A Boat Is Born

By LLEWELLYN HOWLAND

1

IN THE early spring of 1893, as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, I spent many dismal weeks abed in the grip of typhoid fever, to enjoy later a long convalescence under the eye of my old friend and mentor, the Skipper, at his shore farm, “The Cottage,” on Clark’s Point, that long finger of land facing the western entrance to Buzzards Bay.

On my arrival at The Cottage in midafternoon of an August day, I was greeted, owing to the Skipper’s temporary absence, by the hitherto austere and unapproachable Deborah, cook and general factotum within doors, who to my amazement hugged me to her ample bosom. After helping me upstairs and settling me on a bed smelling of freshly sunned sheets and lavender, she left me for a few minutes. Presently she returned with a tray charged with a jug of steaming beef-tea seasoned with chopped chives, a brace of chestnut-brown beaten biscuits, a pat of unsalted butter, a jar of strained honey, and a glass of Madeira, all of which she insisted I must dispose of before taking a “snooze” while I waited for the sounding of the gong that would announce the Skipper’s arrival and that of our supper in the gun room downstairs.

When I was roused from my nap by the purring of that gong, which had served its time aboard the ship Saint George to boom messages across miles of heaving seas to distant whaleboats, my one thought, as I nipped down the crooked staircase, was to bask in the sunshine of the Skipper’s greeting. But again to my amazement his welcome was as sober as Debby’s had been effusive, as, kneading my scrawny hand in his and looking me up and down, he said severely, “Well, well! It’ll take a lot of Deborah’s cookery to fair out the hollows in your outline” — a remark, as I took it, that implied, “All this trouble’s your own damn fault,” which tended to season an otherwise delicious supper with the gloom of my hurt feelings.

My gloom was relieved only when, on the coming of dessert— a decanter of port, a basket of English walnuts, and a pot of black colfee—the Skipper said with a cheerful smile, “I’ve been hoping you’d help me with a job I have on hand here. If you like, we’ll start tomorrow morning at eight-thirty in the carpenter shop, where I’ve installed that jaek-of-all-lrades, Abel Handy, for a month or so, while you and I try to find out what design will give us the best boat for cruising on our New England coast. Meantime I’ve got something to show you here in the house before we go to bed, if you re up to it. How about it ?”

A nod and, I assume, a hangdog lookdn my eyes — the only answer I could muster at the moment were evidently intelligible to the Skipper; for after lighting a cigar, he led the way into the living room, a long, narrow room with three exposures — east, south, and west — that had about it an air of comfort in spite of the disproportion of its dimensions.

As I paused on the threshold to peer into this familiar room, dim in the lingering light of the afterglow, I sensed rather than saw that the collection of Chinese porcelains and bronzes which usually graced the long, narrow center table of rubbed teak had been replaced by a tall, shadowy something which, as the Skipper scratched a vesta and lit the brass student lamps at either end of the table, revealed itself as the model of a three-masted, lugger-rigged vessel, upright in her cradle and with her sails set.

Unversed as I was in the niceties of model building and classification when, for the lirst time, I stared up at those lofty sails — pale pink in the soft light of the lamps — I was nevertheless deeply impressed by the perfection of workmanship which they and the entire fabric supporting them proclaimed. Overcome by admiration, I fell into a reverie from which I was aroused by a long, low whistle causing me to look at the Skipper, only to realize from his chuckle that I — not he — had been the involuntary author of this demonstration, an embarrassment he relieved by saying, “I’ve never seen the like of her, either! And the more I see of her the better she looks. Let’s start in on the cradle and work up to that sliding gunter of a main t’ gallant mast.”

And from then on, my memory of that evening has had about it the ecstatic quality of a vivid dream — a dream more real and rewarding than reality, and one that never fades.

For at the small cost of ardent scrutiny with a magnifying glass, treasure after treasure of the mechanic arts was revealed; as for example the cradle’s heavy baseboard of yellowish, close-grained pearwood, as level and true as a billiard table, on the face of which was engraved in delicate black lettering: “Saint. Esprit du Conquet”; and below, the date “1799”; and still lower and to the right, the metric scale to which the model had been built and by which the Skipper had computed the overall length —86 feet 4 inches — of her prototype. On the longitudinal center line of this baseboard ran a procession of turned, ebony balusters, spaced at equal intervals and varied in height to support with exactness the raked and slightly rockercd keel of the Ghost, as we thereafter referred to her. Of these balusters, four wrerc pierced by ebony cross-timbers to which were hinged, to port and starboard, a pair of arms that with their adjustable and padded bilgeblocks firmly embraced and steadied their burden.

