Читать книгу Captain Abby and Captain John: An Around-the-world Biography - Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Страница 10

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John Dunning Pennell never had to have his mother escort him to school again. He went there under his own sail and learned all that the Pennell school could teach. He learned to cipher, and he learned to write a fine scrolled hand in which every capital is carefully shaded in. That was a good thing. For John was going to deal in capitals all his life. Most of his words began with them. He tried them out in that small notebook of his. His own name and his friends’. He tried out some ships’ prows, too, and scroll designs to go on them. All his life he did so, in his log-books among latitudes and longitudes. His mind was full of fine patterns.

Of course, John took time out between capitals and sums. He dug for old homemade bullets of the Indian wars on the hill back of the Simpsons’ New Wharf, where a stockade had stood. He skated on Middle Bay when a January snap had made a floor solid enough for oxen to go right down the bay to Birch Island. My father drove his down that way thirty years later. He shot his partridges in the ancient apple trees his Great-Grandfather Thomas had planted when he took possession of this peninsula. He went to molasses candy pulls at his uncles’ houses. He went to spelling schools and singing schools at the schoolhouse. He had a good voice. John went in swimming when the tide suited. He may have set a powder train or two under some boy’s tail at the schoolhouse in business hours, and laughed to see the boy galvanized into swift action. But usually he tended to business.

John never had much to say. He didn’t after he grew up. He was one of the quietest and soberest of the Pennells. But he did a lot of straight thinking. It made him shoot up very straight in his mind as in his body.

When he had finished all the spellers and readers in the Pennell school, John went on to the town school and exhausted theirs. Then he boarded himself out in Portland and went to a business school there. Nobody had ever told him. Nobody had to tell him. But he knew he was going to be a sea captain. He took it for granted, as so many Brunswick boys took it for granted a hundred years ago. He was sure of it as he was sure his eyes were frostflower blue, like the hillside by old Deborah’s house in Septembers. He was sure of it as he was sure his brown hair was curly and his hands long business-like hands. So John learned methodically and thoroughly all that there was to learn in the school-books. He had been learning the wind and the weather and tides the same way, from babyhood on. He knew when the tide was flooding even in the dusty Portland schoolroom. He got as much schooling handling things on the ships at the Portland wharves, and talking to mates and captains. His last name opened any ship’s cabin door to him. He did not hurry to become a sea captain, as many other boys did. Lots of the hasty ones came to a quick end. John did not want to be one at seventeen. He wanted to know about things before that. For instance, the way the oak planking is fastened together under a captain’s feet. He wanted to be a first-class captain. There were plenty of the other kind. So John studied, shot up, and got his growth on him.

At nineteen John Pennell came home and entered his brothers’ shipyard. There was no formal announcement or celebration. It was tacitly understood that he was to be one of the Pennell Brothers. He put on his work clothes and went at it with adze and plane. He worked hard and took a common man’s wages. Building came first, sailing afterwards. John wanted to know all about the house in which he was going to set up housekeeping for life. His children would be born in just such a thing as he was making. It was a large cradle. It would be good to make it a strong one. John Pennell came to know how important the least tree-nail was to a ship. A score of lives depended upon that thing no bigger than his thumb. Upon this very one. So he shaped it and drove it in right. And so it went on, honesty and good workmanship out to the tip of the jib-boom. He learned to handle chisels and to know the right curve in a white oak plank by the feel of his hands. He didn’t talk much with the other carpenters. But they soon knew he was one of them. He became the best one in the whole yard. He was constantly drawing the fine scrolled designs for ships’ sterns and prows, and he was putting them into wood now. At the front of his log of the Deborah Pennell, there is the design he made later for a two-masted sloop and the prow-piece of a ship. The fine work in modelling and finishing was given over to John now. The brig Robert Pennell—named for his nearest brother and the one John loved the best—the ship James Pennell, the ship Tempest, the ship Governor Dunlap—John’s clear and clean mind was built into these four vessels. His life was a part of the life they would have out on the sea, under the wind, when every fibre and nail in them would come alive and work every minute of the time, as dead steel never comes alive. Four ships to John’s name now.

Young Mizzenmast, the men in the yards nicknamed John Pennell. He was tall, and he was solid. The mizzen is the mast next to the captain’s cabin. John was proud of his name.

