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Young Johnnie Pennell had a lot to grow into besides the frog ponds of Middle Bays. He had a town, and he had a family that expected a lot of him.

Brunswick was a peculiar town a hundred years ago. It was on the river, and it did not have many miles of coast on the Atlantic. But it made the most of those few miles. The population of the place did not much exceed 1500, on the average, in the years between 1830 and 1880. But during that time this little place was well represented on the sea. During those years Brunswick had two hundred sea captains. Two hundred that I know about. There were probably a lot more. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me this is some sort of a record, even for Maine coast towns. I have the list that Charles Pennell, one of the Pennell Brothers’ firm, wrote out, in 1899, of his fellow citizens who commanded ships in the last century. Two hundred captains! And of course there were other hundreds of Brunswick seafarers who never got that far, because death or lack of ambition, matrimony or other hazards, kept them from going the whole way aft. Allowing for the wind and for the fact that some of the captains were repeaters in the same family, let’s say that for every ten inhabitants of Brunswick, there was one sea captain in full cry on some ocean somewhere. Some of the hundred were tacking around the Horn, some were in the China Sea, some on the Atlantic. But they were all busy.

It is interesting to see how the same names recur: Skolfield, Giveen, Woodside, Merryman, Woodward, Pennell, Melcher, Dunning, McManus, Otis, Boutelle, Minot. There are thirteen Skolfields: John, Joseph, Charles, Thomas, James, Thomas again, Alfred, Samuel, Lincoln, Robert, William, Samuel again, George; nine Giveens: Daniel, Robert, Robert 2nd, William, Lewis, John—who commanded the Pennell topsail schooner Exchange, Robert once more, Robert still again, Thomas; seven Pennells: William, John, James Henry, Isaac, Benjamin, Lewis, Samuel; seven Merrymans: Thomas, Richard, Alfred, Curtis, Jacob, William, Jeremiah—(Lord only knows how many dozens of Merryman captains there were two or three miles away on Harpswell Neck, but I am sticking to Brunswick); seven Otises: James, Albert, Henry, James 2nd, William, Edward, Albert 2nd; six Dunnings: Jacob, Minot, Benjamin, Joseph, Sylvester, Charles—two of these, Jacob and Minot, were over half Pennells, having a Pennell mother; five McManuses: Richard, Asa, Robert, George, and Robert again; five Melchers: Joseph, Benjamin, Abner, George, Josiah; five Snows: Jesse, Thomas, Jesse again, Charles, Harrison; four Woodsides: William—veteran master of Pennell ships and maker of more sea captains than he had fingers and toes, Benjamin, Arthur, Adam; four Boutelles: Charles, Joshua, William; Charles A.; four Jordans: Peter, Cowan, Frank, Francis; four Martins: Clement, Matthew, Thomas, Clement Jr.; four Minots: Harry, Thomas, Albert, Bradbury. And there are three Woodwards, several Chases, three Simpsons, three Badgers, two Thomases, two Stovers, two Stanwoods, and two Orrs. Practically all these names are found on captains in neighboring Harpswell, and are multiplied down two or three or four generations. One can see that the sea ran in certain families in place of blood! Calling the roll of sea captains in Brunswick and Harpswell is like calling the roll of whole families: grandfathers, fathers, sons. And when you recall that most of these families were related by marriage, you can see how small a chance any boy born then had of not commanding a ship!

John Pennell, youngest of the eight Pennell brothers, had no chance at all. The whole town was against him. He was never to have any home except one that had sails on its roof and rolled about round the world. Whatever children he would have would have to be cradled and brought up there.

When you remember that every captain must have a vessel, you can see that a fleet could have been assembled off Brunswick that would have taken Homer two books more to catalogue. And practically all these ships, remember, were built in Brunswick, of the white oaks the Brunswick Plains grew, and built by the same families that built the captains. This was a town that left its mark on the sea and no mistake! If there is any town that can stand up to Brunswick, I should like to know it and take my hat off to it.

It wasn’t John Pennell’s town only that forced him out to sea. It was his family, too. Ships had been in the family blood stream goodness only knows how long. For the Pinel family—as it was spelled sometimes in old records—came from the Isle of Jersey, in the Channel, across the sea. There the ocean was a natural road, and they must have travelled it long. The family, spelling its name in the ancient English and modern American way, had gone down there to the Channel Islands during the Wars of the Roses and had become big toads in that small puddle.

No family is worth much that doesn’t have a cruel step-mother on its coat of arms or in the family tree. The Pennells have one, though it happens to be a wicked uncle and he happens to be a myth. The story runs that this uncle sent three Pennell brothers to America for their education, cheated them out of their patrimony, and left them in the New World to snuff ashes on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Being penniless, they went to work. So runs the tale. And as in most families, there was the usual American dream of recovering vast estates overseas. As a matter of fact, there were only two brothers who came over, Thomas and Clement. I know why they came, too. It wasn’t for an education. It was for the trees. They had used up all the available trees on Jersey, and they wanted more to build ships out of. So they came. And they happened to have shillings enough in their breeches to buy property when they got to Massachusetts early in the eighteenth century, and trees. Thomas, born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688, was a mariner and shipwright, as most of his descendants were going to be. He naturally kept to the coast so his sons after him might follow in his trade. He settled in Gloucester and went on building ships as usual. He died in 1723. Thomas the Second, his son, born in Gloucester in 1720, moved up to the District of Maine, as the trees in Massachusetts grew thin, settled first in Falmouth, then bought the land around the head of Middle Bay, Brunswick, in 1760. He built himself a house and a shipyard, and set up housekeeping in the old family trade of shipwright. He brought his son, Thomas the Third, born at Gloucester in 1789 and second of the Pennells born in America, along with him, gave him a hammer, and put him to work, too. Thomas the Second became a leading citizen. He saw the Maine Pennells started right on their shipbuilding, and died around 1780. That was the beginning of the Pennells of Middle Bays. Like Moses, this man had led his children into the Promised Land.

When John Dunning Pennell was going to school that morning in 1842, with his mother escorting him, the house that Thomas the Second had built was only a green hollow in the ground where lilacs still grew and a clump of lonesome apple trees with lonely whippoorwills calling through the stillness. For the family had been by that time nearly a century on the bay, the old homestead had become a ruin, the shipbuilding had moved down towards deeper water. This was America, and civilization moved fast.

