Читать книгу Hard down! Hard down! - Captain Jack Isbester - Страница 13

The Novice, where John Isbester finished the 1867 season, was owned by the well-known Shetland cod fishing firm of Joseph Leask & Co., and in 1868 he signed on the schooner Anaconda, another Faero smack owned by Leask, where he was to go to the cod fishing for the next three seasons. These schooners were long, rakish, fine-lined vessels of over 35 metres in length, wet in a seaway and needing to be handled with care – ‘Like a glass baby which would as soon drown you as look at you’ – as one old salt is reported to have said. Like most of the Faero smacks they had originally been built for other trades. Anaconda and her two sister schooners had been luxuriously appointed, and the skipper of the sister ship Destiny was reputed to have adopted my lady’s boudoir as his cabin.1 It is unlikely that John Isbester, sailing as ordinary seaman, would have felt much benefit from the luxury.

During the fishing season Anaconda carried a crew of 17 of whom 13 were full-shares-men; the three ordinary seamen, of whom John Isbester was one, earned ¾ shares, and a ship’s boy earned a ½ share. These were the shares of the earnings from the fishing after the owners had taken a half of the total earnings, plus the costs of fitting out the ship for the fishing.2

After the fishing season these vessels made voyages to Spain and the Mediterranean ports with sun-dried Shetland cod (baccalà), for which there was a good market, and they made other commercial voyages to British and European ports.3 This is how the schooner Anaconda was employed during the winters of 1868–9 and 1869–70, which must have been frustrating for John Isbester, who as a junior hand was not retained outside the fishing season. His shipmates were visiting new countries, experiencing the adventure of foreign ports, seeing beautiful big sailing ships and enjoying, from time to time the sunshine, blue skies and gentle winds, the flying fish and sporting dolphins of more southern latitudes. From his more experienced shipmates he would be hearing sailors’ stories of romantic tropical seaports and great commercial centres. So it is no surprise that after five hard summers of fishing in challenging northern climes amongst his Shetland countrymen he chose to move into big ships, trading worldwide. In the spring of 1871, at the age of 19, he went south to Liverpool, to find employment in square-rigged ships.

In Liverpool he joined the ship Sealkote, 1,241 tons gross, as ordinary seaman in April 1871 shortly before she sailed for

Calcutta and any ports and places in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the China and Eastern Seas (thence to a port for orders and to the Continent if required) and back to a final port of discharge in the United Kingdom term not to exceed 3 years.4

The agreement also provided that:

The crew shall consist of Mate, Carpr, Bsn, Sails, Std, Cook, 8 Seamen, 1 Ordy and 1 Boy [i.e. mate, carpenter, bosun, sailmaker, steward, cook, 8 seamen, 1 ordinary seaman and 1 boy]. No grog allowed.

Life in the forecastle cannot have been pleasant. James Reddock, another ordinary seaman, fell sick on the third day of the voyage from an unidentified but appalling illness which covered him with a rash, then scabs which rubbed off to leave bare flesh. Despite care which seems to have been well intentioned and kindly, he died 12 days later, by which time he was ‘smelling very strong’.5 Throughout his illness he lay in the forecastle, sharing the space with all the other sailors. After his death, in accordance with tradition, his possessions were sold to his shipmates. This was a way of ensuring that his meagre possessions were not wasted and of providing a little money for the next of kin, when and if known.

Calcutta was reached in mid-September, after about five months at sea. During the passage while Sealkote was in the Atlantic, John Isbester would have experienced Westerlies followed by the steady north east trade winds, then the doldrums and the south east trades, mostly pleasant sailing in latitudes far more benign than was offered by the waters around Shetland. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, probably at a good distance from the land, the westerly winds of the Roaring Forties might have accelerated their passage before they turned northwards into the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The final weeks of the voyage would have occurred during the south west monsoon season, providing a fair wind but unpleasant rainy, sweaty conditions when tempers are likely to have been short. Arriving at Sandheads at the mouth of the Hoogly, Sealkote would have acquired a pilot and a tug and been towed up the fast-flowing river to Budge Budge or Calcutta. The dense mangrove swamps, the innumerable small boats transporting passengers or stacked high with sacks or bales of farm produce, the fishermen with their nets and the brown-skinned people in lungis and saris would provide fascinating sights for a young man who until that time had seen only the Faeroes, Scotland and northern England.

