to port. No such luck. But they were marked for punishment throughout the journey. “The boys were hung by the thumbs and made to stand on their toes for two hours at a time,” Barker wrote. “This punishment was frightful, the rolling of the schooner adding to the misery.”
Barker described the generally wretched cuisine aboard Alcyone, but also noted the occasional treats:
“Hard-tack [crackers] and tough salt meat comprised the bulk of their daily meals, it being necessary to bake the former in a hot oven before rendering it safe to eat. Occasionally, this diet was varied by flying fish that were caught on the deck. These fish are similar to our smelts in size and taste. The flying fish were attracted by a lantern hung over the side of the rigging. They would fly on board in large schools; the crew gathered nearly 200 of these fish in one school. …”
“When a whale was captured the cook fried doughnuts in the hot froth of the whale’s oil and these were looked upon as a delicacy.”
It took 11 months of cruising in the South Atlantic for Alcyone to round the Cape of Good Hope and enter the Indian Ocean, where Barker saw his first pod of sperm whales. One of Alcyone‘s three whaling boats approached an especially large whale that seemed not to notice its presence. “Within about 10 yards of [the whale] the boat-steerer drove the harpoon into it,” Barker wrote. “As soon as hit, the whale turned flukes and started for the bottom. … It soon came up and started along the surface of the water at a rate close to 20 miles an hour, towing the boat along with it. It kept this pace up for some time, but after a while became tired out. The boat then drew up to him and the captain drove a lance through its heart, putting an end to the racing.” The whale had by then drawn the boat some 25 miles away from Alcyone.
After the whaling boat was reunited with the mother ship, two men were lowered from Alcyone on a platform just above the enormous carcass. They began carving off strips of blubber two feet wide. These strips were fastened to a hook and raised to the ship’s deck, where they were cut into smaller pieces and fed into cauldrons over high heat. In this process, known as trying, a highly-valued oil was extracted from blubber. The whale that took Alcyone‘s boat on its 25-mile “Nantucket sleigh ride” yielded 90 barrels of oil. Each barrel was worth $60 — nearly $1,500 in current money, for a total haul (again, in modern dollars) of $135,000. From one whale.
Not too far into the Indian Ocean, Alcyone ran aground on a coral reef off Mahé, the largest island in the Seychelles. Damage to the hull was serious enough that the captain decided to put into dry dock on the island of Mauritius. George and one of his mates jumped Alcyone there and found passage on a full-rigged cargo ship bound for Melbourne. Alcyone itself did not return to Provincetown until 8 June 1871, 961 days after departing.
Barker was pretty smart for a 16-year-old.
George Barker jumped ship from Alcyone in Mauritius.