Thomas the Third flourished like a quahaug at high water by Middle Bay. He got him a wife, Alice Anderson, out of Freeport, a fine place to get a wife from. He had got to be Tax Collector of Brunswick around 1778 or ’79. By 1791 he owned two horses, four oxen, eight cows, and twenty acreas of arable land. He also had added ten children to the land by then, five of them sons. He was also able to board the Congregational minister, as well as his numerous offspring, for in July, 1803, the First Parish paid him for Minister Brown’s keep. He had his hands in the ocean and ships, too, as well as in soil and ministers. He had taught all five sons to build ships. By 1800 he and his sons, William, Jacob, Thomas, and others in the family had evidently spread out on a larger scale in shipbuilding and were trading on the high seas. Son William, around 1780, had built himself a fine story-and-a-half house—for which I thank him since it is now my own—and a shipyard lower down the bay than his father’s, had sold it to his brother Jacob, and had become a sea captain. And now, in 1800, he had a fine new son, Thomas, growing up to follow him on the decks of Pennell ships. There was at least one schooner in the family by 1807, I am sure. For in the attic of the house Capt. William built for himself and me, I have brought to light a receipt by John Powell, dated February 13, 1807, for money Jacob and Thomas Pennell had paid him. It seems John had repaired the schooner Farmer’s sails for $2.00, had supplied three yards of Russia duck, two pounds of twine, and three pounds of bolt rope. His bill totalled $10.21. That schooner Farmer appears again in a letter from my attic dated at Boston, July 17, 1807, and addressed to Thomas Pennell the Third and his son John, a partner with him, at Brunswick, Massachusetts, District of Maine. Maine, as you see, was not yet free of Massachusetts. This letter came by ship, was folded and sealed, without envelope, and it cost the Pennells fourteen cents to have it delivered into their hands. In it, the mate, Thomas Cloutman, writes the Pennell owners of his taking their schooner Farmer over, after the death of Capt. Hills, on the way from Havana. So the Pennells this early had their hands in Cuba and sugar. “The Schooner Behaves Very well, All But One Small Steady Leak, which I Suppose is a Nail hole. I shall Black the Spars & sundry Other Small Jobs With what we have to do with. Gentlemen, if you wish me to Do Any thing with the Schooner, you will Be so Kind as to Drop Me a Line ... Thos. Cloutman.” The Pennells would keep their hands in sugar of Havana for three-quarters of a century more.

Somewhere around this time, too, there was another schooner, the Independent, in the family also. It is mentioned on another scrap of paper from my attic. This time it is a bill for labor on the schooner by George Minot, in shillings and pence. The items are on the back of a MS of a patriotic song of our very young nation, a eulogy of Washington, which some patriotic Pennell had copied off in a fine, cobwebby hand. Washington and the Muse have been sacrificed on the altar of shillings and pence! Only the eighth stanza remains on the scrap. Here it is:

Should the tempest of war overshadow our land,

Its bolts could ne’er rend freedom’s temple asunder,

Crowned at its portal would Washington stand

And repulse with his breast the assaults of the thunder,

His sword from the sleep

Of its scabbard would leap

And conduct with its point every flash to the deep.

For ne’er shall the Sons of Columbia be slaves

While the earth bears a plant or the sea rolls its waves!

The Father of his country, one can see, has profited by the experiments of the great Dr. Franklin!

The beginnings of every nation are found on little scraps of paper or stone someone forgot and left in an attic or grave. So it is with the nation of the Pennells. The beginnings of their glory as shipbuilders and masters are well-nigh lost. Only little sparks shine out here and there in the dark that has closed over the light that burned a century and a half ago along Middle Bay. How many craft the Pennells had built and sailed before the beginnings of fair records, around the year 1834, will never be known. But by that time the Pennells had made a bright name for themselves among Maine builders and sailors.

Besides the schooners Independent and Farmer I have already referred to, I have found mention, in scraps in the Curtis Memorial Library at Brunswick, of a sloop Eliza, a brig Favorite, and a schooner Harmony. The years around the War of 1812 are especially hard to find accurate information on. It was a time of confusion, and legends that spring from confusion, in our nation; and it was for the shipyard on Middle Bay, too. Thomas the Third, founder of the clan, died that year 1812. Of course, in the years just preceding, President Jefferson’s Embargo Act had crippled the Pennells along with other Yankee shipbuilders and traders with foreign ports. But evidently there had been some shipbuilding in spite of the presidential prohibition of foreign trade. And Thomas the Third’s last act in life, if we can trust a very old and strong tradition, had been a typical one. A privateer had been ordered for prosecuting the war against the British. Thomas, in his last Summer, turned out a fine one complete in ninety days from the time her keel was laid. She was christened the Dash. She sailed out of Middle Bay—so the tradition swears—with a crew of Brunswick men, and she was never heard from afterwards. But Thomas never knew that. He was safe in the grave at last, having died in November, 1812, on his own sweet soil, in a place he had chosen for all the Pennells to lie in, a corner of a field above a brook called Spinney’s now, with white birches and pines leaning over. And his wife planted cinnamon roses over his place. The conventional memento was put over his head:

My loving friends, as you pass by

On my cold grave please cast your eye;

Remember as I am so you must be,

Prepare to die and follow me.

Time has obliterated the grave now, and the stone has disappeared. But Middle Bays swarmed for three-quarters of a century with the life he passed on to the nation and the future.

Another craft was surely built during the War of 1812. The memory of it was always a mournful one and bound to be in such a family as the Pennells, who had a Yankee passion for making good use of good things. Jacob Pennell, Thomas’s oldest son, and father of young Johnnie Pennell of the smarting trousers, had built the full-rigged ship Charles. But the owners never dared to have their ship risk running afoul of the British men-of-war swarming off Maine at the time. The Charles lay for years beside Pennell’s Wharf. The Charles lay there till her timbers were wormed and unseaworthy. And they left her there till she rotted away. Her keel, they say, was seen for many a year at low tide. It was like a scar on the Pennells’ minds.

After the war was over, and American sailors could go to sea without ending up in the Royal Navy, the Pennells blossomed out again. They launched the ship Fair American in 1815, begun during the war. They built many others the names of which have not survived. Capt. William’s son, from my house, another Thomas, took his first voyage on a Pennell ship in 1821 and died at sea. A whole batch of future sea captains probably perished in that young man. But there were many other Pennells now to carry on. Middle Bays was alive with them, good men with timber and rope, men who had cut their teeth on a hand spike. The topsail schooner Exchange was certainly built somewhere around this time, and in the Pennells’ upper yard. She was as smart a little schooner as you will see in a month of Sundays. There is a painting of her in the Curtis Library in Brunswick, shining like a piece of the morning, with two square sails atop her schooner sail on her foremast, running along the wind into the port of Trieste on July 26, 1824. A topsail schooner was a rare bird of the sea. There were not many of them made. They were as jaunty a vessel as ever danced along the waves. John Giveen was this schooner’s master. She was a thing to be proud of, and her smart, spruce Yankees must have cut a fine figure on the streets of a town like Trieste, a town that was to become almost as familiar as Brunswick to two generations of Pennells. There is a family tradition that Tadesco Beach, near Lynn, Massachusetts, got its name from the name of a bark of the Pennells which went ashore from her anchorage there with all on board and broke her ribs open and drowned every soul. That was in the great gale of 1851 when Minot’s light was swept away. The bark’s name, Tadesco, the Pennells say, was the name of an opera singer of the time.

