William Whittington (1842-1929), a blue water skipper of the old sailing days, witnessed the evolution at sea from racing clippers of the Victorian Age (1837-1901) through to the era of motorized ships.
Born in England, Whittington was apprenticed to the Green-Blackwall Line, a passenger and freight service that ran sailing ships from London to Sydney to India long before the days of steam, and spent the greater part of his life at sea, sailing always in Green-Blackwall ships.
Among his many seagoing adventures, there was the time his ship was becalmed for three weeks off the Maldive Islands.
Others include his circumnavigation of the globe three times, sailing through treacherous iceberg fields, rounding the dangerous Cape Horn in winter, and thrice visiting St. Helena Island, where Napoleon (1769-1821) had lived in exile in a wooden cottage.
Between voyages, Whittington attended a nautical school in England, took a succession of examinations, and eventually earned captain’s papers, although he never commanded a ship.
His wife, Mrs. Ellen Whittington (1850-1928), an Englishwoman born in India, was educated in England and France, and afterward was traveling back to India to live, when a romance that began aboard ship culminated in her marriage to Mr. Whittington in 1875.
William Whittington left the sea shortly thereafter, and the couple went to California for a spell.
Whittington then became manager of the Soper, Wright &Co. sugar plantation at Ookala, Hawai‘i.
In those days, Ookala was reached only by horseback trails and was the most isolated plantation along the Hamakua Coast.
And, since no road went from Ookala to Hilo, people usually boarded the steamer “Likelike” at Laupahoehoe for Hilo and to other places beyond.
Mrs.Whittington remembered one trip aboard “Likelike,” when Princess Miriam Likelike, “a tall, stately woman, who was kind to the children,” spoke with her on deck.
In 1899, the Whittingtons settled on Kaua‘i, where Mr. Whittington became Port Allen’s pilot and raised pineapples on their Kalaheo homestead beginning in 1915.
Their children were Mrs. Helen Hason, Mrs. Gregory T. Greig, Addie Whittington, Joyce Whittington, Dorothy Whittington, and Richard and Robert Whittington.
