Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester
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16 Old Boys Association. Grey River Argos. 16 December 1909.
17 West Coast Times, NZ 25 November 1906.
18 As seen elsewhere the two spellings were interchangeable. Indeed their death certificates show that John was buried as an Isbister whereas his brother Henry was recorded as Isbester.
19 By this time he was an inmate of the Westland hospital.
20 [email protected] by personal email dated 12.11.2011 stating the list of Hokitica NZ gravestones provided by a researcher had been seen by him at the Bayanne Shetland Genealogy website. (Isbester Collection).
21 Isbister, John. Motion for Probate. Archives New Zealand Ref. CH300, HK59/1911.
22 Hansen, Alan. Personal email dated 21.05.2013 (Isbester Collection).
At the end of his voyage to Australia John Isbester, Able Seaman, paid off in Liverpool on 18 August 1876 and seven weeks later, on 3 October 1876, aged 24, he was awarded his second mate’s certificate of competency, no. 02269. He must have enjoyed an enormous feeling of satisfaction at the achieving of his first ambition. Captain R.S. Cogle, writing nearly 40 years later at the time of John Isbester’s untimely death, wrote under the heading The Loss of the Dalgonar:
Sir,- it was with a sad heart that I read the log of the above in the Shetland Times of last week. It has been my privilege to have known the late Captain Isbester for about forty years. He passed all his Board of Trade examinations under my guidance and never failed once.1
Captain Cogle was a Shetland man who ran a private navigation school at 35 Pitt Street in Liverpool and, in retirement, lived in Hoylake on the Wirral coast, just a few miles away.
It was not until six months later, in April 1877, that John Isbester returned to sea with an appointment as second mate. It appears that he had taken a voluntary winter holiday in Shetland – in 1884 he was described as having been ‘seven years south’,2 i.e. away from Shetland for seven years – which fits with what we know of his movements. Winter in Shetland would seem like a second best when there was an officer’s job to be enjoyed, and sunlit seas, gentle breezes and graceful palm trees to be found. It may well be that jobs were hard to come by, as they certainly were two years later, or he may have decided that he had earned a break and wanted to do a bit of courting. This appears to have been the time when John Isbester ‘left his watch’ (a Shetland expression for an informal betrothal) with Maggie Smith of Strome in Whiteness, the village of his birth. John Isbester eventually joined the wooden ship Nelson, of 943 tons gross, in Maryport as second mate. She was bound for Quebec, where she spent a month discharging and loading, and was back in Ayr at the end of June to end a round trip of two and a half months. Ten days later he rejoined the Nelson in Greenock for another trip to Quebec, this time under a different master. The fact that he was prepared to travel to Maryport and to Greenock to join the ship hints at an eagerness to grab a berth on a good ship – or perhaps on any ship from a shrinking choice.
A month after leaving the Nelson in Gravesend at the end of the second voyage, John Isbester joined the iron barque Parthia, 1,063 tons gross, in Liverpool for a voyage to Valparaiso in Chile, where, after discharging they sailed north to visit Iquique and load nitrate in Antofagasta, thence to Falmouth for orders and on to Liverpool. That voyage, with its rounding of Cape Horn in both directions, took 11 months and should have convinced John Isbester, if he needed convincing, that he had a good knowledge of the work of a second mate in square-rigged sail.
Back in Liverpool in October 1878, John Isbester found that there were no second mates’ jobs to be found, and on 12 November he took a decision that could have been life changing – he enrolled in the Liverpool Constabulary as a third class constable.3 Enrolling in the same period were men with such Shetland-sounding names as John Gifford Inkster, Peter Anderson, Hector Bain, John Irvine and Magnus Irvine, so it may have been the ‘thing to do’ at that time.
Figure 5.1 John Isbester as a young man
Photos of John Isbester (Fig.5.1) suggest that he was a man of good stature, probably a requirement for the police force. It would be good to believe that he enjoyed duty attending the crowds visiting the Walker Art Gallery, where up to four constables were posted, but it is more likely that his main concern was in dealing with the cases of drunkenness in Liverpool, which had in December 1876 risen from 15,763 to 16,859 per annum, leading to protests from prominent members of the public, insisting that the licencing laws be enforced.4 Other incidents requiring the attention of constables included dealing with the boys troubling Mrs McMillan in Balm Street and the need to apprehend Aaron Lipwitz, charged with stealing Abm. Liebenchutz’s cash box. I have found no record of when, why or how John Isbester left the Liverpool Constabulary, but he used to tell his family that he had been a policeman for about six months, which would place his departure from the Force during the summer of 1879. He finally returned to sea on 1 February 1880, joining the iron barque Cumeria, 1,336 tons gross, in Liverpool as second mate for a voyage to San Francisco. She had unrecorded problems which caused her to return to Liverpool after a day at sea, but she eventually completed the 11-month voyage with its double wintertime rounding of Cape Horn, returning to Hull to discharge her homeward cargo. That had been John Isbester’s first visit to San Francisco, a two-and-a-half-month stay in a port to which he was to return many times in later years. After four weeks’ leave John Isbester rejoined the Cumeria in North Shields for a voyage to Bombay with a cargo of coal. He must have done well on his first voyage on Cumeria because although the new crew signed on in Hull on 14 January his place was kept open for him to rejoin on 29 January.
Bombay would be yet another new destination for him, but the voyage would leave its marks on him for quite a different reason. When he came on watch at 0800 on 7 February Cumeria was south of St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight and close hauled on the port tack, steering about south-west by west5 (Fig.5.2). The wind, from the south-south-east or south by east, was getting up, and there was a heavy cross sea from the west. Cumeria was carrying courses and upper and lower topsails in addition to jib, foretopmast staysail, maintopmast staysail and crojack, and Captain Evan Williams from Aberdovey ordered all hands on deck to shorten sail (Fig.5.3). John Isbester and his watch were allotted the mainmast, the hands going aloft to reef the main course and upper topsail while the mate and his watch reefed the corresponding sails on the foremast. Next John Isbester and his watch commenced furling the crojack on the mizzen mast while chief mate Gilbert Pearson from Shetland, bosun Robert