There must have been a steady procession of schooners, barks, brigs, and ships going off the stocks at the Pennell yards after the commencement of the last century and so on up to the Golden Age of the Forties and Fifties. For by this time Jacob Pennell had started on the begetting of his long line of children, that ended in Johnnie Pennell. This was the Age of Jacob. And Jacob was a man who felt, like Abraham of the sons like the stars in the sky of night, that it was given to him to people a nation. And being a builder, Jacob felt that every son and daughter ought to have a vessel of his own. So ships must have gone into the Atlantic in the rhythm of his sons and daughters. Every year or so a son, every year or so a vessel. Whatever Pennells there were of the older days, they were soon crowded out by this growing young republic from Jacob’s loins. They were crowded out to Portland and Brunswick town and Harpswell, to earn their bread elsewhere. They left Middle Bays to Jacob’s sons and their wives and children and cattle and ships. It is the old story of the one best ear in the wheat, of the one chosen to found the chosen nation. All the other Pennells’ lands fell into Jacob’s strong hands. He sat at the center of the land, in the house he had built near the close of the eighteenth century. He sat on the Middle Bays hill, with a shipyard at his feet to keep his children busy, and he watched his children grow great around him. He was a man out of the Book of Genesis, and God’s word to Adam and Noah and to Abraham was in his ears: increase and multiply as the stars in the sky. So the vessels came out fast as his offspring from his house and went away to the four corners of the sky. He was the first great builder and the father of the greatest. His ships went out white on the world.

There is a persistent legend in the family of the Pennells, which all Pennells swear by, that the young Longfellow, while a student and professor at Bowdoin, often came down to witness launchings at Middle Bays. They say he saw a Pennell ship named the Union take the waves, and it was around the sight of this ship being built and launched that the poet afterwards built his poem, The Building of the Ship:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

It is arguable that Longfellow was thinking more of our nation than of the Pennell ship Union. But the Pennells won’t hear to it! It was their ship all right, they vow. Anyway, Longfellow probably got his local color at Middle Bays.

The poet Longfellow touches again on Pennell lives, for the Pennells swear that after his student and professor days at Bowdoin, in the interim between Mrs. Longfellow the First and Mrs. Longfellow the Second, Henry Wadsworth was practically on courting terms with Susan Chase, sister of the wives of two of the Pennell Brothers’ firm, Jacob, Jr. and James, sons of patriarch Jacob. Susan lived in the vast Chase mansion, above the craggy glen where Bunganuc Creek empties into Maquoit Bay. The Chase place stood on a hill looking out on Mair Point and Harpswell Neck. It still stands there, though the big central chimney is gone, and the woods have grown up so that you cannot see much of Maquoit Bay.

This house did a good deal for the Pennell family, and shipbuilding in general. It raised six daughters for the cause. If the Pennell houses are hamlets, the Chase mansion is a whole town. It has a staircase for an army of children to go up in column of fours and rooms for them all when they got upstairs. The Chase house once had an oven large enough to bake for all Cumberland County. The house has a graveyard to it, too, out in front, for the children to lie in after they had finished with their long lives. The slate stones in it were brought from England. They are beautifully carved. One has a death’s-head cherub grinning with perfect teeth, and one has the loveliest weeping willow that ever wept green tears over a grave. Nothing was too fine or too far for a family who boasted that the royal blood of the Stuarts ran in their veins.

The Chase house was full of fine china and fine furniture. The Pennells seem to have stocked many of their houses out of its pantries and parlors. May the Pennells who are now within my own family forgive me for saying so! Historians can have no family but the truth, and I may lose a good part of mine in writing as I write. But it does strike me that the Chase girls were fond of stripping the old nest for the new. It had always been so with the daughters of this house, it appears. For this great mansion had had an almost titled mistress once, an Elizabeth Stuart, who eloped, according to tradition, with a Maine sea captain, Dan’l Campbell, from her eyrie in Scotland. She was the daughter of a great laird and head of a clan, and they say she had the purple blood of the Stuart kings in her. Her mother was Lady Eleanor Stuart. So little Bunganuc probably had a swarm of small Pretenders in it around the end of the eighteenth century! Anyway, though Elizabeth left home in a hurry and on horseback, with the laird somewhere in hot pursuit, she apparently had time to gather up a few things. Her horse must have been a tremendous creature. For here’s what the almost-Lady Elizabeth Stuart Campbell brought with her, by my own count: a four-poster bed, three complete dinner sets of dishes, a dozen wine glasses, a warming pan, a pair of andirons, six Hepplewhite chairs, a dresser, a grandfather clock, and a rosebush! I have the descendant of the rosebush in my side yard under the window as I write this. I thank Elizabeth for that. The rose is white with gold in the center. Everybody in Pennellville has a piece of the royal bush now. Oh yes, and Elizabeth loaded in the side saddle on which she escaped that day, too. The wilderness of North America should not find her unprepared for the nicer occasions of life such as riding to hounds!

This fetching of an heiress from overseas by the high-toned Campbells set the style for the high-toned Chases. They kept up the tradition by bringing over lead coffins and a wrought iron fence to go around the family lot and to shut in that weeping willow which is lovely as the tracery in a dream.

It was lucky Elizabeth stocked the Chase house so well. There were six Chase girls. And as the Chase daughters began to marry the Pennells one by one, early in the nineteenth century, each bride brought enough furniture and dishes to set up housekeeping in her new nest. I am rather surprised that Miss Susan, who remained at home, had anything to eat off or any bed to sleep in at all. Anyway, she still had the grandfather clock, though the Pennells would get that when she died. The Pennells all swear to a man and a woman and a child that this clock was the one Henry Longfellow had in mind when he wrote his Old Clock on the Stairs. The Cambridge clock that is pointed out as the one is a wretched imposter, they say. They had a letter to prove theirs was the clock when the timepiece came, as most Chase things did, to the Pennells at last. Longfellow wrote the letter, and it was pasted right inside the clock. But Susan’s Pennell niece, Aunt Nell, must have removed it, when she removed other clues that connected Susan and the poet. At all events, the aspens which Longfellow mentions in his poem—they call them honest popples up here in Maine—are still right out there in front of the house, catching the wind from Maquoit Bay, a whole row of them, and their leaves still tremble in the breeze. This makes, the Pennells say, two poems Longfellow got out of the family, the ship Union and the old stairway clock.