Hut, as seasoned lovers of ship models are well aware, the study of details, to be rewarding, is a matter of “small doses oft repeated.” And so it; followed that within an hour, and to my regret, the Skipper called it a day and after blowing out the lamps followed me back to the gun room.

Here, in the soft light of four spermaceti candles — he in his armchair and I stretched out on a rattan-bottomed bedstead, a relic of the old Indiaman Rousseau — the Skipper recounted the saga, as he had pieced it together, of the original Ghost, the vessel so meticulously recorded by our model in the room we had just quitted.

2

WHEN that model of ours first came into my hands from your twice great-grandfather’s old house on the end of the Point,” the Skipper began, “she was in a dustproof glass case which was so big that when we finally landed it in the dining room I felt I’d been stuck with a white elephant. But when I got round to translating a bill of materials — a masterpiece if I ever saw one — which I’d found tucked into a corner of the case, I discovered that our Ghost was one of a pair — duplicates — which had been built by order of the Minister of Marine in Paris, from lines and specifications furnished by a ‘Monsieur le Capitaine Pierre Reynard, constructeur de bateaux, du Conquet’ —a bit of information that set me thinking I’d fallen heir to a good thing and wishing I could find out more about this Captain Fox — or, as I thought likely, ‘Peter the Fox,' all things considered.

“But talk about starting one of our New England foxes when the sun’s dried up the dew on the footing. That’s nothing to tracking down this gentleman I’ve been after for the past six months; until a few weeks ago, when of all places to find it, his story, such as it is, showed up on some loose sheets in Captain Smith’s handwriting which were shoved in between two of the blank pages in one of the Euphrates’ logbooks, stowed away in my own counting room.” Here the Skipper paused to light another of his Manila cheroots and after a few long puffs continued his story.

“Captain Smith’s account, like the entries in his logbooks, was long on dates but shy on the highlights and shadows of a career that, considering the times and the sphere of action, was astounding. To get the full flavor of it you have to keep these facts in mind: that in 1789 a boy about your age, from nowhere and known only as ‘Pierre,’ showed up in the harbor of Le Conquet — a French fishing village on the Kermorvan Peninsula, a little south and west of Brest and southeast of the Island of Ushant. - - with three waifs like himself in an old battered lugger without identification marks; that three years later that boy, ‘who said little but worked hard,’ had become well known locally as ‘Monsieur Pierre,’ the owner of a boat-building yard employing many hands; that in 1795 ‘Monsieur Pierre’ was known as ‘Monsieur le Capitaine Pierre Reynard,’ commander and sole owner of the armed lugger Saint Esprit, a product of his own shipyard and a notoriously fast and able vessel; and that from then until 1807, when ‘Le Capitaine,’ a rich and respected citizen of France, swallowed the anchor, he and his command were employed in a coasting trade of which little was known other than that the two were seldom seen in their home port but were said to be constantly on the move, at all seasons, in the area known as ‘the English Channel,’ which if stretched a little takes in a big expanse of open sea, as rough and dangerous to navigate as can be found, the control of it at the time being Napoleon Bonaparte’s number one problem.

“Just think of it! The seamanship and nerve of the man — running cargoes, both ways, of contraband from rum and tobacco to specie and secret agents and Lord knows what besides, while the open sea bristled with British men-o’-war and all harbors and their approaches were patrolled night and day by flotillas of armed boats with shore batteries to back ‘em up. No wonder he’d given his best to the designing of this able flyer of his when every trip she made was a race for a barrel of gold against a stretched neck for him and his big crew of cockalorums. I tell you, old man, Monsieur Pierre had a right to his surname if any man ever did! And finally, when both France and England set a whacking price on his head, alive or dead, and the going got tough even for him, what does he do but trade the British a package of French secret papers and his promise to go ashore for keeps for a handsome cash-down payment; and then trade Napoleon a bundle of British Admiralty undercover documents and his Saint Esprit for a pardon, citizenship papers, a life pension, and, for good measure, our model there in the next room, which Captain Smith bought from a storekeeper in Le Havre who said he’d known ‘Le Capitaine’ and described him as a small, dark man — a Basque, he thought — with a big nose and gimlet eyes. A rascal who stopped at nothing, yes

— but a genius too; and one with whom it paid evidently to be friendly! And now,” the Skipper said as he glanced at the clock, “old man, to bed!”

