Читать книгу Hard down! Hard down! - Captain Jack Isbester - Страница 9

My grandfather died 21 years before I was born, so the main link between us is that we both spent much of our lives at sea: 47 years in his case and 35 in mine. Even my father’s links with his father were diminished by the fact that Captain John was 48 when my father was born, and he died when my father was 13. For me one of the greatest pleasures derived from writing the story of my grandfather’s life has been discovering how many of the same ports we visited and how often we carried similar cargoes. Liverpool was his home port throughout almost all of his career: that was where he joined and left most of his ships, and that was where he studied for and passed all his exams. Liverpool was my home port, too, for the first 20-odd years of my seafaring career, but during those years I was completely unaware that I was treading in my grandfather’s footsteps. The only surprise is that my grandfather did not marry a Liverpool girl. He found a wife on his doorstep at home in Shetland, and left the privilege of a Liverpool wife to me!

It is a happy circumstance that much of the detail of a merchant seaman’s life – when the voyage started and ended, who was aboard, how old they were, where they came from and what disasters befell them – has to be recorded in the ship’s official log book (OLB) or Articles of Agreement (AoA), and while many of these records have been lost many survive in archives in the world’s seaports. It is an even happier circumstance that in times long before the internet or even the widespread use of the telephone, communication was by letter and my grandfather and his family were committed letter writers.

I have been very fortunate that my father was a hoarder of family documents and that throughout his life he was happy to correspond with anyone interested in my grandparents, the ships and Shetland. I have been fortunate, too, that my unusual name enabled one former shipmate to trace me and provide me with intriguing letters and photos 60 years after we had last spoken.

In this story I have quoted extensively from my grandfather’s writings. They vary considerably. His handwriting is always admirably clear, and when writing in the official log book, or composing a letter which he would have considered important, for example a birthday letter to a 13-year-old son or condolences to a friend of his wife’s, the punctuation and spelling are good, with few mistakes. When he was writing to my grandmother, however, his punctuation was sometimes missing and the spelling more arbitrary. It may be that when writing his personal letters he was writing colloquially, but it could be that he had a glass of Scotch beside him. With the exception of a couple of lines to be taken away by the pilot or the tug, and once when a trusted sea pilot had the con, he appears never to have written letters while at sea. To remove the distraction which might be caused by the minor errors in his letters I have, throughout the book, usually inserted punctuation and corrected spelling where necessary in the documents I have quoted.

I have usually referred to my grandmother as ‘Susie’ because that is who she was to her husband and friends, and so that, throughout the book, is how we usually meet her. I do, however, have the clear impression that as the well-bred daughter of a Victorian Shetland landowner and as wife of the captain of large sailing ships she was conscious of her place in society. She died a year before I was born, but I suspect that had we overlapped and had I when a child addressed her as ‘Susie’ rather than ‘Grandmama’, it would not have been well received! So I do have a slight feeling of lèse-majesté when I use her given name.

Jack Isbester