I am treading on ground the angels would tremble to tread—and I shouldn’t dare even to imitate an angel if Aunt Nell were still alive—when I resurrect this episode laid safely away in lavender. But the Pennell tradition declares that Susan and Henry Longfellow were closer than mere acquaintances, after his Bowdoin years, in the late Thirties and early Forties of the last century. The tradition is that he had gone often to Bunganuc in his days as professor at the college, and had got to know the Chases very well and their young daughter Susan. Tradition also says he had often tasted the cider made in the mill built right under the lovely Cape Cod cottage, where my apples are ground to this day. (I can think of no lovelier place to live than over a cider mill, with the soul of Summer seeping up through the floor. I’ve tried to buy the house. But the people won’t sell.) The poet had admired Susan as a child, the story is, and now as a professor at Harvard renewing his lost youth at Bunganuc and bereft of his wife, his attention was centered on this lovely young lady at the Chase house. Tradition declares that Longfellow wrote many letters to Susan and that whenever he came back to visit in Brunswick the two of them were seen riding along the Bunganuc road. Whether on Lady Eleanor’s saddle or in a chaise, I cannot determine. And I don’t dare to ask. The two were as thick as thieves.

Whatever blight fell, I do not know. The Pennells don’t, either. But nothing came of this promising beginning, and the belle of Bunganuc was never translated to Cambridge. So the family lost the chance to add a poet to its sea captains. Longfellow eventually married again. But Susan stayed single all her life. She had her art to comfort her. She painted wild roses and pansies on velvet for all the Pennell houses. She even dabbled in portraiture and essayed the Pennell faces. But faces are harder to do than pansies. The softness went out of Aunt Susan’s touch there. The Pennells looked like a lot of granite headlands. Still, a lot of them did in real life. Susan returned to her studies of the wild rose.

Susan and the poet Longfellow corresponded all their lives. Susan collected a whole trunkful of letters, it was said. And when the poet came back in 1875 as a white-headed and bearded old centurion and cried Morituri Salutamus into the face of death in his fiftieth-anniversary poem, they say he sent a note down to Susan asking her to come up to Brunswick and hear him. Susan, of course, did no such thing. She had her pride. She stayed at Bunganuc, with her letters. She gave those letters, on her death-bed, to Aunt Mary Ellen Pennell, and she made her niece swear that, before she lay on hers, she would consign them to the flames. I guess I may have blown up the flames when, in 1925, on the hundredth anniversary of Bowdoin’s Longfellow-and-Hawthorne class, bull in the china closet that I am, I pleaded with Aunt Nell to let me see the Longfellow letters to Susan. At any rate, the letters—which her sister-in-law had seen—vanished, and not one has ever been found. Who knows what facts of history and sentiment went up in smoke at Pennellville in 1925!

Whether or not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ever bombarded Susan Chase (or Chace, as she spelled her name and her sisters usually did not) with passionate letters, other lovers did. There were many moths around that candle in Bunganuc. I have found two memorials to passion that burned hotly before the belle of Bunganuc’s shrine. At least two lovers sought her hand. And probably a third, as one of the two hints. One writes from Brunswick, December 11, 1838: “Madam,” his letter reads—Susan was twenty at the time—“I can no longer do so grate violence to my inclinations and injustice to your charms and merits as to retain within my one breast those sentiments of esteem and affection with which you have inspired me. I should have hazarded this discovery much sooner but was restrained by a dread of meeting censure for my presumption in aspiring to the possession of a lady whom beauty have conspired”—the lover’s heat involves his grammar here—“to raise so high above my reasonable expectations. Were our circumstances reversed, I should hardly take to myself the”—a gap where some wretched seal-collector has destroyed a phrase of love—“of doing a generous action in overlooking the considerations of wealth and making you an unreserved tender of my hand. I shall await your answer in a state of unpleasant impatience, and therefore rely on your humanity not to keep me long in suspense. I am, Madam, Your most humble servant, Elisha Snow.”

The heiress’s answer—and I hope it was mercifully speedy—must have been No. For we find her being besieged by another even warmer and more rhetorical tender of marriage on January 6, 1843. This one came from Portland, it came in care of Capt. Daniel Chase, and it cost the writer six cents to send. The suitor this time was a sea captain, he was just about to sail, and he embarked on three sentences at the beginning much too elaborate for any plain sea captain in his soberer moments ever to embark upon: “Madam, Those only who have suffered them can tell the unhappy moments of hesitating uncertainty which attend the formation of a resolution to declare the sentiments of affection; with which you have inspired me. Every one of those qualities in you which claim my admiration increased my Diffidence, by showing the great risk I run in venturing, perhaps before my affectionate assiduities have made the Desired impression on your mind, to make a Declaration of the ardent passion I have long since felt for you. If I am Disappointed of the place I hope to hold in your affections, I trust this step will not draw on me the risk of losing the friendship of yourself and family which I value so highly that an object less ardently Desired or really estimable could not induce me to take a step by which it should be in any manner hazarded.” The captain threw rhetoric to the winds and came out with sea-captainly frankness, he exposed his naked heart, probably without any letter-writing guide before him: “I am ready for sea the first opportunity to sail, and expect to be back in April, if it is God’s will, and shall call and see you and talk this over if you are not otherwise engaged, if you keep your promise good. And excuse me for sending this scribblin. I don’t expect you can find this out, but you can gess at part of it, I suppose. Plees excuse me giving you the trouble of this, and you will do me a favour in letting no one see the insides of this. I am, Madam, your affectionate admirer and sincere friend, E. D. Griffin.” And the captain adds a rather sour postscript that he supposes that Susan will be seeing a good deal of a Mr. Kelsey this Winter at her residence.

Yes, Susan knew passion.

The Pennell tradition, you see, makes out that the poet Longfellow practically jilted their relation. As a matter of fact, whatever Aunt Nell burned that day, it was probably a funeral pyre of something like a jar of old rose leaves cherished for half a century, a slender fragrance, maybe merely of friendship, that had meant life itself to a thrifty and beautiful woman, growing old alone after having had her chances at marriage and bearing young sea captains and having refused them all. It is like Yankee women, unmarried ones especially, to treasure a rose in a Bible.

