“Draw ships!” Messina exploded. “It’s high time you was a-sailin’ ’em!”
Needless to say I was disappointed in the way the old man received my good news. For the first time I felt that he had failed me. It didn’t occur to me then that it might be a blow to him to see me turning to someone else for nautical training.
My mother took it differently. “Donald McKay is a splendid man and he was a good friend of your father’s. You mustn’t mind what old Messina says. He’s a little touchy, you know. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity, but I shall be thankful if the association doesn’t lead you into sailing.”
The fact that I must leave school to make my own way in the world did not upset me. What school could have rivaled the interest of the surroundings in which I now found myself? From six o’clock in the morning till six at night I labored over a drawing table in the mold loft of Donald McKay’s shipyard.
My work in the beginning, in all truth, was elementary enough: I was allowed to trace the simpler details of ornament for the great-cabin. Today I realize that it was only the kindness of his heart for the son of a friend that prompted McKay to take me into his office. In those first weeks, if the destiny of the ship and the fate of all who manned her had been dependent upon my efforts, I could not have felt a greater sense of responsibility.
Through our offices filed a procession of shipwrights, chandlers, underwriters, lumbermen, engineers, sailmakers, captains active and retired. I kept my eyes upon my work, for McKay was a hard taskmaster, but I kept my ears apeak, and they missed no detail of all that there was to hear.
Donald McKay not only designed his ships, he superintended their construction as well. When he first began to build, it was the custom to hack frame timbers out of the rough with a broadax; when a timber must be cut lengthwise, it was sawed through by hand, a laborious process and a slow one. Here McKay showed the independence of his mind by setting up a sawmill in his yards to do both these jobs. It was an innovation, I can tell you. The saw hung in a mechanical contraption in such way that the workmen could control the tilt of it and thus get the desired bevel of cut. Once men had had to carry the big timbers on their shoulders; McKay erected a steam derrick to do it for them. It caused a lot of amusement among the scoffers but did the same work in jig time.
So active had the New England shipbuilders become that the seaboard forests were being stripped bare of timber. Men had to look farther for wood. McKay met this problem after his own fashion: he made a full set of patterns for every stick and timber in his ships; these patterns were taken into the northern forests during the winter; lumberjacks felled trees of the necessary number and size. Then over snow and ice the logs were hauled to the rivers before the spring thaws, and down in East Boston his adzes and hammers and his caulking irons rang to high heaven.
Sometimes the poet Longfellow dropped in to pass the time of day. If old Messina hadn’t always snorted at poets and suchlike, I might have paid more attention to Longfellow. But I do remember that after a visit to our yards, he once wrote a poem about a launching, and Donald McKay tacked a copy of it up on the wall of the mold loft. Probably it has never come to your eye, since they tell me that these enlightened days of the twentieth century hold Longfellow something of a fogy with a goodly coating of moss to his back. Maybe so. Anyway, here is the stanza:
Then the Master,
With a gesture of command,
Waved his hand;
And at the word,
Loud and sudden there was heard,
All around them and below,
The sound of hammers, blow on blow,
Knocking away the shores and spurs.
And see! she stirs!
She starts—she moves—she seems to feel
The thrill of life along her keel.
Not bad for a poet, moss or no moss. Once Richard Henry Dana, who wrote Two Years Before the Mast, stopped by for a chat with Donald McKay: a quiet, studious-looking man he was, with little look of the sea about him. Aye, it was all-absorbing to a lad like me, you can imagine.
Up in the mold loft the air was charged with activity. Draftsmen, down on their knees, drew diagonals and trapezoids in chalks on the floor. No one but a shipwright could have made head nor tail to them. McKay hovered over his men like a hawk, his keen eyes catching out any error of workmanship. With mammoth calipers he checked every line that the draftsmen drew, and they trembled lest the master find so much as a quarter-inch difference in their renderings of his plans. Sometimes he paced the floor as we worked, and you knew by the far look in his eyes that he was seeing this ship full-bodied and in her element—the sea. Now and again he’d halt, study the sheaf of plans in his hand, then bend to chalk a correction in the designs on the floor.
Every important timber in the ship—and there were more than two hundred—had been drawn in small scale on these plans. The draftsmen redrew them in chalk on the floor, some fifty times larger. Though the mold loft was 100 feet long by 150 feet deep, it was not vast enough to accommodate all these great drawings; they overlapped and crisscrossed until they would have seemed a Chinese puzzle to a landsman’s eye.
So the Flying Cloud took shape. First the seed which germinated in one man’s mind; then the model by which lesser men could catch the vision of her; then the mechanical drawings that put her into figures of geometry and conic sections. But as I labored there from daylight till dusk, bent over my drafting table and completely happy, those drawings became more in my sight than intersecting arcs and geometric trapezoids: they were the yards and spars of my ship, buffeted by the gales of the Roaring Forties, and I was athwart the t’gallant yard with my feet hooked into the lifts, fisting sail in the teeth of a heroic wind!
It was a great day when the converter was given the order to make his molds. It meant that at last the Flying Cloud was emerging from her chrysalis of drafting paper into tangible form. The converter and his men moved into the loft, puffed up with the sense of their own importance. First they cut thin deal boards into molds, each one of which followed exactly the shape of the chalk drawings on the loft floor. Then as fast as each mold was cut, it was carried off to the neighboring lumberyard where Donald McKay himself picked out timbers of the proper grain and size and marked each one with the number of its mold.
Pileheads had been driven deep into the slip to form a bed for the ship to rest upon. Timbers were laid horizontal-wise across the pileheads. On rugged blocks of oak along the center of the groundways the backbone of the vessel had its beginning. Of solid rock maple were her keel timbers; next, the upward thrust of her stempiece curved from its boxing into the keel; the sternpost was set in its mortise, while amidships the white-oak ribs swelled and rounded.
Fortunately it was a mild winter and no weather was so bad as to keep the men from their appointed jobs. From light till dark the yards hummed with activity. The saws whirred; the derrick groaned its complaint; adze and caulking iron kept up their resounding clamor, while the air was filled with the tang of fresh sawed oak and pine. Wood powder drifted like mist from the pits where the under-sawyers worked; the fires of the blacksmiths glowed in the wind.
In those days men took a pride in their work. The humblest apprentice in the yards seemed to feel that he was engaged upon a great, aye, even a sacred undertaking. For them the Flying Cloud was not just one more ship; she was timber and iron springing into life under their hands. Funny thing—that sense of the reality of a ship which impresses itself upon those who have a hand in her shaping. There was not a workman in the yards who doubted that a living spirit was housed within his handiwork. Just so the sailor believes that it’s the soul of a ship which makes an individual of her. And who can declare that they’re wrong? It is a fact that two ships built after the same plans, in the same yards, by the identical builder, will display wide-differing qualities when they