When berthed at No.5 Hastings Moorings, Calcutta, at 0715 hrs on Monday 17 September, shortly after Sealkote’s arrival in the port, Lewis Joseph, ordinary seaman, loosing sails, fell from the mizzen topsail yard onto the poop deck. He was immediately seen by a doctor who happened to be on board at the time and sent to Calcutta hospital where he died at 1015 hrs the same morning of a ruptured spleen. A fall in these circumstances would be unusual – the ship would be steady and the temperature not extreme – but the records show that Joseph had taken a cash advance of 5 shillings on the ship’s arrival in port the previous afternoon, in addition to incurring debts of £1 5s with a bumboat man for unspecified goods or services. In Calcutta in 1871, 5 shillings – half a week’s wages for an ordinary seaman – would have been a very much more substantial figure than it seems today. Whatever the reason, it is likely that his fall was caused by feeling unwell. When Joseph’s effects were sold, John Isbester paid 3 shillings for a pair of boots which Joseph had earlier in the voyage bought for 16 shillings from the captain’s slopchest.

Most of the crew deserted soon after the ship arrived in Calcutta, which probably suited both crew and owners well. The latter could use cheap local labour when needed for the two months during which Sealkote was in the port, and the former could have a few days ashore enjoying themselves after their five months at sea and then, when their money ran out, ship out to some new destination.

Sealkote remained in Calcutta until mid-November and I like to think that my grandfather wandered around the suburban Kidderpore covered market as I did 90 years later, enjoying the immaculate stalls selling beans and pulses in sacks carefully opened to display their attractive contents, bars of coarse local soap, brilliantly coloured saris and enticing, juicy mangoes, sweet and tasty bananas and delicious papayas. For five months John Isbester had been climbing the lofty masts of Sealkote but he may have been surprised at the skill and nonchalance with which Indian men shinned up palm trees to harvest the coconuts.

Calcutta at that period offered plenty of traditional attractions for sailors.

A great deal of moral latitude, not to say licence, was permitted in Calcutta at that time. Everything was cheap – rum, women and tobacco. The merchant sailor was allowed to do pretty much as he pleased in pursuing his peculiar ideas of personal enjoyment. He might get drunk in the Numbers, riot in the Checkers and then proceed to clean out the German Barracks without fear of serious interference or arrest on the part of the East India police, most of whom were recruited from the maritime contingent themselves.6

John Isbester seems to have been an unusually committed and well organised seaman. During nine years of service before the mast he never deserted, adopting a pattern of behaviour more like an established petty officer – a sailmaker or carpenter – than an ordinary or able seaman. Many of his shipmates deserted in Calcutta, but there and on subsequent voyages to inviting places such as Quebec, New York, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Adelaide and Sydney he appears to have maintained a faultless record, always completing the voyage. This suggests that he was committed to getting on, to earning promotion. He also seems to have made it his purpose to visit all the great seaports of the 19th-century world – and I have to admit to more than a tinge of envy when I read an account of the ports that he visited.

Eight ABs – a typical mixture of Scots, Irish, German, Swedish, Canadian and Channel Islanders – were signed on in early November when the ship was ready to leave Calcutta. One of them, Augustus Jouan, a 30-year-old from Guernsey, had been released from hospital a day before he joined the vessel. After four days at sea and when still in the Bay of Bengal he ‘was taken sick with the cholera’, and ‘despite all possible means being used to save him’ he died a few hours later.7 The homeward voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Atlantic and up through the Channel to Dundee took a bit more than four months, and John Isbester paid off, after a voyage lasting ten and a half months, with £16.17s.3d earned at a rate of £2 per month.

