Funny thing about age—it’s like climbing a mountain. When you’re nigh the top, you turn to look back now and again. If your eyesight’s good (and mine is as keen as a petrel’s, if I do say it as shouldn’t) you can pick things out in the valley: men going about their chores; a dog lying in the sun; the river where it turns under the bridge. Memory’s like that, too. Just cast your eye back along it when you’ve most reached the century mark and you’ll see a powerful lot of things. Of course they don’t all stand out alike. Some are kind of blurry around the edges, and some are so faint you can scarce see them at all. But there are others, plenty of them, clear and sharp.
I remember—why, by the Great Horn Spoon! I remember seeing slaves up on the block, being sold at public auction. I remember Lincoln’s funeral, and the fever that ran through the country when Booth was captured. I recall, when I was only a shaver of six, squaring off to fight Charles Dickens because he called Americans “savages,” and it got my dander up.
Big things were happening. There was a young fellow named Sam Morse who turned his back on a promising career as a portrait painter to tinker with the telegraph. Blatherskite, sober folks called him. Matthew Maury was working out his theory of the natural laws governing winds and currents; charting those “sea lanes,” down which the California clippers were to sail to everlasting glory. Steam and the Ericsson screw were turning the maritime world keel up. Steam paddle boats could do eight and nine knots in an hour. The age was crying speed—more speed! If America hoped to compete with the subsidies and monopolies of the Old World, her ships must show their heels to all rivals.
In England Samuel Cunard had established his famous steamship line. When his Britannia, snorting like a grampus, pulled into Boston Harbor in the summer of 1840, public enthusiasm swept high. Here was the proper challenge to fan into flame the spark of the American genius for shipbuilding. The windships sharpened their bows, adjusted their sprits to a keener angle, and cracked on more and more sail to hold their own against the invader. The bluff-bowed East Indiamen were doomed; it was sundown for them and dawn for the clipper. Roaring days, those, of iron fists and hearts of oak! America’s Golden Age on the sea. But it was a losing fight. Sometimes I envy the men who, unlike myself, never lived to see the finish: steam’s triumph over sail.
The old ships are gone, and the men who manned them. Floating hotels driven by engines have taken their place. Ingenious inventions, I grant you. But ships? Ho! Funny thing about the art of shipbuilding—men practiced it for centuries before they produced the grand clippers of the ’50’s. But it died almost within a decade. The engine won out. The art has gone, like the ships themselves. And gone are the wildest, sweetest, freest years of life. So, in these latter days, you must pardon an old man while he casts his eye backward and remembers the days when life was as fresh as a morning at sea, and the sky was swept by the winds of surprise.
Show me the boy who doesn’t love ships! East Boston, where I was born, was a small lad’s paradise, for here ships were built; here they set sail for voyages to the world’s end; here they returned, heavy with ivory and pearl shell and oil and whalebone. And here finally they rode at anchor, the rake of their masts beckoning like a finger to a lad who stood on the threshold of eager venture.
Every hour that I was not in school found me at the wharves watching the loading and the unloading, listening to the talk of sailormen and the rousing chanteys. Aye, they sang them lustily, I can warrant.
Oh, a Yankee ship comes down the river
Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Her yards and masts they shine like silver
Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Backs bent to work, feet braced, brown arms hauling. The smell of tar on a blackened wharf, of hemp, of bananas rotting in a ship’s hold; such smells and sights and sounds formed the background of my childhood.
At this time my best friend was old Messina Clarke. What his age may have been, no one could say. He was known as “old” Messina. The adjective seemed to reach into antiquity. A small man he was, but tough; his eyes had been bleached of color under many suns; wrinkles furrowed his face, and his lower jaw was fringed in a scrub of white beard. He carried a spyglass as some men carry a cane and I never recall seeing him abroad without it.
The old man lived at the foot of my street in a shingled house that was like a hundred others of its day, yet had a sort of sea-going look about it. Perhaps it was the figurehead on the front lawn: a roundish mermaid with cheeks puffed to blow a conch. Perhaps it was the lanterns that hung to starboard and larboard of the door, or the ship models seen through the windows. Maybe it was just that the house sheltered Messina Clarke and so reflected the man who lived inside it. For never was there a brinier salt come to final anchor.
Messina Clarke was a small man but tough; his eyes had been bleached of color under many suns; wrinkles furrowed his face, and his lower jaw was fringed in a scrub of white beard.
I realize now what it was that attracted the old man to me: he was a talker and I was a listener. We shared a common passion in the sea. As I came to know all his anecdotes by heart, it was a simple matter to put in the word that suggested a new story as the one he was telling drew to a close. And what tales they were! Mutinies under the Southern Cross; a captain swinging from a yardarm; pirates in the China Sea and opium smuggling off Madagascar; slave runners plying their trade between the Ivory Coast and the South American market; yellow jack and whales, and cannibals and pearls….
The old man had started out in life as a cabin boy on a whaler, rising to the envied position of harpooneer; from that, by slow and logical degrees, boat header, then Chief Mate. Finally, Captain. Thus he brought his adventures to a close, but relived them all from day to day in memory. Once I heard my father refer to him as a “tiresome old man,” but to me he was the veritable source of all wisdom. Why, he was like a god who held the winds and storms in answer to his command.
Old Messina taught me all that I ever knew about a ship until I came to sail in one. He showed me how to turn a splice, to tie a score of knots, to shoot the sun and box the compass. Geography came to life all of a sudden, and places like Zamboanga and Malabar rang as familiar to my ear as Nantucket or Salem.
Holding one of his precious ship models on his knee, old Messina would demand, “What’s the longest name of any line aboard, lubber?”
I would wrack my brain, go hot and cold, feel a flush of fever in my cheek as I fished for the proper answer. The old man’s anger was lightning let loose. The air of the quarter-deck hung about him still. I would stammer out the first rope that came to mind.
“No it ain’t, neither!” he would bellow, shaking his fist under my nose. “It’s the main t’gallant stu’ns’l boom-tricing line. And don’t you fergit it the next time I asks you, or I’ll scalp you like a bloomin’ cannibule!”
When the Empress of Asia on her return from China, carrying a cargo worth five hundred thousand dollars, went down off the Horn with all hands, my father was a ruined man. He was a merchant and the cargo had been his private venture. He never recovered from the blow. A year later, when I was fourteen, he died, leaving my mother and me with scarce enough to keep body and soul together. My mother gave music lessons and finally was forced to take a few paying guests into our home. But even this proved insufficient to our needs. It was up to me to do something to swell the family income.
Naturally I looked toward the sea. My mother, with the memory of the Empress of Asia fresh in her mind, begged me not to think of sail. My father had friends among the shipbuilders,