Annie & Family – a summary

Annie Chase (1868-1936) was the daughter of Captain Amos Appleton Chase and of her mother Louise Dana Brown 

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Louise’s time as whaling wife began because her husband Amos, had in his previous voyage, been held captive on Pohnpei Island in the South Pacific after the south’s civil war steamship, the Shenandoah, burning to the waterline his ship, the Hector, and two others, and the "diminutive spitfire," who resisted fiercely enough to be put into irons, was "imprisoned on a tropical island, guest of the king." 

 

Given that Chase was offered an island wife, and that crew were already consorting – on deck even – before "the burning,"from 1867 to 1890, on six long voyages, Louise never “let him out of her sight again”

 

Annie’s time as a whaling child began in 1868, when Louise debarked the Platina to give birth to Annie in the whaling enclave in Paita, Peru, while Amos hunted in the Northern Pacific grounds off the coast • Captain Chase brought his wife and new daughter back on board when Annie was six months old .

 

From six months to age fifteen Annie lived with them on the whaling ships Platina and Jirah Perry, with, at most, six months on land in between voyages. Her first time on land after embarking at 6 months old, we said, was in Australia. Said whaling wife Laura Jernigan, " The Chase's were jolly people, and loved their children." Children certainly must have brightened their days, and they were apparently jolly on land. But we all knew Amos was a bastard at sea, and Louise so strict that Annie remembers being mostly confined to a very small cabin, and required to sew and read the bible. While her memories would have been colored by her hatred for the sea, other whaling children appear to have had better quarters, and more time on deck. (See the extraordinary X for a look at whaling during its "heyday" if it can so be said.) 

 

At fifteen, Annie left the sea into the care of her mother’s family to be ‘finished” in Pittsburg.

 

She met her wealthy husband, Hanson Wheeler Rose, while they were co-stars in an operetta. Married in 1890, they had three children, and the family all enjoyed the felicity of love and good fortune for another ten years.

 

Grievously, the little family lost all of their money in the Market Panic of 1907, and Hanson died in a flu epidemic just two years later. Annie returned to Maine to live again – but on land this time – with her parents Amos and Louise, and her children.

 

Amos and Louise, too, were starting over. On the return leg of their last voyage, on the Niger, Amos and Louise were bringing back a cask of Australian opals bought with all their retirement savings, as their rarity would insure a great return. But learning of them, the crew mutinied, refusing to work until Chase threw them overboard, for they believed opals were evil, and cursed the ship to certain ruin (see MA achievement test essay).

 

When Annie’s daughter Louise began to raise her family, Annie lived with and cared for her three grandchildren, Anne, Janet, and Betty, dying beloved of them, and of her son-in-law, ever grateful for all she had done to create this happy extended household.