Читать книгу Captain Abby and Captain John: An Around-the-world Biography - Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Страница 7

Table of Contents

To know the reason why Deborah Pennell was driving her son John to school with a switch along the road on that bright morning of the Year of Our Lord 1840, it is necessary to make a study of a fever. It was a fever that swept the New England coast from one end to the other after the War of 1812 had made it possible for a Yankee who was built handsome and wanted to follow the sea to leave Harpswell and Yarmouth and come home without having served some years in His Majesty’s British Navy. The war had made the sea safe for American merchantmen, and so the fever set in. It was a lovely fever, though, and the brightest chapters of the State of Maine’s history rustled past during its rise and fall. For the years from 1820 to 1880 were the only years when the State of Maine was able to keep her smartest children home and give them all something to do, and not have to breed them for states farther west, Illinois and Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Oregon and Washington. Those states had to look elsewhere, during that spell, for good farmers and fishermen and boatbuilders and lumbermen, and not rob the Maine cradle of its best lumbering and fishing babies. And this was thanks to the fever.

The fever began in the oaks—white oaks which grew taller and straighter here than they grew anywhere else—that came right down to the shore and even waded out into the ocean on the many islands of Maine. These trees had been there before the coming of the white men. They had pushed up and up for years and years, seeking the sun in company. They had killed out all rivals for light and air, their heads were very high, as high as the bald eagles flew. For twenty, thirty, forty feet, they might be without a big bough, pure, white wood inside, without a knot. The fever started in that sheer whiteness. Men along the shore had been putting it into barns and houses. Now they discovered it turned into something tougher than iron itself when it dried out in the wind. Now, after 1820 especially, they began to put that white metal of a wood into houses that were piked at the front door. Those houses moved out from the shore, to southern ports first, then to the West Indies, then to England, and at last around the two capes which separate the Atlantic from the Indian and Pacific oceans. The winds moved them, and they went wherever the winds blew.

And so the years crowded on fast when every farm that had its feet in salt water had houses which went around the world annually. As almost any farm in Maine that wants to can have its feet in salt water, since the ocean obligingly keeps going up into the middle of the state and coming back every mile or so, that meant that many farms had these round-the-world houses. And the farmers went off in them, just as soon as the oats were cut, and did not come back till the leaves were red on the swamp maples again and peepers calling in the marshes, and it was time to think about sowing oats again. The men wanted to be husbands as well as sailors and traders, they wanted to have their socks darned at night, so they thought to take their wives right along with them, with the makings of Maine apple pies hung on strings and the cows and chickens of home. For even the hens and cows of Maine became nautical ones. And, of course, family events took place, as family events will take place when husbands are around, and many of Maine’s babies were rocked to sleep in their earliest naps by the motion of oak cradles weighing 700, 800, 1200 tons at last. For the ships grew in size as did the families.

Maine boys began to have strange names in front of their plain Yankee family names, Blanchard and Merriman and Linscott: San Lorenzo, San Sebastian, San Fernandez. For they first saw the sunlight in lost and forsaken jumping-off places, far volcanic islands in all the lonely places of the sea. And their fathers named them for what little of land they could see with a spy-glass the mornings or evenings when they were born. Maine birthplaces became world-wide ones, and fathers filled in proud little crosses where the blooms of their manhood flowered on the charts where they marked the paths their ships made from continent to continent.

These were the days when every front dooryard along the Maine coast did not stop at the sea’s edge but went right along down the earth’s curving sides and took in the great fireflies of a Javanese night and the windy escarpments of the end of the earth at Cape Horn. Every Maine man of the coast was a citizen of the big world, did business in Genoa and Leghorn and Calcutta, rowed ashore to Cadiz in a smart Yankee boatload of clean and shining men, and came home again with fine furniture and stuffs and china dishes bought at the four corners of the globe. A State of Maine farmer lived a life in the round, in long straightaway lines which turned to circles and brought him home clean as a die. He erased the seasons. He lived all in Summer, hanging head down from the sphere at Table Rock in Summer when the snow flew back home, standing head up under the Dipper in a Maine August night snowed over with stars and nebulae when the Winter blew bleak across the southern Pacific. These farmers erased the seasons and the geography of small inland minds. They were at home wherever their white-oak homes could sail.

The homes sailed everywhere. The lonesomest wastes of the Pacific saw Yankee captains’ wives paying calls and drinking tea with one another as their ships stood hove to in spells of fair weather. Gossip of little Maine hamlets rippled out under coconut fronds in the velvety heat under the Line. Wives mended their husbands’ trousers after an afternoon at the palace of the Doges of Venice. Children went to school for arithmetic to their own mothers alongside the fairyland mountains of Borneo, and their mothers became distant and severe blue-eyed taskmasters and allowed no boy at the beginning of his multiplication table to rest his cut-me-downs from his father’s trousers on her prim lap. The boy had to sit up straight and toe the line and say his two-times-three like a Trojan. And the girls had to put their dolls one side and sit up sober at the dough-dish with their brothers. And their mothers collected a schoolteacher’s pay for schooling their offspring, once they were home again where there were school committees to collect it from. There were American babies smiling up blue-eyed among naked brown strangers; many and many

A woman knitting baby things

Under the albatross’ wide wings,

for babies arrived in port and for babies coming.