As I slipped down between cool sheets that evening, the breathing of a little breeze sweetened by the fragrance of early blooming buds of English ivy fringing the open window seemed to assure me that at last I was clean again — in a wholesome state, the immediate effect of which was a sleep without unease of body or mind, a sleep from which I awoke in time to spend a half hour in the living room with our Ghost before the gong boomed its call to breakfast in the sunshine on the “south terrace. ' And yet, much as I relished that leisurely meal, it was nearer eight o’clock than half past when I arrived at t he open door of the carpenter shop — a unique structure, formerly a ship’s caboose or deckhouse containing the galley and quarters for cook, carpenter, and sailmaker, and now one of a range of outbuildings beyond the farm barn.

3

THAT morning when I entered this little shop with its flavor of old times and the sea, Abel Handy, a retired ship’s carpenter and the ace of all trades, was already at work; and without so much as a nod of welcome or the lifting of his eyes from the bench over which he was bowed, he observed: “Ben sick, ain’t yer? Take an’ chaw one o’ them pine shavin’s till yer jaws ache. An’ swaller yer spit — best cure for bowel complaint, an’ won’t cost yer a red cent.” This advice, coming from an old acquaintance, I adopted without question, to find it effective at least to the extent of choking off conversation, os the trace of turpentine in the delicate curl of white pine stung my tongue and puckered my throat.

Finding Abel engrossed with his work, I too lined up at the bench, on which were ranged the hulls of twelve model boats—some no more than roughed out, and some almost completed. As they lay, bottoms up, in an orderly row and beam to beam, it was evident they were all of one length — three feet

— but otherwise bewilderingly unalikc both in design and dimensions. But before I had time to assess these variants, Abel, handing me a nicely squared block of maple around which was wrapped a strip of fine sandpaper, pointed out one of the hulls and said, “Squint out and feel out them humps and hollers on that un and then sand ‘em out — but God help yer ef yer dish the fair o’ the lines or leave a holiday.”

Time passed — perhaps an hour — while I “chawed ” on my pine shaving and sanded the boat, until the busy silence was disturbed by the arrival of the Skipper, first to inspect and then to comment on the work accomplished since the day before. As he and Abel conferred, I gave over my sanding to follow their discussion and thereby pick up the threads of their plan of time-racing these models and also to become more conversant with the individual characteristics of the boats themselves.

Six of the hulls — three sets of twins, and each pair differing in detail from the ot hers —• composed a group to be raced, twin against twin, under different rigs and sail plans; but as all but two of them conformed in general to the fashion of the times, they were referred to as “the moderates. The other six — no two alike, and called “the extremes ” — were examples of the wide and shallow and the narrow and deep, both of which types in those days had their advocates who were engaged in noisy but inconclusive argument.

This enlightening conference of half an hour or so was concluded by the Skipper’s departure for town, which left Abel and me to continue our work until twelve-thirty, when he opened his lunch basket to “munch-up my victuals where I be,” while I went back to The Cottage to submit to more of Debby’s coddling. Then came the afternoon’s spell of work in The Caboose, lasting until Abel said, “Time to close up — see yer in the mornin’,” which left me an hour before supper to visit the Ghost in the living room and fall deeper in love with her than ever. And ah, what a contrast that supper was to the one of the night before! For not only was it one of Debby’s best, but this one was salted with animated “boat talk” and the further unfolding of the Skipper’s plans for the testing, which I learned was to take place in a cove bitten out of the east face of an islet, the largest of several which formed all together a little archipelago known as “The Egg Islands,” a scant mile across the ship channel of New Bedford’s outer harbor.

Under the discipline of such daily routine, broken only by a day off at a Potomska Clambake and a moonlight picnic at the fort on the tip end of the Point, two weeks flew by, in the course of which six boats — the three sets of twins — were completed, rigged, and ready for trial. And here it should be borne in mind that this building and testing of little boats had been undertaken as no mere pastime analogous to toy-boat sailing, but rather to satisfy the Skipper as to the validity or invalidity of certain theories and practices which at the time were influencing both the design and construction of sailing vessels, particularly those intended for cruising and racing. And further, these boats, designed and built for the sole purpose of implementing the Skipper’s long-considered experiments, were highpowered sailing craft which, with their extremely light hulls and heavy ballast, were sparred and rigged to carry a maximum of sail to ensure their being driven to the speed limit of their length and individual characleristics.