Captain John Pennell’s log-book of the bark William Woodside is full of pressed roses and pansies, smilax, pinks, forget-me-nots, and lilies of the valley. It is like going through a hothouse in Elysium to turn through the pages. After the tall captain was under earth and his ships under the sea, feminine treasuring turned hard, plain latitudes and longitudes and details of bending fore topsails and making sail into a garden of tenderness. Of such shy and fragile stuff is Yankee sentiment!

If Susan Chase was folding her life away like a rose in the Bible over in Bunganuc, the family her sisters had married into were not. They were bursting out rampant as a lot of sunflowers. Jacob, as we have seen, had taken over his father’s mantle. That garment could have fallen on no more robust a pair of shoulders. He had become lord of all he could see. He was building more ships than any of the other citizens of Brunswick who had caught the oak fever. The old first Pennell house had been too small for him. He had built himself the house on the hill, a story-and-a-half but wide enough to hold the children he was adding to the roll of ship-wrights. Jacob had overflowed in all directions. When he had married, he had taken Deborah. Deborah was a Dunning.

Now the Dunnings of Brunswick and Harpswell were as the sands of the sea or the silver-blue alewives that crowd all the Maine creeks in May of the year. They were also as the salt of the earth. They were myriads. They were Tartars. They were full of the Old Hairy, and also of a special Grace. They knew winds and sails as they knew their own right and left hands. Ships crowded their blood stream. Tradition said that they were descended from James Dunning, Lord Ashburton. Somewhere in the family there was a picture of him in full regalia. He had had a vast estate in England, but it had reverted to the Crown. So the Dunnings of the New World had to make sail for themselves. The Pennells had already mixed with the Dunnings. Thomas the Third’s first-born, Agnes, who had been born on Christmas Day and who died on Christmas Day 91 years after, in 1856, had married one, Joseph, and given him a sea captain son; and when he died, she up and married his brother, Benjamin, a sea captain, and started bearing him prospective sea captains, too.

Now Deborah Dunning, cousin of Agnes’s two husbands, came into the Pennell family like a northwest wind on a ship working south. She bellied things out in great style. She probably brought the starch that the Pennells needed in their spines in order to become the leading Brunswick shipbuilders for half a hundred years, 1834 to 1874, when Middle Bays prosperity stood at tip-top highwater mark. Deborah started bearing children in 1802, the year she was married, and she kept right on with her profession till 1828, when she had Johnnie, her eleventh child, broke off and called it a day. Calling the roll in her house on the hill was like calling the roll of a platoon in the army: Eliza, Benjamin, Jacob, James, Job, Charles, Paulina, Joseph, Harriet, Robert, John. She must have baked johnnycake by the square yard and prepared hulled corn by the hogshead. A good mother to fill up a nation—eight boys and three girls all brought up well and amounting to something. Life must have been a three-ring circus in her house. I know, for I grew up in a family of ten myself three miles to the eastward as the seagull flies. Luckily Deborah’s husband Jacob was a fairly large man, so pants he put by could do for three or four boys at once. How the moderate-sized house she lived in held so many children is a Middle Bays miracle. But it did. And they began early to bend sail for themselves, so by the time she was seeing Johnnie to school with her birch switch, that April morning in 1842, she already had four grandchildren. Deborah taught them all to read and cipher, sent them to toe the line in the schoolhouse. Then she turned the boys over to their father. He gave them all a mallet or an adz and let them rip. They ripped right into the tall oaks still left around the shipyard, and built ships bigger than their father had ever dreamed of building.

Long before Jacob died, in the Fall of 1841, he realized he had accomplished something. He had begotten a chapter of American history. He had begotten the best firm of shipbuilders this part of Maine ever saw. He had begotten the Pennell Brothers.

Jacob divided up his estate, for he saw his years were heavy upon him in the land he had peopled with good seed. He was ready to call it a day and go off to his rest in his corner, under the cinnamon roses. He cut his land up into strips, the way it was cut up in old townships. He gave each of his sons a whole strip of Middle Bays from woods to the bay, so each should have all kinds of soil, from sand to blue clay, and all kinds of chances to spread out handsome. Only John Dunning Pennell, his youngest, got left out. But then, Johnnie was still a boy, and he had the whole Atlantic for his estate. Let him live there. And so, as we shall see, John did.

The older children had spread out handsome, for certain. In the year 1840, Jacob’s old eyes saw four big mansions already around his modest house on the hill. And more were a-planning. Eliza had married a Reed and was living over on Orr’s Island. Benjamin had married a sea captain’s daughter, Mary Giveen, and had built himself a fine house at the bay’s edge. Jacob, Jr. had come into the old house Capt. William Pennell had made, and was keeping it shipshape for my use a hundred years later. He had married one of the girls from the Chase mansion in Bunganuc, Hannah, and had sired a son already, Samuel, who would be a captain one day and command one of the largest Pennell ships, the John O. Baker, until she was lost in the North Sea in 1878—the model she was built from is beside me in the cabin as I write—and then the mighty Bath ship Oregon, would round the Horn seventeen times, as mate and master of Maine ships, and come home to my house, which his father had finished remodelling, August 31, 1859—as I can read on the inscription on my shed plaster—and he would sit in the side chamber that looks out on the empty bay, dreaming of old days when that water was crowded with ships and he a citizen of the vast world, until they found him dead, last of all the Pennell sea captains in a world where sailing ships were forgotten.

James, his brother, had married a Chase girl, too, Susan’s sister Julia, and had brought her home to the loveliest of all the Pennell houses, loveliest because he built most of it with his own hands, and his hands were the best that ever planed a board at Middle Bays, in a ship or out. His house has a cupola that is the envy of my life. James, the handsomest of all the good-looking Pennell brothers, with a twinkle at the corners of his eyes that would have made him a success anywhere in the world, had blossomed out into the greatest Pennell artist in ships of them all. No vessel went down the ways that had not felt the fine touch of this master builder. He had a son creeping around in his house already, James Henry, a sea captain-to-be, and one that would break his father’s heart. Master James’s house up the avenue of elms was already the heart of the shipbuilding world of Middle Bays.

Job, James’s brother, was soon to be married, and to the handsomest wife of all the Pennell ones, in spite of his hare lip and halting speech. He, the marked for life, stood somewhat apart from the others. He did not go down to the yard with them. He was not one of the firm. He kept to himself. When he drove his mother Deborah, in all her jetty Sunday-go-to-meeting best, to the First Parish Church, he did not go inside. He stole away and hid himself in the livery stable, or in one of the ribbon roads that wound into Brunswick, and sat among the hot pines and cool ferns there.

