Introduction

I hope the reader will allow me to insert a small note concerning one of my ancestors.

In 1803, John DeWolf, to whom I’m related on my father’s side, left Bristol, Rhode Island, aboard the Juno, a 250-ton ship of which he was the owner. His family, the most prominent in Bristol, had made much of their money in the African slave trade, but John wanted no part of such a business. He and his crew sailed around Cape Horn and moved up the west coast of the Americas, acquiring as they went a valuable cargo of furs. When they eventually reached Alaska in 1804, DeWolf made friends with the Russians who occupied the trading post there. He sold them the Juno in exchange for a smaller sloop, onto which he loaded his cargo of furs. He then dispatched his crew aboard the sloop to China, with instructions that they were to sell the furs, return to Rhode Island, and deposit the proceeds in his bank account.

Dewolf remained with the Russians throughout the winter of 1804; then together they set off across the Bering Strait. They were blown off course and ended up in Kamchatka, from whence they traveled by dogsled overland to St. Petersburg. The American sea captain remained in the Russian capital for a year or so and finally journeyed across Europe, crossed the Atlantic, and in 1808 returned once more to his native Bristol. There he discovered that his crew had indeed from China and had deposited $100,000 in his bank account.

With this windfall he retired from the sea and later married a woman named Mary Melville.

Mary’s nephew, Herman, delighted in talking to his uncle about the captain’s adventures at sea, and Nor’west John, as he became known, appears in cameo in the novels White Jacket and Moby-Dick.

This seems an appropriate note on which to begin the story of The White Wyrm.