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Captain Abby and Captain John

The Blue Chest

Table of Contents

Most New England families have left a large house full of furniture and portraits and haircloth trunks behind them. They have even left wreaths of their hair—long curls such as used to cascade down the sailor collars of boys too big in their velveteen pants to spank, rankling with golden life, white locks of aged men, curls of fine-spun hair from brides’ heads, stiff wires from spinster crowns. New England families have left albums of daguerreotypes and tintypes, showing uncles who sat for minutes with flies tickling their noses. They have left cupboards full of dishes, attics full of hoopskirts and bustles. You can walk into whole rooms full of history. You can climb upstairs and find out easily what kind of people they were. You can build them up again into the company of the living out of the solid substance of their beds and comforters, and armchairs and pots and pans.

But the man and woman I am going to bring to life in these pages are shut up in a very small room. It is five feet long and only a little over a foot wide. Smaller than a coffin even. It is shaped something like a coffin, though, and it is made of clear Maine pine. It is painted blue. It is that old-fashioned thin and greenish blue that runs in most Maine families as the color of their eyes. No one can look at that blue and not think of the sea. This narrow chest in which my two Maine captains lie buried and waiting the word to rise went to sea all its days. It went around the Horn many times. This small box is full of tremendous courage and great tenderness. It has sweat and the love of children in it. It has details of simple everyday living. Great storms and earthquakes are shut up in it. There are wide wings of albatrosses and half a thousand white-sailed ships. It has far-away shining cities and Maine farmers’ gossip. It is filled with huge cargoes of sugar and white pine, and of life and death and love.

This box is the sea-chest of Captain John Pennell, of Middle Bays, Brunswick, in the County of Cumberland, State of Maine. It is stuffed with maps on which many voyages are pencilled in. It is filled with tall log-books of more voyages than Captain John had fingers and toes. It contains cash-books and account books, bills of lading in the captain’s bold hand. It also has several diaries and many letters written in an ink as bright as the day it flowed out into the delicate lacework of a New England housewife’s hand. For the captain’s wife wrote, too.

Here are the bare bones of fine and brave and godly living. Here are the complete anatomies of two who followed the sea all their life together. They had no other roof to their heads than the swaying one of a ship’s planks or the one studded with nails of stars. They begat and bore their children and brought them up among winds and high waves. Here is all the furniture of a house built on water, all the household goods of a home that leaned and swayed as it moved around the world many years. This home held babies and pies made of Maine apples, socks to darn and shirts to starch and iron. It had schooldays and birthdays, and death days as well. It was a complete home. It held a small and warm Maine household in the coldest and windiest places of the world. Here it all lies in small words on old paper, in this chest that is smaller than a coffin and blue as the middle Atlantic at sunrise.

Here are the bones. They need only two hearts and the flesh. I must make the small words come to life. Like Elijah of old, I must put my mouth on the mouths that have grown cold. I must put my hands upon these marks made by dead hands. And I must make this woman and this man stand up again and breathe.

And if I can do this, I shall restore to history, without the risk of its being lost again, a small chapter in the vast history of Maine’s seafaring people, so young in the world’s measure of time, so ancient already beside the empty Atlantic which washes the coast of Maine today. It will be a family history, but it will, in the small, be America’s amazing history as well. It will be a chronicle, I hope, full of that vital mixture which is so peculiarly American, plain living and grand living. It will be the history of a captain who is also a working man, of a seaman who is a father with his family around him always, the history of a ship’s first lady who is also a busy housewife, knitting and mending and ironing. It will be that paradox that confounds Europeans when they study our ways of life—the lordly and the humble, the bold and adventurous and the tender and homely combined. It will be the story of a plain Yankee home that went to sea.

May I be the man to bring this house and home to life!