BRISTOL BOOKFEST 2024
Voyage of Melville’s seagoing uncle Nor’West John D’Wolf to be retold at Bristol Bookfest 2024
JOHN DE WOLF
DeWolf Fulton will present the incredible story of his ancestor Nor’West John D’Wolf, whose four year voyage circumnavigated the globe.
The epic voyage of Nor’West John D’Wolf, uncle to Herman Melville and the first North American to circumnavigate the globe “by the land route,” will be presented on Thursday, March 28 at 6:00PM in the Linden Place Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public and no registration is required.
In conjunction with Bookfest 2024, the PowerPoint presentation by DeWolf Fulton will trace the 1804 voyage to the North Pacific where Cpt D’Wolf traded Bristol goods for sea otter pelts shipped to Canton for silks, then back to Bristol for the local market.
While D’Wolf sent his crew to China, he sailed along the Aleutian Islands to Kamchatka, across Siberia to St Petersburg, then back to the United States. While others had circled the globe by sea, D’Wolf was the first to cross Siberia, a voyage that took him four years and netted $100,000 profit, over $2 million in today’s purchasing power.
As it crossed into the Sea of Okhotsk, D’Wolf’s ship ran up on the back of a whale, an episode he later told his nephew Herman Melville who recounted the tale in chapter 45 of Moby Dick to help fortify his fiction. D’Wolf was instrumental in persuading young Herman to go to sea for a vocation.
DeWolf Fulton has reprinted the Roulon-Miller edition of Nor’West John’s Voyage to the North Pacific and donated a number of the books to Linden Place for its gift shop. This edition includes illustrations by Anne Hughes and essays by Harold Turner detailing the Bristol/Melville connection.