And superstition and malice touched Job and turned people from him. Folks said he had marked more than one unborn baby with his deformity. Even no less a one than that of Brunswick’s first citizen and Bowdoin’s greatest professor, Alpheus Spring Packard. Wives about to become mothers shied away from the sight of him. Human cruelty did not burn out with the witchcraft days. It had not ended in Brunswick with that woman whose body was staked down through the ribs at the Harpswell highroads’ meeting place because she committed suicide. Human hatefulness came right down to our own times.

Job avoided working with other men. He worked his father’s acres. He became the only complete farmer among the Pennells. He lived quiet and silent and peaceful, and apart. But he had his triumph. The lovely woman who came to his side bore the handsomest child of all who wore the Pennell name. Providence also comes down into our times.

And Brother Charles had, in 1840, just finished his grand house on the hill at the shipyard for his new wife, another daughter of Capt. John Giveen, like Ben’s wife across the way, and she would occupy it only the year remaining to her life, and then resign it and its twenty-odd rooms to Margaret Patten, Charles’s second wife, and resign her infant son Benjamin to his Uncle Benjamin across the road. Charles was on his way to become, in the family phrase, “Charles the Great.” And the second Mrs. Charles Pennell would see her husband become the business manager of the Pennell Brothers and the “ship’s doctor”—the man who met the family’s incoming vessels in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, and took charge till they were ready to sail again. The second Mrs. Pennell would become the social light of the whole very sociable Pennell clan and would entertain under her roof all the big-wigs from far and near. She would fill the immense house with five beautiful daughters and two sons. And the Pennells would get a poet at last. For her talented daughter, Harriet Giveen Pennell, would, in addition to being vice mother to all her brothers and sisters when her mother was trailing clouds of glory and silk in the drawing rooms of Boston and Philadelphia, and an accomplished pianist and singer and church worker, become a poet and would contribute to the book of Maine poets, the Boston Budget, and the Christian Register. If her verses seem soft and sentimental today, we need to recollect that a lot of the stern work of the world was done successfully by a thousand such heroines of Louisa Alcott—baking and sewing and scrubbing younger children’s faces, and making the men feel like the lords of creation they believed they were, before women lost the fine art of sentiment—as well as poems about the flowers of life.

The poetess’s father, Charles the Great, would gain control of the Pennell shipping industry, with 51 shares to his name. He would pluck at his hair in fine nervousness over the firm’s affairs until all his fine hairs were gone, and he would have to wear a wig. And a young nephew, son of John, would one day burst in upon Charles the Great in his office looking on the shipyard, and see him without his wig, and never think of him again as the demigod he had always supposed him to be! It would be like seeing Zeus himself with his ambrosial locks hung on a chair. And no matter for all his Uncle Charles’s carrying a gold-headed cane, the boy would never think of him as a being in the clouds again. Charles the Great would make a name for himself outside of business, too. He would cultivate music and sing a golden tenor in the Congregational Church in town. He would require a town house for his expansion and would acquire one for the Winter social season. One in Boston also, for the season there. He would give his daughters the “advantages,” not without some envious whispers among other Pennell daughters that maybe some of these “advantages” were coming from the community chest of the firm. And Charles would crown his days by jumping in, wig and all, when the belated saint out of Bede’s collection of saints, that plowman-preacher of Harpswell Neck, Elijah Kellogg, fell through the ice at the Pennell shipyard, and by saving him from a watery grave in Middle Bay. That act alone would have made any man famous. So when Charles the Great laid hold on the author of Spartacus to the Gladiators and a legion of books that have made boys better boys, that chilly day, the Pennell family touched on literature once more.

It was altogether fitting that the fine house Charles built, when it went out of the family at last, should go into the hands, for some time, of Helen Keller, the woman who made a dark world a world of light. This great woman of our times was able one day to sense that something wrong was going on around her barn. Some men were digging out a woodchuck. Helen Keller sent out word forbidding them to do any violence on her place. The little deed shines like a spark out of the dark and the past. And I wager the little woodchuck was grateful!

I owned Charles’s house, too, for a little while and gave it to my wife as an anniversary present. But our friends got the better of us and would not let us occupy two Pennellville houses at once. One lovely fact about that mansion is that nobody connected with the Pennells has ever died there. I will make a bee-line for the place if I ever get to feeling really ill!

Paulina, the seventh child of Jacob and Deborah, in this year 1840, was married to another one of the Dunning clan, Thomas, and she was nursing her first sea captain now, Jacob, who would be lost at sea in 1869. And there would be a second sea captain, Minot, to nurse next year, and he would also die at sea. Another son would die in childhood. It is not to be wondered at that Paulina, after her heap of troubles, should become a little “queer.” She was the only member of the family to become so. And she had her reasons, Lord knows.

Joseph was not married yet. And Harriet had not as yet married and lost her Dunning husband, an artist and carpenter in the Pennell yards, nor had the little white cottage gone up just north of my house, where she was to live so many years. Robert was still a boy of fourteen. And John was two years away from the birch switch of the April morning with the frogs calling him away from school. But small John had more voyages in him, for all the brief length of his trousers, than the whole lot of the Pennells.

It was a fine, upstanding family for a father’s old eyes to gaze on the last year of his life. If Jacob Pennell could have looked around the corner of time and seen into the thirty years ahead, his old eyes would have glowed still more.

He would have seen enough ships go out of the Pennell yards in Middle Bays to fill Portland harbor. And Portland has a pretty big one. Ships growing larger and larger, heavier and heavier, and more and more beautiful. He would have seen the Pennell Brothers’ flag spread over the whole world and Pennell ships in every port under the sun.

He had seen the beginnings of the blossoming, in any case. Enough to make him very proud. He had seen his old shipyard given up, and a larger one in deeper water built between the houses of his sons Ben and Charles. He had seen the brig Charles, 160 tons burden, slide into the sea in 1834; he had seen the schooner Harriet, 128 tons, named for his fourteen-year-old daughter go down the ways in the same year. He had probably seen the brig Cyrus go off, for I think that smart vessel which hangs painted over my mantelpiece was built in the Pennell yards, though I cannot prove it for certain. Andy Pennell gave me the painting, and it had always been in Master James’s family. Anyway, the veteran captain of the earlier Pennell ships, William Woodside, was her master in 1839, as my picture declares. I like this Pennell painting especially because William is going uphill. The artist drew his legend out of line with the ocean, so everything is uphill. William was an uphill kind of man. Old Jacob Pennell saw the ship Eliza—he was getting all of his daughters into his vessels’ names—launched in 1838. He saw the brig Mary Pennell, 233 tons, and the bark Tennessee, launched before he died, in 1840. And in 1836 he had reached the peak of his pride and had received the master of arts degree in shipbuilding and in life, when a ship of 233 tons rode into the Atlantic bearing his own name. It was written in the stars that his ship would go ashore on the coast of Ireland and go down with all the crew and 400 passengers, Irish emigrants, men, women, and children. But that would be after Jacob was finished with the stars and lay under the soil he had made richer by his life in his family graveyard. Untroubled with the future, Jacob could die in peace, seeing his family blossoming so and his life so crowned with success. The patriarch had founded his nation and seen his children enter the Promised Land.

