HAWAIIAN WORD OF THE DAY Pupule: Crazy, insane				HAWAIIAN PROVERB OF THE DAY “He goes amiss on the trail of the mentally deranged.”
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September 6, 1844: The whaling ship Sharon, from New Bedford, Mass., anchors off Lahaina. Having left the Eastern Seaboard on May 25, 1841, the ship had not been home in more than three years, with good reason. Two years before its Maui visit, its captain, Howes Norris, had been killed on board. A vicious and sadistic man, Norris had, by several accounts including the third mate’s log, spent the previous six months slowly murdering the ship’s steward, George Babcock, a fugitive slave who chose the Sharon as a good place to spend a few years while headhunters tired looking for him. Norris repeatedly whipped Babcock, starved him, flayed Babcock’s open wounds, and crushed his wounded, blistered foot, among other tortures.

By November 5, 1842, 11 shipmates had deserted the Sharon because of Norris’s madness. Nonetheless, when sperm whales were spotted, Norris sent all hands out to them, leaving him with a Spanish steward (a replacement for Babcock) and three Rotumans who had signed on from the Fiji Island of Rotuma to replace deserters. No one is sure what happened while the boats hunted whales, but the second mate, Norris’s first cousin, Thomas Harlock Smith, saw the flag on ship flying at half mast (arranged by the steward). Norris was found on deck, severed in several places, including his waist and neck. It is thought an altercation between Norris and the Rotumans “got out of hand”, and the Rotumans, fearful for their lives after seeing what Norris did to another dark-skinned person, killed him.

The returning sailors killed the two Rotumans, and brought a third islander to New Zealand, which, lacking evidence that he did the deed, promptly set him free. No sailor or officer ever publicly described Norris’s murder of Babcock, though suspicions grew, and in New Bedford, the Norris family was shunned. Thomas Harlock Smith was captain of the Sharon when it arrived in Lahaina. However, he became known as a coward of sorts, not only among the crew for not challenging Norris during the torture, but during whaling as well, his second mate calling him “fearful of whales, a strange malady in a whaling captain.”

The Sharon was the sister ship to the Acushnet, the vessel on which author Herman Melville served. Both crews exchanged gossip when possible and it is thought some of the sad tale of Norris, his madness and the Sharon may have influenced Melville when he wrote Moby Dick.

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