His next four voyages were all quite short ones, being round trips to Quebec, New York, New Orleans and again to Quebec in four different ships, all sailing from Liverpool. The first was the ship City of Manchester, 1,116 tons gross, where he signed on as ordinary seaman. The ship’s official log book8 reveals only that on 30 May seven seamen deserted in Quebec, where six replacements were later signed on. It must have been a relief that no-one died.

He then served as able seaman in the iron clipper ship Strathearn, 1,784 tons gross, a hard-driven ship credited with making a passage from New York to the United Kingdom in ten days. She carried three mates, a bosun, 26 ABs and four 0Ss, double the size of crew to which John Isbester would become accustomed. She also had an engine driver to look after a boiler and winch, provided to help with heavy hauling. Outward bound to New York, in mid-Atlantic, Thomas Evan AB fell overboard from the main shear pole, a position low in the main shrouds. The ship hove to and a boat manned by the chief officer and four sailors was launched, but searched for him without success. On the homeward passage from New York at 0300 am John Fillibank OS, taking in the starboard sidelight, ‘either overbalanced himself or was washed overboard’. He was presumably taking the light in to top up its oil; the sidelight was probably lost with him, but spares would have been carried.

There was no possibility of saving him, the ship going 12 knots and the morning very dark. The Chief Officer threw a lifebuoy and put the helm down but he was not seen and we very reluctantly had to give up hope of saving him.

Nine days later misfortune struck this unfortunate crew again. The official log book records:

At about 5.45am whilst the ship was running 15 knots before a NW gale shipped a sea on the poop and swept Mr Campbell Chief Officer overboard. Blowing very hard with very heavy sea at the time, it was quite impossible to do anything to save him.9

At the end of that passage John Isbester must have been relieved to set foot again in the familiar streets of Liverpool.

Next came the barque John Geddie, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, 651 tons gross – a small vessel with crew of 13 all told. John Isbester is recorded in the official log book10 as John Ibister, one of numerous familiar corruptions of the name. John Geddie seems to have been a happy ship under the command of George Wellen Smith. The log book records no failures-to-join, no desertions in New Orleans, and no penalties for offences committed, in contrast to her following voyage, a round trip from Liverpool to Halifax under a different master, where each of these misdemeanours were common. By this time, however, John Isbester was aboard the ship Advice, 1,261 tons gross, on the last of his four short voyages.

These voyages lasted from three to four and a half months, including a month or so in the destination port, and were separated by no more than a few days of leave – insufficient time for a return to Shetland. That is not surprising. When I was 20, life at sea was fascinating – there were skills to learn, sights to see and adventures to be had – and time away from home was no hardship. John Isbester did not even have parents to whom to return.

He next joined the barque Beulah, 746 tons nett, for what was to prove a very different voyage. In the space of 20 months she went from Liverpool to Sydney in Cape Breton Island, thence to Darien in Georgia, USA, next to Pensacola in Florida, and from there to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Following a month or so in Buenos Aires, Beulah rounded Cape Horn carrying John Isbester into the Pacific for the first time and working her way north to Portland in Oregon, USA, close to the Canadian border. Her cargo was probably discharged in Portland, and she then moved to Albany, still in Oregon, to load wheat for Europe. As was very common she proceeded via Cape Horn to Queenstown, Ireland, for orders, from where she went immediately to Liverpool to discharge, the passage from Albany having taken four months.

John Isbester paid off on 8 April 1875, at the right time of year for a bit of a holiday and probably with a few pounds in his pocket. He took more than five months’ leave at that time and it is likely that he returned to Shetland for some or all of that summer. While there, staying at Haggersta or visiting his aunt and uncle, he may have learnt that his absent father was in Sydney, Australia.