To carry out the trials, all our resources were organized: The Caboose and Abel, as arsenal and shop; The Boathouse and Levi, the boatman, as dockyard; a spring wagon with “Old Bill" in the shafts and Gus, the farm boy, with the reins, as transport; Sally, a sailmaker’s daughter, and a room in the ell of The Cottage, as sailmaker and sail loft; Deborah as commissary-general at Headquarters; the Skipper as admiral of operations; I, as clerk of the works. The working hours were set from 7 A.M. to sunset; lunch for the detachment afloat, eleven-thirty to noon; and off time for all hands, Sunday evenings.

So organized, the first day was devoted to the breaking in of personnel, transporting of finished boats and their gear to The Boathouse, laying out and buoying of courses in the Egg Island cove, equipping the gig (boat) and two light skill’s with sundries for emergency adjustments, and, late in the afternoon when the breeze softened, giving all six boats a sail-stretching maiden trip, off the boathouse beach — an enlightening experience for us, in that we found we had to row all-out to keep up with the little flyers when the puffs hardened.

By the end of a week all of us involved in the trials had “learned our ropes” and the work in hand was going smoothly. In the mornings, which were usually calm, the Skipper and I were busy in the sail loft, The Caboose, and The Boathouse preparing untested boats for trials and readjusting rigging, sails, and ballast of those already tried out and considered susceptible of improvement. The afternoons, if the breeze served, would find the Skipper, Levi, and me afloat in the cove, with the two skiffs and the gig, sailing, sailing, and sailing the two, three, or sometimes four boats selected for that, day’s testing over the buoyed courses—a beat to windward, a reach and a run to leeward — with more attention given to how they performed than to timing them between buoys. It was a strenuous business altogether, calling for concentration, a row of three or more miles, and a thorough soaking — in sweat if we wore oilskins, and in salt water if we didn’t.

Without compulsion, other than that of giving every one of the twelve model boats her day in court, two more weeks slipped away during which, although there were three stormy days preventing operations at the cove, our logbook of notes, timings, and records was completed except for a summary of the collected data and, to finish the job with a flourish, a statement of the conclusions reached as to design, rig, and dimensions most likely to produce a cruising boat fulfilling the Skipper’s requirements. In the twilight of our last day on the cove, the Skipper and I chose a footpath crossing a grassy hillside as the shortest way home from The Boathouse. The plaintive note of a meadow lark in flight evoked a feeling both of elation and regret that we had come to the end of our undertaking — dual emot ions which Debby, as she cleared the table in the gun room after dinner that evening, interpreted by saying as she looked me up and down with an expression of pride in her eyes, “Well, there’s one thing I’ll say for all this triflin’ and troubleit ain’t done you no harm, and you feel kind o’ smart now it’s over. But I guess if you live to be a hundred you’ll hanker some for our victuals and the bed here that give you the ehancst. to learn to work, even if what you done ain’t of much account.” A mouthful for me to savor, while the Skipper tipped me a wink as he lit a cigar and started to study the notes of the afternoon’s testing.

Later that evening I had my first lesson in summarizing collected data and soon realized that in building a sound wall of proof, the bricks of evidence should be laid dry, uncushioned by the mortar of prejudgment. And when at last it came to setting forth our conclusive argument I held my breath, as little by little the scales of justice inevitably inclined in favor of specifications that barred all extremes and emphasized many of the salient details of hull design and construction inherent in Le Capitaine Pierre Reynard’s Saint Esprit du Conquet — not a “thing of beauty” but the “thing of beauty,” which for me will endure forever.

On the following Sunday evening I fetched up with a bump on the hard sandbar of school, where I was greeted by the headmaster with the news that I must work out the “dead horse” of an eight weeks’ absence before Christmas or abandon all thought of continuing with my class. Thus rewarded for misfortune and dismissed to my room, I was overcome by that “hankering” that Deborah had predicted; and when I came to sit on the thin, hard bed in my bare quarters and contemplate the future, my first reaction was to double-damn typhoid and all its works. But on further reflection, that affliction took on a new significance; for was it not to it and to it alone that I owed those fruitful and never-to-be-forgotten weeks at The Cottage for which I was to pay so inconsiderable a price as a few hours of extra “grinding”? By thunder, Deborah was right; and as for extra schoolwork pooh, pooh!