It wasn’t all work and no play for the young man John. It could not have been in such a family as his, for all John’s natural soberness. The young Pennells themselves made up a good-sized society. Many of them were full of the proverbial Pennell liveliness. There were high old times along Middle Bay on Sundays and when the snow flew and stopped work in the yards. There were baked bean and Indian pudding suppers Saturday nights in the Pennell houses, in rotation. This saved firewood. And every Pennell house had an oven large enough to bake beans and brown-bread for all Middle Bays. This Saturday assembly of the clan was an institution that lasted all through the shipbuilding years. At the gatherings, Mother Deborah laid down the law, and also played the melodeon for the singing. The Pennells were renowned for their good voices. They made the starry Winter skies ring like a crystal vase over whatever house it was, Jacob’s or James’s, Charles’s or Ben’s, or the old homestead. The chosen house rang with the assembled voices of the clan.

The Pennells went to church en masse also. They were one of the sights of Brunswick when they came along the upper Mall, by chaise and horseback, towards the First Parish Church. The men wore tall hats and shawls, and the women sat in acres of taffeta and silk, with bonnet and shawl over all. They were a handsome cavalcade. People turned out to see them come on a fine Summer morning. Young John was one of the tallest and one of the best riders of all. The Pennells were famous for good horses. Their horses were high steppers, like their owners. Middle Bays had the best horseflesh in Cumberland County. They ran especially to finely matched spans. The Pennells’ horses could take them to Portland and back in one day, a good sixty miles. The lowlier townspeople described the Pennells themselves as “heads up and tail over the dashboard.” The Pennells sat together in a block in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s church, and the center of the music was always there. But though they made a fine show at church, they did not go there for show. They went for worship. For they were a very devout and godly family. Young John was religious and pious even from his youngest years. In his pocket diary, under March 1, 1848, he writes this pious stanza in a young man’s hand:

Remember all Thy grace

And lead me in Thy truth,

Forgive my sins of sober years

And follies of my youth.

John.

This stands right next to measurements and notations of wages paid men in the yards. John combined religion and business all his life.

Some Brunswick citizens regarded the Pennells as stuck-up people, and they often shouted at them in town meetings a word not unheard today—and usually used against the finer-grained persons—“Bourbons!” For the Pennells naturally gravitated to the side of property in their voting and speaking there, having a good deal of property themselves. But they were at heart plain and democratic Yankees, no Bourbons. If they wore good clothes, they earned them. And with their hands and by their own sweat. The women by sewing and ironing for a host of children, the men by driving nails and planing planks. They worked with their workmen on their ships. If they had fine ways and manners, it was because they thought fine manners and a sense of decorum were a part of right living and thrifty living. If they had a sense of family, it was for the reason that they knew that wise breeding was essential, that it took silk to make a silk purse, and not a sow’s ear. They were farmers and working people, as well as ladies and gentlemen. It never occurred to them that people might not be both at once. It had never occurred to most Americans in that day. It was the unthrifty and the small-minded Americans, then, who thought that way. Maybe times have changed now. If they have, the people deserve hanging who have changed them. For they have gone a good ways to destroying America.

There were the Pennell sleighrides, between Sundays, in a dozen two-horse sleighs in procession, for the Pennells always went together, over to Harpswell Neck, to Freeport, to Maquoit, to Topsham, to New Meadows, to Gurnet. Sunlit December days and moonlit January nights were full of sleigh bells and Pennells. They were great visiting folks. They called on friends and relations in company. They carried charcoal stoves and soapstones for their feet, and they often sang as they slid along, a sight and a sound to remember for years, under the moon.

And there was another church, nearer home, the “Forest Church,” on the Mair Point road. John and the younger Pennells especially frequented this place. The services were in the evening. Bowdoin students often walked down from the college, and the Pennell girls often walked up. So they met on neutral ground. It was a traditional place for the beginnings of courtships. Many life lines first wove themselves together there. There were printed cards which helped matters along. They read: MAY I C U HOME? These were passed around surreptitiously during the sermon. John Pennell handed out several such cards, with blushes on his face. He saw his share of girls home. But he never saw any girl there home for good. There are several girls’ names in his diary, written in when the young man was thinking of something else and so was most himself. Only two, though, occur twice. One was Martha Randell. The other—and it was scrolled in most carefully—was Abby Reed. Abby Reed did not go to the Forest Church. She lived over on Orr’s Island. John did not let love interfere with shipbuilding.

There were meetings even at the Pennell schoolhouse. John notes in his diary that they had a meeting there on February 22, 1852, with Elder Cushing holding forth.

There was good gunning along Middle Bay. John records that he shot a wild goose in April, 1851. He shot hundreds of the wild pigeons that used to come over the Brunswick Plains in such myriads that they made a twilight at noonday.

A lull came in the Pennell building. It was the time. John was twenty-four years old and knew what was inside ships. Capt. Thomas Skolfield, over on Harpswell Neck, needed a man to make up a crew. John Pennell went over and saw him. Then he came back and packed up his things. Big Tom Skolfield was known among his friends as the Rock of Gibraltar. It took a lot to move him. None of the oceans had moved him any. He was a good man to learn sail under.

