Читать книгу All Sail Set - Armstrong Sperry - Страница 12

CHAPTER I

I MEET DONALD MCKAY—AND SWEAR A VOW

IF, BY the grace of God, I should live three years longer, I will be one hundred years old. Aye, a ripe age, any way you look at it. There are trees in California—sequoias, they call them—that have seen a thousand winters; there are insects that are born and die before a minute ends. Well—a man’s life sails its course between these extremes. Threescore and ten the Bible says. But shucks! That’s scarce a babe’s age when you’re ninety-seven!

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, so it was upon them that I cast my eye.

Gold had been struck in California. Around the Horn, over mountains and prairies, people were swarming. Ninety-odd thousand of them on the Pacific Coast were clamoring for food, for clothing, for the necessities of existence. The long-neglected shipyards came to life, while new ones sprang up with mushroom growth on the shores of Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. In the harbor of East Boston there was an unbroken line of yards stretching from Jeffries Point to Chelsea Bridge. Humming with industry they were, in answer to the call of the Gold Coast. Flour was bringing $40.00 a barrel; sugar $4.00 a pound; shoes were selling at $45.00 a pair, and laudanum at $1.00 a drop. The miners could wash from 100 to 1000 dollars worth of gold dust in a day, and often the profits from one voyage of a fast clipper would pay for the original cost of the ship.

At the foot of Border Street, Donald McKay had his shipyard. Donald McKay … there’s magic in the name! He was a young man at that time; not more than thirty-seven or -eight, I would say, but already his name was upon every tongue. It’s the necessities of an age that produce the men it needs. Donald McKay was one of those by whom a period in history is remembered. John Griffiths of New York started the ball a-rolling with the Sea Witch, the first true clipper. Thacher Magown of Mystic River fame crowded close upon his heels.

But it was McKay who carried shipbuilding onward to new heights. Creative artist and master engineer he was; a dreamer, too, but with the drive of energy to bring his dreams to reality. Even the names of his ships quicken the blood and conjure up a vision before the eye: Staghound, Lightning, Westward Ho, Sovereign of the Seas, Flying Cloud … these were but a few of the sixty or more that stood to his final credit.

Many times I had heard my father speak of him with admiration. Only the old die-hards were set against the man: turning a ship’s bows inside out wasn’t natural in a ship, they maintained. And at first it looked as if they were right. The clippers did drive themselves under until their commanders learned to crowd most of their canvas on the main and mizzen. Then the records began to give the lie to the old men’s croaking. In Topliff’s News Room the Marine Intelligence column of the Transcript published Arrivals and Clearances that confounded the wiseacres. China and back within six months! Ridiculous. But true. Ships that averaged, if the Transcript didn’t lie, 15¾ knots an hour. Well, muttered the die-hards, you couldn’t believe everything you saw in print. But the old order was changing. Men were talking speed—speed in terms of dollars.

I determined to try to see Donald McKay. That afternoon as I made my way to Border Street, the wharves were humming with activity despite the biting December air. News had just been signaled from Telegraph Hill that a clipper was in sight, Boston bound. Men were grouped on the street corners, speculating as to her ownership, laying bets on her speed, her cargo. Clerks poked their heads out of countinghouse windows; spyglasses were trained to eastward. It was a scene that I knew and loved. Vessels were moored at the very doors of the warehouses, discharging their cargoes or lading for the far places of the world. Clippers and brigs and barkentines shoved at one another, the arrogant angle of their sprits jutting up across the street as high as the third story of the storehouses. I saw the house-flag of Enoch Train’s packets fluttering its white diamond on a red ground. Here was the sea come to meet the land and declare a truce. Here men made ready to have their business upon the great waters.

I hurried along Border Street, past Central Square. There they were—the McKay yards! I turned in at the entrance to a fenced-in area and my ear was assailed by the whir of saws, the ring of axes, the fused sounds of wood and metal in the shaping. A smell of fresh-sawed pine and oak smote my nostrils. Outside the frame building that housed Donald McKay’s drafting room and mold loft, I paused. It took some courage to enter. Once inside it wasn’t so bad. I looked at the stool perchers bent over their ledgers, and took heart. Pale men they were, existing on the salt edge of adventure. Nothing scary about them.

The prestige of my father’s name turned the trick. I was permitted to climb a narrow wooden stair leading to the drafting room above. The sanctum sanctorum. I lifted my fist to knock. I stopped. Behind that door Donald McKay was at work. I realized that I was trembling. Swallowing hard, I thumped the panel.

“Come in!” boomed a voice.

I opened the door and entered. In the gloom of the vast room all I could see for a moment was the square of light where the window gave on the shipyards. A man was bent over a drafting table. My eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom, took in many things at once. A high-ceilinged room with rows of shelves lining the walls; in a far corner a cherry-bellied stove glowed to defeat the outer chill. There was a clutter of nautical paraphernalia everywhere: a model clipper with false gunports painted along her sides; a mounted shark whose slim hull was marked off in geometric sections; samples of copper and wood and sailcloth; whale-oil lamps above the drafting table; a set of bellows worked by pedals that could create a miniature wind of hurricane hazard from any point of the compass; wooden lift-models and mechanical drawings; many strange sea-going devices that would have baffled a landlubber.