And Jacob Pennell had left a good manager of his children behind him. Deborah took her place in her husband’s shoes and drove her fine sons on, with words and birch switches, to greater and greater glory. For Deborah Pennell did not stop with boys young enough to switch on their back trousers. She kept a weather eye on all her children, even the married ones. And she added their wives to her children as they came along. She gave them all orders. She made them all toe the mark. She knew what was going on everywhere. Her house commanded the road and most of the children’s houses. She knew all that was afoot. She knew when her sons went to work and came home. She knew what wives went to town, and what for.

“Cat’s hind foot!” she would say. “There’s Hannah traipsing off up to the village again, and she was there just last week.”

Deborah had a vinegary tongue to go with her gimlet eyes.

“Ben’s wife better stop gallivanting in her fine feathers, or she’ll have Ben on the town one of these days, I declare.

“There’s that young sannup of a Sam going home crying again like a bullefant. I guess he got his going-home-a-crying at school today. His bladder must lie near that boy’s eyes.”

Deb would look out of her window and sniff. “What’s she got on her head now?—A new bonnet! Glory to Gideon! Jacob can’t afford it. A bonnet?—Sho! sho!”

Or Deborah would have her hands deep in her dough-dish and not be able to go to the window. She would ask somebody to go for her. “Run see who that is going by. Julia?—and on a wash day? She best stay home and get her sheets whiter, say I.”

Two small granddaughters of Deborah, Nell and Harriet, six years apiece, were sent up once by Master Builder James to his mother’s with a ten-quart pail full of russets he had bought from a hand in the yards. Deborah loved russets. But she wouldn’t be beholden to anybody, not even a favorite son. She filled the pail right up out of her new hogshead of molasses. The little girls started home. Ten quarts of molasses is heavier than ten quarts of apples. It was a heavy load for little girls. Their arms ached at their sockets. They meditated emptying some of the stuff out on the road. But they were afraid of those eyes that could see to all the corners of Middle Bays. They staggered on home with the pail between them.

It wasn’t that Deborah was a hard woman. She had to be severe, for love and money’s sake. She was watchful of the interest of her children and their families because she wanted them all to amount to something. She was bound the young-ones should get their money’s worth out of the school. She and Jacob had built that school, out of their own pockets. The Pennells paid for the teacher and boarded him around. Deborah worked hard, the way Jacob had worked in his shipyard. Only her work was not merely from sun to sun. It was all but the sleeping hours of her life.

So, under Deborah’s stern eye, down the ways went, in 1844, the brig Guadalupe, of 188 tons. The vessel sailed from Portland, December 14, 1844, and the great gale came up, and she was lost on her very first voyage, with all hands. That did not stop Deborah and the PB firm, though. They set their jaws and went on building. In 1845, off went the bark Oregon, 347 tons. Before 1849, they had the brig Robert Pennell on the sea, as John Pennell’s pocket diary proves. In 1848, the Pennell Brothers launched their masterpiece so far. She was named for their master builder, the James Pennell, and she weighed 570 tons. She was a landmark in the history of Brunswick shipbuilding. They were prouder of her than of anything that had happened. But the stars were against this vessel, too. She sailed once too often with wheat around the Horn. The wheat shifted in her in a terrible gale, she was “knocked down on her beam ends,” her crew took to the boats, as she stood on her nose, and pulled away. But two other ships saw her later. She had righted herself somehow, she was going along by herself, with her hurricane sails set, her wheel lashed. They boarded her and found all apparently in order, except for no crew. They were loaded themselves with wheat, or they would have tried to save her. They watched her sail away, with her flag flying, headed due south. It was a sight to abash any sailor. Maybe in some frozen bay of Antarctica she still flies her PB ensign and the Stars and Stripes. It was a sad day for the Pennells when word of her loss came. She haunted them for years, their lovely flagship, going mysteriously on some unknown errand off into the silence of the South Pole.

By the time of the James Pennell, Johnnie Pennell was no longer Johnnie, but John Pennell, a young carpenter in the yards, doing a man’s work and drawing a man’s pay. His careful workmanship was built into the James and the six vessels that followed her. For vessels followed fast now. It was at the high tide of American shipbuilding, and the Pennells were bound they should keep on the crest. So the roll goes on, with ships growing ever longer and heavier. In the middle Forties, the Pennell ship Majestic, 714 tons; in 1848, the ship Cornelia; November 1, the ship Tempest, 861 tons; October 5, 1850, the ship Governor Dunlap—which a single notation in John Pennell’s notebook has rescued from the darkness of oblivion; in 1851, the ship Calcutta; 1853, the ship Redwood, with the unheard of tonnage of 1165—they had to dredge Middle Bay to get her off. The bark William Woodside, 462 tons, named for the tough old teacher of sea captains, slid down the ways in 1854. And then came 1855, the year that was an epic in the Pennell family. I have not heard of any family shipyard that can rival this one. In that year of grace, the ship Charles S. Pennell, 986 tons, went off, and Charles came into his glory now; the ship Ellen Hood, 1046 tons, went off; and the ship United States, 1082 tons! The Pennell ships in that one year could have taken the whole Greek army to Troy, and could have taken most of the Trojans out for a ride with them! The year 1855 was a record any shipyard in Christendom could well be proud of. Three ships in one year! And this was a one-family yard, remember. And remember, too, that a year in Maine means at the most five months of outdoors working. Three vessels in five months! 3114 tons of Maine goodness, beauty and usefulness! After the panic of 1857, the record runs on—without John Pennell now, for he is out sailing the Pennell ships and not building them. In 1859, the ship John O. Baker, 797 tons, rushed down into Middle Bay.

On November 20, 1860, in her last year of living, the eighty-year old steel-blue eyes of Deborah Dunning Pennell dimmed with the proudest tears an American mother probably ever wept. Deborah had wondered why her sons and daughters had manoeuvred her and kept her away from the shipyard in the Fall of that year. Then the day came when they were launching. She went down, in her best bib and tucker, in her carriage. And there on the high ship, in letters of real gold leaf, was her own name. The bark Deborah Pennell, 599 tons, went into Middle Bay like a flying seraph, with her namesake on her. And Deborah, blinded with tears she had held back for so long and had used sparingly, Yankee-like, went into Beulah Land with all sail set. All the tenderness she had repressed all these years came welling out. She wept among the children who had made her so proud. All of them were grown now, and most of them successful and famous. And they were all hers. To crown it all, her son John, her youngest son, already the head master of the Pennell Brothers’ ships, was to go as her captain. Deborah had earned her rest by her husband. She died just six weeks later, in great pride and great peace.