Where John sailed to, and how long, nobody alive knows. The log of the ship is lost. The ship was the Screamer, I have been able to ferret out that much, though. A good spread-eagle name for a Yankee vessel! And she was built by a Dunning. That made it perfect. Built by a Dunning and manned by a Skolfield. I don’t know where John sailed. But I know he sailed. And learned. He learned to balance his feet on an icy moonbeam at midnight a hundred feet over a sea that ran blackness and sudden death. He learned to man a pump. He learned all the forty-eight sizes of rope. He learned what each strand meant in the gigantic cobweb spread above a square-rigger, and how his life might depend on a single knot there. He learned to eat the forecastle beef and to drink ropy water that stank to heaven. He mastered the exquisite science, one of the most intricate and exacting professions human civilization has ever worked out, with Phoenician and Grecian angles to it, of making a world of wood and canvas move around a world full of winds and currents usually against a man, and smashing waves always against men, over a network which isn’t there but which the mind of man has traced over the globe so that he may know exactly where he is at any hour of the darkest night. It took a lot of learning. John learned to live detached from all but those two webworks, the ropes over his head and the gridwork of latitudes and longitudes running imaginarily over the ocean around him. He learned how to erase time and the history of friends and home always going on around one on land. He learned to live by the day, by the watch, by the single lonely minute. How to live by the wind and the weather, too. He learned to eat his heart and say nothing, to let his freezing tears roll down his unbrushed cheeks as he silently made a line fast high in a gale of Winter wind. John learned a lot.

Enough to last a lifetime.

John began his sea life the right end to, as a common sailor. There was no short cut by a mate’s berth to a captaincy. This was a science that began at the bottom. And this was democratic Yankee land. A man began at the foot of the ladder. This is a Maine history of a Maine man.

Then John came home to Middle Bays and went to work in his brothers’ shipyard again. And he probably had the name of Thomas Skolfield, who had shaped his body and his mind to the sailors’ life, written across the curve of his heart.

John Pennell was busy as a hot hornet in the yards those peak years of Pennell building. He had had his hand in most of the vitals of the vessels turned out in the past five years. And he had his hand and his heart very much in the ship United States, 1046 tons, the prize ship of all so far, in 1855. It was the last ship he would have a hand in making in his life. He put all he had into her. She moved like a whole universe down the ways at last, in the Spring of the year. She took her place on the sea. And John Pennell left the land with her. He went as her first mate. His blue chest was in the cabin, his Sailing Directory, and his Bible.

There are only one or two such moments in a man’s lifetime.

Now there was only the ocean for him for the rest of his time.

John sailed to Mobile on the United States, J. D. Blanchard master. It was John who made the entries in the log. From Mobile they carried 3166 bales of cotton to Le Havre. Then back to New Orleans they came with a cargo of immigrants. They are a crankier cargo than cotton. Five of the immigrants died on the way, two on a single day, an infant child and an old man. They were all buried at sea. And fast. It was the fever. It worked fast, immigrant fever. One immigrant used unseemly language on Capt. Blanchard and was put in irons. Irons were a leading article of dress on ships in the Fifties. They landed at New Orleans on November 16. They had a sumptuous Christmas dinner there: turkey, oysters, “pyes,” and cakes. January 11, 1856, cotton again, 2163 bales of it, for Liverpool, a much less perishable cargo! They arrived February 12, a quick crossing, for Winter. They loaded in freight. March 10, they put out for Boston. On March 15, during a gale, they were run into by a bark, “name unknown,” their main fore braces were carried away, and they were damaged at the hull “considerable.” John did not note what happened to the bark! Plenty must have. They had lots of weather going home, five gales of it. They made the ship fast at Long Wharf, April 23.

John sailed as Blanchard’s mate still, through 1857. He was with him when he sailed, February 6, from New Orleans, with cotton, for Havre. They fell in with the Russian bark Odessa on that trip; she was headed for Haiti and entirely out of grub. They gave her what she needed. Havre, March 16. And John parted hawsers with Capt. Blanchard. He joined the ship Wellfleet Harbour on April 6, as chief officer under Capt. Westcott. They sailed May 4 for New York, with immigrants. All Europe seemed headed for America. It was the revolutions and hot water there. John had to put one man, “soused in liquor,” in irons on the way over, met an iceberg face to face and had to crawl in jibs past it, and reached New York on June 3. John went home to Middle Bays in the middle of the Summer to tend to various jobs.