I started to speak, then stopped. My attention had been caught and riveted by the model of a ship cradled in its wooden brace. Clean-lined and eager as a greyhound she was; no trailboards, no cathead carving, no ornamental barnacles of any sort. She had the lean belly of a sprinter, and from the sudden sharpness of her stem the figure of an angel rose with trumpet poised, like a herald of good tidings; and in the uprush of the figure I could almost hear the ringing gladness of the trumpet blast! Here was the core and essence of a ship, a ship to carry herself with pride before the wind. From truck to keel, from rudderpost to jib boom, she was a miracle of proportion and grace. In the shaft of cold sunlight that slanted through the window she seemed almost to breathe, and I caught my own breath in wonder.

I felt as if all the sinews of my body had been plucked by an unseen hand and set a-humming, as a vessel’s cordage hums to a sudden-bursting gale. I wanted to shout and sing, but my tongue was silent. Only a model of a ship. But enough. She was beauty moving toward perfection.

Thus I first saw the Flying Cloud.

Aye, as if it were yesterday, I remember that moment. Perhaps destiny, hovering above our heads, sweeps close enough sometimes for us to feel the brush of its wing. I knew that this ship and my life were to be bound up together, come what might.

“Weel, young lad, an’ what might ye be after?”

The voice of the man at the drafting table brought me back with a start. A flavor of the hielands hung about his speech, like a smell of heather blown across a moor. I saw a stocky man, ruddy colored, with thick, black hair growing after its own impulse. His mouth was firm, even stern; his eyes direct and piercing; his chin square and deep-cleft.

My throat felt tight and my voice small, but I remember the friendliness that sparked his eyes as he glanced across the drawing table at me.

Turning back to me, Donald McKay demanded, “An’ what mak’s ye come to me for a position?”

“I—I want a position, sir.”

“An’ what can ye do?”

“I can draw ships, too,” came my answer, with courage mustered from somewhere.

He laughed then. “Hoot! An’ that’s a braw deeclaration! What’s yer name?”

“Enoch Thacher.”

“Son of Joel Thacher, the merchant?”

When I nodded in the affirmative, he said: “I knew yer faither weel, laddie. A fine mon he was, too.” His mouth relaxed into a smile and I felt my heart grow warm toward him.

Donald McKay turned and laid his hand upon the ship model that had cast a spell over me. For a moment he was silent.

“I caught ye lookin’ upon this ship,” he said at last. His eyes lighted and he moved his fingers over the model with a sculptor’s touch. “Up New York way they’re sayin’ that we Doon Easters canna’ build ships to outsail theirs. Weel—they can tak’ a round turn out o’ theirsel’s and go to Tophet! I ken that this sweet lassie will mak’ them eat their words. She’ll be as quick in light airs as in a howlin’ blaw, or I’m a Dutchman. Look-ye how I’ve sharpened her bows and flattened her forebody, and peeled her under the counters! She’ll hold to a maximum o’ speed wi’out drivin’ hersel’ under. An’ as for they newfangled teapots that run wi’ engines!” He gave a snort of disgust and patted the model almost with reverence. “The end o’ sail, the wise oracles are sayin’. Just wait till you tak’ to water, my pet!” Turning back toward me, he demanded, “An’ what mak’s ye come to me for a position?”

“Well, sir,” I stammered, “I often heard my father speak of you as—as a man of genius, sir. And I’ve loved ships ever since I was born.” I was twisting my hat and wondering why I had been cursed with such a clumsy tongue.

Donald McKay looked at me with those piercing eyes that could have found out the flaw in any living thing.

“So ye love ships, eh?” he chuckled. “I mind when I was yer age I loved them too. Grand fun it was to be a-straddle a skys’l yard, swaying to the pitchin’ o’ the ship. Sometimes as I sit here on the land, designin’ ships for other men tae sail, I think aboot it, an’ remember the gales an’ the storms. An’ I tell ye, it mak’s a shiver run through the marrow o’ my bones! Ye ken, laddie, there are men this world who ne’er see a drop o’ water but what they wash in? To them the sea is an auld wife’s tale wi’out muckle o’ truth to it. But for men like you an’ me, laddie, it’s a braw sight, an’ ane that plucks at yer heart wi’ cold fingers. Bonnie, but awesome.” His eyes had the look of a man who sees a vision, and I held my breath lest I break the spell.

Donald McKay turned back toward his work. “All right, laddie,” he said abruptly, “I’ll sign ye on. Three dollars a week, an’ mind ye spend it cannily. Nip awa’ home noo, an’ report tomorrow.”

I was dismissed. I could only stammer my thanks as I backed toward the door and stumbled over the boot scraper. My mind churned with the things I had seen and heard and felt. In a stride Donald McKay had taken his place beside Messina Clarke as one of the gods of my childhood. But there was a pivot, a focal point, around which even he whirled as a minor impression, as they say a satellite whirls about an orb of greater magnitude: the Flying Cloud …

Out in the street again I stood stock-still before McKay’s office, stood there like one daft, and stared up at his window, through which I could see the top of his head as he bent over his work. The Flying Cloud! To work all day within hand’s reach of her. To see her taking shape as one week merged into another, expanding, growing to the fulfilment of her perfection. To have a part, no matter how small, in her creation.

The gold of that wintry late afternoon was round about me. The striking of the old South Church bell reached my ear across the clear air. The sea was as blue as an oath.

I felt suddenly charged with resolution and purpose. A knight of old seeing a vision of the Grail could have known no more solemn consecration than did I.

For the Flying Cloud, I vowed I would give the best that was in me: my strength, my youth, my life if need be!