In September he was back in Liverpool to find a ship. He’d done India, he’d done North and South America, east and west: where was new and where would be interesting? Australia sprang to mind – he might meet his father – and John Isbester joined the iron ship North Riding, 1,432 tons gross, as able seaman for the voyage to Sydney, which port was reached on 19 December, in comfortable time for Christmas 1875. North Riding seems to have spent about five weeks in Sydney before proceeding to Adelaide and then to Port Wakefield in the Spencer Gulf to load wheat, before returning to Adelaide to clear for Queenstown, Ireland, for orders. Seven of the ship’s ABs, including two Shetland men,11 deserted towards the end of the ship’s stay in Sydney in late January 1876. John Isbester, however, remained to complete the voyage in Liverpool paying off, in August 1876, with a healthy £30.7s.11d.12

My grandfather used to mention that he had met his own father on his own early voyages to Australia.13 In fact this was the only early voyage that he made to Australia, though he called there regularly during the last 15 years of his life.

He was of course referring to my great-grandfather, John Isbister, who had probably left Shetland in the 1850s, and earned a living intermittently as a gold miner on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island for the better part of 50 years between 1860 and 1911. Like other miners who reached the area in the 1860s he had probably moved to the west coast from gold mining in Victoria in the 1850s and Otago in the early 1860s,14 having first reached Australia as a seaman. The evidence that he and his younger brother Henry spent their declining years and died on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island is convincing, but there is evidence that he mined for gold in Australia from time to time as well. An item in a New Zealand newspaper describing gold mining in Red Rock, New South Wales, Australia, in 1887 contains an editor’s note reading ‘John Isbester, late of Kumara [a town on the New Zealand west coast], has a claim next to the aforementioned party’.15 In view of family tradition it is likely that he had several spells of mining in Australia and was mining in New South Wales in 1876 when my grandfather was there aboard North Riding, as well as in 1887. Sydney would be the natural place for a gold miner to go for a break or when travelling to or from New Zealand.

During the five weeks that North Riding remained in Sydney there would have been plenty of time for the Shetland network – the informal contacts between people of Shetland origin throughout the world – to bring news of family and friends both near and far. Meeting other Shetland folk in far parts of the world was not at all unusual, but was certainly a matter of interest. A number of encounters of this sort are described in my grandfather’s correspondence from his later years. It is tantalising to reflect that we will never know what passed between my goldmining great-grandfather in his fifties and his 25-year-old son, an able seaman with his future before him when they met for the first time. Did my great-grandfather leave Shetland unaware that he was to become a father and only learn the truth years later? Did he intend to return? And if so, was he prevented by some difficulty, or did he decide that Sarah Anderson was not the woman for him?

Some feeling for the special nature of life in the New Zealand goldfields during the gold rush days can be gained from the account16 of the 1909 annual reunion of the West Coast Old Boys.

After doing ample justice to the good things provided the toast of The King was duly honoured. [Officers were elected] and the health of Mr Russell the newly-elected president was drunk. The chairman proposed the toast of West Coast and West Coasters and was ably responded to by Messrs J. Keating, J. Jackson and J. Kerr, who paid a high tribute to the pioneer work done by the early arrivals on the Coast. The toast of Departed West Coasters was drunk in silence.

Mr E. Sheedy proposed the toast of Old Sports and held that the West Coast had turned out some excellent athletes. The toast was ably responded to by Messrs D. McKay, J. Evans, L. Broad and C. North. Mr Ashton proposed the toast of Commercial and Professional Interests and [it was] responded to by Messrs Joyce, Kerr and Cunliffe.

Mr Joyce proposed the toast of the Pioneers of the West Coast, those who made our roads and developed our district. Messrs Splaine, Hinkley and Isbester responded.

Several other appropriate toasts were proposed and responded to and an excellent musical programme rendered. The singing of Auld Lang Syne brought a most successful re-union to a close.

