16.8 The view from the poop, looking forward, the sails drawing nicely
Figure 16.9 Track from Liverpool to Martin Vass Rocks and the Greenwich Meridian
Figure 16.10 Running the easting down: track from the Greenwich Meridian
Figure 17.1 Water on deck – looking forward from near the entrance to the saloon
Figure 17.2 Dressed for the weather
Figure 17.3 Entering port after a stormy voyage
Figure 18.1 Alexandra Dock, Hull, from Susie’s postcard
Figure 18.2 The family about 1911.
Figure 18.3 Lewis Davies, first mate
Figure 18.4 Dalgonar, looking aft from a position on the foremast.
Figure 18.5 Looking forward from a position on the mizzen mast
Figure 18.6 Looking aft from the foremast
Figure 18.7 The storm-scarred Dalgonar in Seattle
Figure 18.8 Dalgonar at anchor, in process of unshipping topgallant masts
Figure 19.1 Captain and Mrs Isbester
Figure 20.1 Captain George Laurenson, his wife Barbara and their children
Figure 21.1 Ballast, stiffening and cargo sequence
Figure 21.2 Typical apprentice’s reference issued on completion of service
Figure 22.1 Captain John and Susie Isbester with the halfdeck in the background
Figure 22.2 The final page of John Isbester’s last letter to Susie
Figure 23.1 Dalgonar on her beam ends
Figure 23.2 Dalgonar from port side, as seen from Loire.
Figure 23.3 The rescue as seen from Loire.
Figure 24.1 The sail plan before attempting to wear ship
Figure 24.2 The sail plan while attempting to wear ship
Figure 24.3 The effect of swell on Dalgonar’s ability to turn
Figure 24.4 Mr Mull’s tracing of Captain Jaffré’s track chart
Figure 24.5 The lifeboat stowage
Figure 24.6 View looking forward from the poop
Figure 24.7 Launching a lifeboat with radial davits
Figure 24.8 Launching a lifeboat, Step 3
Figure 24.9 Lifeboat outboard and almost ready for lowering: Step 6
Figure 24.10 Mr Mull clambering along the ship’s side listed to 70 degrees
Figure 24.11 Dalgonar’s final passage
Figure 24.12 The value of centreline shifting boards
Figure 24.13 Intended securing of the Callao ballast aboard Dalgonar
Figure 26.1 Figure of a generic three-masted square-rigged sailing ship
FOREWORD BY PROFESSOR TONY LANE
At last a book with an original slant on the men and, yes, the women, of commercial sail’s last years. For more than one hundred years, scores of books have been written by seafarers recalling and commenting on their experiences of working and living aboard square-rigged sailing ships. All were written from memory, some helpfully jogged by saved letters and ‘telegraphic’ diaries/logs. A great deal of this genre, very popular from the early twentieth century and into the 1960s, makes for fascinating and sometimes exciting reading. I’ve been collecting and reading these books for forty years and I’m persuaded of their essential authenticity by the sheer repetitiveness of accounts telling of deaths, desertions and unrelenting danger; appalling food, low wages, and long hours; brutality not always leavened by solidarities, acts of bravery and skill, and occasional kindnesses. Probably the best of these accounts is David Bone’s, The Brassbounder first published in 1910 and thereafter more often than not in print. It certainly has literary flair but like the more prosaic authors, Bone has little to say about the family circumstances of either themselves or their shipmates. Now, however, thanks to Jack Isbester, readers have a unique opportunity to see beyond the rigours of daily life in sail (without ever losing sight of them) and find in satisfying detail something of the social origins and familial life of one of the last shipmasters in sail. In this book there is a consistent interrogation of a life at sea intimately interwoven with family relationships despite lengthy separations and scattered, infrequent and unreliable means of ‘keeping in touch’.
The story begins in, and often returns to, the Shetlands, the birthplace of Jack’s grandfather, Captain John (‘Jack’) Isbester. His family’s daily life and broader social and economic circumstances have been sieved by the author’s unremitting diligence in digging down and around in the detail of Shetland’s self-supporting agriculture