4

THROUGHOUT the sixty-two years that stretch between that Sunday evening at school and today, I have been conscious of a faith that luck — good or bad—more often than not is in the nature of a paradox, not to be defined on the spur of the moment but. only after the passage of time has crystallized it into its true shape and significance. And coeval with this point of view as to luck has run that insatiable, beggaring plague — a love of boats — that has imposed on me the burden of owning one or more “sailing sirens as a necessity. C onsequently, year after year, I have bought boats— with a single exception — as I bought my shoes, in the ready-made market with the foreknowledge that while they might fit to a degree, they could not and would not give me the comfort and satisfaction that a boat of my own design and built to my order might be expected to produce.

Then — wonderful to relate! — the long succession of make-fits was brought to an end in the fall of 1938 when a hurricane roaring over our southern New England coast destroyed not only lives and properly—my boat of the moment among hundreds of others — but also landmarks, such as our Egg Islands, which for generations had stood imperishable. On first thoughts, this storm that had bitten so deep into our countryside was an irreparable disaster; but in retrospect it could be accepted as a lesson in geography-in-the-making and the transitory nature of all things, even the living rocks.

As to the loss of my boat, it was as if I had been stripped in a public square and were under the compulsion of providing myself with a suit of clothes to cover my nakedness. Speed was the essence of the situation, and within a few days I had marshaled my forces and gone to work with the one thought in mind that, after years of experience with makeshifts, I had at last the opportunity to suit myself regardless of fashion or any other considerat ion.

In my need for haste I freely called on the time and skill of many willing hands to help me carry out my plan for the creation of a forty-foot boat which, in essence, should sail on her bottom, not on her side, and, at that, approach the speed limit of her length under the widest range of weather conditions likely to be met with off or along shore on our Atlantic seaboard. All other details were subordinate to these cardinal qualifications.

And when it came to interpreting these controlling factors by lines on the drafting board, I was secretly elated to see that, owing to the restrained proportioning of length-to-beam-to-draft, my boat-to-be gave every promise of having that dimensional Symmetry from which indubitably flow those fair, sweeping lines and graceful arcs inherent in Nature’s works, particularly those pertaining to the sea, and which, unless they are intentionally or carelessly distorted, are bound to bring forth that “thing of beauty,” be its purpose what it may.

Thus was this boat conceived, and after ten busy months, during which it was my good fortune to be able to devote myself to the innumerable details of her construction and equipment, she was successfully launched and rigged as a yawl.

And then at last on a summer day the time came to sail this substance of long-imagined shapes and aspects out into the hazy blue of liuzzards Bay; and when Java— as I had christened this boat of mine in memory of a lucky ship, a Java of long ago which a great-grandfather had owned — dipped, rose, and then topped the first head sea she met, without pause or fuss, I hope my still vividly remembered sensations may have approached those of an Old Master on finding his picture good.

Fifteen years — a long stretch in the life of a boat — lie between that June day of 1939 and the early summer of 1954. During that period this Java of mine had fulfilled to overflowing my cup of hope for her success by the excellence of her performance, be the weather what it might. And further, she had acquired that “shipshape and Bristol fashion” patina produced only by the passage of time, unstinted labor, and unremitting attention to the upkeep of her entire fabric, both alow and aloft; all of which, when combined with the considered elimination of every nonessential item of equipment and the choice of the simplest and best necessities, had given her, besides, that subtle quality of “fitness for a purpose” which she deserved. And again, as time had passed, she had earned a good measure of “the sincerest flattery by reason of the growing number of replicas of herself that were afloat.

But though I thought I required no further confirmation of my own opinion that Java was a good all-round cruising boat as she lay at her mooring in Padanaram Harbor on the evening of June 24, 1954, still, I have to admit how greatly enhanced this opinion of her was when I was roused out of bed early next morning to read a message from Bermuda to the effect that a friend and his boat, Malay— Java’s twin sister — had won that blue ribbon of ocean racing, “The Bermuda Trophy.”

This news called for a celebration with my dear old boat, and so once more she and I sailed out into the Bay, and as she met the first white-capped sea of the Sandspit tide rip. suddenly out there to windward, in my mind’s eye I spied the Saint Esprit du Conquet tearing by on a close reach, her lofty, tanned sails rosy in tlie sunlit haze, her tilting deck alive with red-capped crew. And as she ranged ahead athwart our course, I had a fleeting glimpse of bronze-green counter and, standing at the helm, the unmistakable figure of “Le Capilaine,’ who at that moment threw out his left arm and opened hand, as if to say; “Bonne chance, via petite soeur!” — both a salute and a subtle reminder of the almost forgotten debt I owed that pair for the intrinsic worth of my own command.