Whether or not Longfellow took fire from a Pennell launching, another famous American writer did. She must have seen several, for she lived in Brunswick right at the highwater of shipbuilding. This author helped to start the bloodiest war in history, a war that would be a handwriting on a wall for the Pennell prosperity. She had had a vision in the gothic First Parish Church at a communion service. She had written the vision down, partly in one of the college dormitories, for she had a husband who was Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. She went to the dormitory when her brood of children became too loud for the Muse or anybody else. The book she wrote was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But she had her lighter moments, as when she was describing a launching. She described one of them in the Pennell shipyard at Middle Bays, in a book in which Moses Pennel is a hero, called The Pearl of Orr’s Island. Harriet Beecher Stowe let herself go when she described Middle Bay:

“On these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of dark, solitary forests, the sudden incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance. Who,” asks Harriet, “that has stood by the blue waters of Middle Bay, engirdled here and there with heavy billows of forest-trees, or rocky, pine-crowned promontories, has not felt that sense of seclusion and solitude which is so delightful. And then what a wonder! There comes a ship from China, drifting like a white cloud,—the gallant creature! how the waters hiss and foam before her! with what a great free, generous plash she throws out her anchors, as if she said a cheerful, ‘Well done!’ to some glorious work accomplished! The very life and spirit of strange romantic lands come with her; suggestions of sandal-wood and spice breathe through the pine-woods; she is an oriental queen, with hands full of mystical gifts; ‘all her garments smell of myrrh and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made her glad.’ No wonder men have loved ships like brides, and that there have been found brave, rough hearts that in fatal wrecks chose rather to go down with their ocean love than to leave her in the last throes of her death-agony.

“A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has an unconscious poetry ever underlying its existence.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe knew her ships and Middle Bays, even if her personifications do seem to get the upper hold on her.

The roll of Pennell ships went on, without Deborah. The bark Anglo Saxon, 543 tons, in 1862. This proud vessel Master James could do only one thing with. He gave it outright to his oldest son, the apple of his eye, James Henry. And this vessel, white and shining as an archangel that she looks like in the portrait she sat for off Holyhead, North Wales, James the Second, son of the master builder, took out on the seas, like the young blood he was, and with a lot of other young bloods with him, and indulged himself in a lark by running the cotton blockade of the South. The episode took place off Hatteras, and James Henry got his wings singed. He had not meant harm, it was all in jest. But Charles the Great, his uncle, the ship’s doctor, had to hurry down and doctor James Henry out of prison, and he, it was said afterwards, got small thanks for it. A shadow seemed to come over Middle Bays with this blow. The twinkles left the corners of Master James’s eyes. The family paid dearly for the escapade. The white ship was lost. Master James may have thought of another king like himself who lost a white ship long before. He had loved James Henry, and he still loved him, above all else on earth. And the most promising of the young sea captains among the Pennells was lost to Middle Bays. It well-nigh broke his father’s heart. James Henry had to live forever in exile in far-away Cardiff over the sea. He would watch Yankee ships coming in there, even if he could never sail them again. Some of the Pennell ships were sunk by the Confederate ram Alabama, as that dark cloud of the Civil War hung over the oceans. These were hungry years for the Pennells. The family tried later on to recover something from the Alabama award of Geneva, but were never able to. The shadow of James Henry stood over them.

But still the Pennells went on bravely. Still the roll going on: 1864, the brig George W. Chase; 1864, the ship Mary Emma, 1067 tons. But the shadow lengthened and deepened, for it was nigh the sunset time. The bark Istria, 811 tons, was on the ways in 1865. But she was the “hard luck” ship of the Pennells. An evil star shone on her before her keel touched water. The ranks of the Pennell Brothers were broken at last. Master James, brains of the business, the tallest and kindest of them all, standing on the top of the first section of the mainmast, stepped on a loose plank a careless workman had left there, and plunged down to the bottom of the ship. His back was broken. And though they did not know it at the time, the back of Pennell shipbuilding. James never spoke or moved again, though he lingered on for some weeks. Then the shadows drew in, and maybe a son’s face he had loved and looked for. When kindly and kingly James went to the Pennell graveyard among the cinnamon roses, all the carriages in town followed. They reached the whole length of the Pennells’ Wharf Road. And most of the people in them were James’s friends. James had put his hand into his pocket to help every soul that had known need, workman or ship owner. Things were nigh the sunset. Bad luck went with the Istria on all the seas. It was hard to get men to sail in her. She finally sailed away to the Pacific and was swallowed up as if she had never been in the great silence of that vast grave. No word came of her. But somebody fell in with a Pennell captain in San Francisco, and showed him a bit of wreckage picked up in the southern Pacific, and the Pennell captain declared it was a piece of the Istria. She had gone to pieces somewhere out in that silence.

The sunset was upon the Pennell yard. The ship Oakland, 1237 tons, designed and begun by James, the master builder, was finished in 1866, the Summer after his death. It was the largest ship so far. But no ship went off the ways next year. None for eight years. The death knell of wooden ships had sounded over all the oceans of the world. The knell was heard on Middle Bay. It was the twilight. But one last blaze of glory there was. In 1874, the ship Benjamin Sewall, 1433 tons, slid into Middle Bay with Captain John Pennell on her deck and all Brunswick looking on, in the most memorable launching that the town ever saw. But in 1878 the bell of the First Parish Congregational Church tolled the return of the greatest of Pennell sea captains, from Rio to the graveyard that lies in the shadow of the pines of Bowdoin. Captain John was home forever. The Pennell sailing was done.

That is how the chronicle reads, if you follow it through to the end.

The hundred years of the Pennells had been a glorious hundred years, though Seventy-odd vessels—so the count stands, though the names of them are not all known—built in a bay that is really a large cove, by one family. The Skolfields, across Harpswell Neck, in the bay named for them, had nothing to show as fine. Twenty-four vessels to the Pennells’ seventy-odd. The Simpsons of New Wharf could show only thirty-seven. The Pennells had led them all. Their ships had become famous all the world over. Their sea captains were among the best on all the seas. It is a proud record for any family on earth.

And the slim boy with the scorched backsides had helped, he more than any other, to make this family shine.

OXEN AT BOW OF THE BENJAMIN SEWALL