A Whaler at Twilight

A unique and engrossing duet format. Alex beautifully intertwines his great-great-grandfather Rob’s autobiographical account with reflections and thoroughly researched historical context. Rob’s fascinating account steeps readers in a mid-nineteenth-century whaler’s life and in Rob’s formative ten-year journey wrestling with his inner demons to find himself. Alex’s reflections and research deepen readers’ understanding of Rob, the time period, the South Pacific region and inhabitants Rob came into contact with, the whaling industry, and the cultural milieu.

A Whaler at Twilight is also a compelling bridge between the past and present as Alex shares his own journey retracing his great-great-grandfather’s footsteps in New Zealand and considers his and Rob’s differing paths and circumstances. The book ends with Alex’s reflections as a conservationist on man’s relationship with the natural world and its future. Readers can’t help but parallel and compare the grim realities of whaling in A Whaler at Twilight with man’s relationship with nature today.

A Whaler at Twilight reads like being invited over to a new friend’s home and hearing all about his family’s sprawling history. It’s a chronicle that reels in a panoply of subjects–ecology, religion, and history–and ultimately serves as a tender reminder that, no matter the era, our relationship with the ever-changing world is just as complex as the relationship we nurture with ourselves.

An adventure story beyond just the era it depicts. Alexander Brash ties the tale together with his passion for environmental conservation to provide an epilogue to [his ancestor] Robert Armstrong’s exciting accounts.

It’s extraordinary, it’s very clever, and hauntingly profound on so many levels. I’m in awe, you write fabulously well. I just wish I was back in the Southern Ocean with you.

This previously unpublished narrative of nineteenth-century whaler and lumberman Robert W. Armstrong is so full of compelling and shocking stories about life at sea and the impact that men, whaling, and colonialism had on the people and ecosystems of the South Pacific and Aotearoa New Zealand that it deserves an important place on the same shelf as the narratives of J. Ross Browne, Henry Cheever, and Francis Allyn Olmsted. The layering of Armstrong’s grappling with redemption, Brash’s historical interpretation, and his own quest of discovery as a descendant who has spent his career in conservation builds A Whaler at Twilight into a unique and deeply personal odyssey.

Using his great-great-grandfather’s previously undiscovered nineteenth-century account of whaling, logging, and searching for salvation as an anchor, Alexander Brash weaves a fascinating tale in which he not only illuminates his ancestor’s compelling journey of discovery, but also his own. Part history, part meditation on the meaning of religion and life, and part plea to better protect the environment, A Whaler at Twilight is a wonderful and thought-provoking read. The colorful characters alone are worth the price of admission.

Alexander R. Brash was born and raised in New York, NY. An early love for birds evolved into a passion for quantitative community ecology and then a devotion to conservation. Along the way he worked on Great Gull Island, in the American Museum of Natural History, and graduated from Buckley School, Hotchkiss School, Connecticut College, Yale School for the Environment, and worked on a PhD at Rutgers University. After a hurricane wiped out his study site, he took a job with NYC Parks and rose to be the Chief Park Ranger, managing the agency’s uniformed officers, Natural Resource Group, Communications, Historic House Trust, and Special Events. At NYC Parks he initiated the Forever Wild Project, now 47 park preserves covering over 8,700 acres, Project X, the city’s first program to re-introduce extirpated species, and he was a first responder on 9⁄11. After nearly two decades in New York, he joined the National Parks Conservation Association as the Northeast Regional Director lobbying for our national parks, particularly bringing attention to the system’s urban parks and cultural icons, as well as initiating the effort to establish Katahdin Woods, Stonewall Inn, and Patterson Falls as new National Parks. Alex then spent three years as President of Connecticut Audubon, which he re-invigorated by moving its finances into the black, tripling its endowment, doubling the size of its nature preserves, and re-aligning its educational programs with STEM. Retired in Connecticut, he has been consulting, writing, traveling, birding, and spending time with family. Happily married to Jane, they have two great children, Ian and Emily.

Robert W. Armstrong was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1828, the only child of William and Rebecca Armstrong. After attending the esteemed Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the world’s first dental school, he served for a short while as a dentist in the Midwest and the South. He then spent ten years in the South Pacific as a whaler and a logger before returning to Baltimore and starting a second career as a store clerk. He worked at his uncle’s firm Armstrong, Cator and Co. Soon after, he married Eudocia Muller and together they opened their own successful millinery store on Lexington Street. With Eudocia ultimately managing the store, Robert became more involved in church and community affairs later in his life. Robert and Eudocia had eight children. He died peacefully in 1902 and lies with his family in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

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