And these people kept the Yankee thrift and worship of homely solid things in expensive capitals of the older worlds and among the careless living by the day in places too sunny and lazy for hurry and hard labor. They kept their plain living among the palaces and glories of ancient lands. They came back from the Grand Canal and the Rialto and shops that looked like the insides of giant butterflies’ wings and mended men’s shirts and thought how the haying was coming on at the other side of the sea, how the old mare, Kit, was standing the gaff on the one-horse farm they had sprung from. They kept their decks and cabins as spick-and-span as the barn and parlor back home. Captains’ wives scrubbed their floors on their marrow bones, darned and ironed and knit. Their husbands mingled with their crews and sweated with them at lines and winches. Their sailors were most of them cut from the same piece of Yankee cloth, all wool and a yard wide, as they were themselves. The seamen in the yards might well be the captains tomorrow. The ships’ masters worked with their hands, harder than the men. For they were harder workers at home, and they had come up fast by such hard work. These were Yankee seafarers. They often startled the British captains they fell in with by their democratic ways and their love of doing things for themselves with their ten fingers and ten toes.

This fever of prosperity in shipbuilding and sailing hit Casco Bay, Maine, especially hard. The oaks were unusually tall along the hundred coves that ran deep into the land there. Fine harbors were as common as thrushes. Almost every farm had one, and the farmer-sailors could run their brigs right up to the kitchen windows and say good morning to their wives, being still on board. Every man around the bay began turning his trees into ships and turning his farm hands into carpenters and ironworkers. Every farmer built him his bark in his cove among the June daisies where they came down to the shore, and went sailing away to make his fortune in sugar and molasses or tea and pepper.

The fever spread inland. It spread up along the rivers that were navigable. But it did not stop at the head of the tide. It spread to the very heart of Brunswick town, which had once begun as a seaport but had thought better of it and moved inland five miles to the water power of the Androscoggin River falls. The fever swept right on over Brunswick, to Lisbon, eighteen miles from the Atlantic. A big ship was built there. They launched it when the Spring freshet came. It came a-fluking down the river to the high stairway of the falls at Brunswick. There it was drawn out on rollers, and a hundred yoke of oxen towed it over to McKeen Street, thence to Main, through the town’s heart. And then it was launched anew into Merrymeeting Bay, at the town’s end, and went on its way rejoicing. In 1815, a family built themselves a schooner right in the middle of Mill Street, Brunswick. It was hauled to the Landing, below the falls, and so to sea. And in 1822, farmers of Durham, high over Rocky Hill, built a ship and dragged it on rollers to the ocean road to fortune. Nothing could stop such men. Not hills, not mountains. They cut swaths through the woods to get their family ships to the water. No farm was too far back or hilly to be out of reach of the fever. Any small stream might come out of its quiet meadows on the sound of hammers at the next bend, and the trout in the brook flashed away frightened by the immense thing that was rising from the shallow pools. The climax was capped when a man built a schooner, in 1823, in tiny Mair Brook, Brunswick, and hauled it overland to Maquoit Bay. There was not enough water in Mair Brook to do more than float the peapod schooners of boys in their first breeches with buttons, but this man could not resist the trickle of running water, and so he laid down his keel there and hid the brook from sight. It was like a goose trying to bathe in a saucer! But Mair Brook’s banks served for braces as the schooner grew. People along Brunswick’s streets might expect to look out any morning and see a ship going by higher than their housetops, bound for Sumatra and the spice isles. Deer of McKeen Woods might stop and stare at oxen with sunflower eyes, two hundred of them, leaning to their yokes and drawing a ship through the forest.

Brunswick was loud with hammers night and day. Maquoit pushed off its schooners, pushing the azure mud and quahaugs each way as they slid at high-run tides. Flying Point sent off its ships with the white furrows curling at their bows. Bunganuc’s deep canyon of a harbor sent them out. The sawmill there showed its silver teeth night and day, turning out pine planking. Mair Point shoved ships off, both sides of its spine, white and new as its birches. Simpson’s Point sent them off. New Meadows River was crowded with last year’s ships coming home and this year’s going to the Gulf for cotton. Boys with their first jack-knives stood waist high in curls of shavings under the high sides of seagoing houses, and picked up new and exciting words from the mouths of men who banged their thumbs with a hammer. Girls set up housekeeping in the half-finished hulls. Wives cooked their clams with chips from boards that would sail the seven seas soon.

And Middle Bays, the part of the township of Brunswick where the sea came nearest to the village itself, had been one of the first places to feel the stir of shipbuilding and trade. The Pennell family, who had settled by beautiful Middle Bay where meadows full of violets came down to the tide’s way and who had built their mansions there, named the place for themselves, and taken over its fine stands of oak and pine, had been building ships from the eighteenth century on. They had moved their shipyard from time to time down Middle Bay and nearer the deeper water as their ships grew in tonnage. They had turned the quiet place, where Indians had once drowsed beside their smoking shell heaps, into a hive. Men swarmed over the ways there, hot as hornets. The world’s goods were coming in at the Pennells’ doorsteps. By 1823, a steamboat was landing regularly at Pennells’ Wharf. By 1825, a steamboat was connecting New Wharf, a stone’s throw to the south of Pennells’ Wharf, with Boston, carrying boxes and staves destined for the West Indies and sugar.

By the time Deborah Pennell came into the family, Pennell shipbuilding was almost at high tide.

It was no wonder Johnnie Pennell got his back struts tingled that April morning. There was no time for any boy to loaf or hunt frogs at Middle Bays. A boy there had to be up and coming. Especially if his last name was Pennell. Johnnie was a Pennell. There were ships—many ships—waiting for him to help build them in his front dooryard, and sail them around the world, afterwards. The birch switch was hurrying him on to glory.