By then my great-grandfather was a man of 84. It sounds like a good party!

John arranged his brother Henry’s funeral in 1906, though there is nothing to suggest that they actually worked alongside one another over the years. At the time of his death Henry was described as a ‘miner, highly respected throughout Westland’.17 The brothers seem to have mined separately, and there were clearly several other unrelated Isbisters in New Zealand towards the end of the 19th century. Tantalisingly the New Zealand newspapers of that period frequently refer to the activities of Isbester or Isbister18 without giving a forename. Another younger brother, Robert, also appears to have been in New Zealand for some years until the 1870s, though I have found no evidence that he died there. Like his brother John, he may have decided to move to Australia but, unlike John, decided to stay there. Nowadays there are plenty of Isbesters and Isbisters in Australia!

In John Isbister’s will, written three years before his death when he was 83, he describes himself as formerly19 a miner of Woodstock, Westland. After payment of his debts he specifies that a sum of no more than £30 sterling was to be used for ‘paying the costs of my funeral and in erecting a Headstone over my grave and concreting it over and railing it in’, instructions that were carried out.20 The total value of the estate was declared to be less than £100 sterling, and the balance was to be left to Helen Robina Wallace (née Morgan), wife of William Wallace of Kumara, Westland, Bushman.21 (A bushman was a logger or forestry worker.22) It is likely that Helen Wallace was John Isbister’s carer before he entered hospital.

1 Halcrow, Capt. A. The Sail Fishermen of Shetland. The Shetland Times Ltd, Lerwick Ltd. 1994, p.108.

2 The Second Shetland Truck System Report 1872. Paragraph 11,279 et seq. By a happy accident the onlyFaroe smack fisherman mentioned by name in the Truck Report is John Isbister (sic) OS on the Anaconda.

3 Thomson, Captain J.P, OBE ExC. Captain John Isbesters Career at Sea. Unpublished manuscript. (IsbesterCollection), p.3.

4 Sealkote Agreement, Voy.06.04.1871–21.03.1872, Maritime History Archive, Newfoundland.

5 Sealkote Off. Log Book, Voy. 06.04.1871–21.03.1872, Maritime History Archive, Newfoundland.

6 Williams, James H. Blow the Man Down. E P Dutton & Co, Inc. New York, 1959, p.115.

7 Sealkote Off. Log Book, Op.cit.

8 City of Manchester OLB, Voy. 02.04.1872–07.08.1872, Maritime History Archive, Newfoundland.

9 Strathearn OLB, Voy.16.08.1872–28.10.1872, Maritime History Archive, Newfoundland.

10 John Geddie, Liverpool, England, Crew Lists 1861–1919 on Ancestry.com.

11 Arthur Blunce, aged 23, Gilbert Porteous, aged 26.

12 North Riding Agreement, Voyage ending 18.08.1876. Maritime History Archive, Newfoundland.

13 Isbester, C. Allan. Document CAI4, written about 1965 (Isbester Collection).

14 May, Philip Ross. The West Coast Gold Rushes, Appendix I, Pegasus, 1967.

15 Kumara Reef, Red Rock, New South Wales Grey River Argos. 24 March 1887.

16 Old Boys Association. Grey River Argos. 16 December 1909.

17 West Coast Times, NZ 25 November 1906.

18 As seen elsewhere the two spellings were interchangeable. Indeed their death certificates show that John was buried as an Isbister whereas his brother Henry was recorded as Isbester.

19 By this time he was an inmate of the Westland hospital.

20 tony.gott@mac.com by personal email dated 12.11.2011 stating the list of Hokitica NZ gravestones provided by a researcher had been seen by him at the Bayanne Shetland Genealogy website. (Isbester Collection).

21 Isbister, John. Motion for Probate. Archives New Zealand Ref. CH300, HK59/1911.

22 Hansen, Alan. Personal email dated 21.05.2013 (Isbester Collection).