me all that I ever knew about a ship until I came to sail in one. He showed me how to turn a splice, to tie a score of knots, to shoot the sun and box the compass. Geography came to life all of a sudden, and places like Zamboanga and Malabar rang as familiar to my ear as Nantucket or Salem.
Holding one of his precious ship models on his knee, old Messina would demand, “What’s the longest name of any line aboard, lubber?”
I would wrack my brain, go hot and cold, feel a flush of fever in my cheek as I fished for the proper answer. The old man’s anger was lightning let loose. The air of the quarter-deck hung about him still. I would stammer out the first rope that came to mind.
“No it ain’t, neither!” he would bellow, shaking his fist under my nose. “It’s the main t’gallant stu’ns’l boom-tricing line. And don’t you fergit it the next time I asks you, or I’ll scalp you like a bloomin’ cannibule!”
When the Empress of Asia on her return from China, carrying a cargo worth five hundred thousand dollars, went down off the Horn with all hands, my father was a ruined man. He was a merchant and the cargo had been his private venture. He never recovered from the blow. A year later, when I was fourteen, he died, leaving my mother and me with scarce enough to keep body and soul together. My mother gave music lessons and finally was forced to take a few paying guests into our home. But even this proved insufficient to our needs. It was up to me to do something to swell the family income.
Naturally I looked toward the sea. My mother, with the memory of the Empress of Asia fresh in her mind, begged me not to think of sail. My father had friends among the shipbuilders, so it was upon them that I cast my eye.
Gold had been struck in California. Around the Horn, over mountains and prairies, people were swarming. Ninety-odd thousand of them on the Pacific Coast were clamoring for food, for clothing, for the necessities of existence. The long-neglected shipyards came to life, while new ones sprang up with mushroom growth on the shores of Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. In the harbor of East Boston there was an unbroken line of yards stretching from Jeffries Point to Chelsea Bridge. Humming with industry they were, in answer to the call of the Gold Coast. Flour was bringing $40.00 a barrel; sugar $4.00 a pound; shoes were selling at $45.00 a pair, and laudanum at $1.00 a drop. The miners could wash from 100 to 1000 dollars worth of gold dust in a day, and often the profits from one voyage of a fast clipper would pay for the original cost of the ship.
At the foot of Border Street, Donald McKay had his shipyard. Donald McKay … there’s magic in the name! He was a young man at that time; not more than thirty-seven or -eight, I would say, but already his name was upon every tongue. It’s the necessities of an age that produce the men it needs. Donald McKay was one of those by whom a period in history is remembered. John Griffiths of New York started the ball a-rolling with the Sea Witch, the first true clipper. Thacher Magown of Mystic River fame crowded close upon his heels.
But it was McKay who carried shipbuilding onward to new heights. Creative artist and master engineer he was; a dreamer, too, but with the drive of energy to bring his dreams to reality. Even the names of his ships quicken the blood and conjure up a vision before the eye: Staghound, Lightning, Westward Ho, Sovereign of the Seas, Flying Cloud … these were but a few of the sixty or more that stood to his final credit.
Many times I had heard my father speak of him with admiration. Only the old die-hards were set against the man: turning a ship’s bows inside out wasn’t natural in a ship, they maintained. And at first it looked as if they were right. The clippers did drive themselves under until their commanders learned to crowd most of their canvas on the main and mizzen. Then the records began to give the lie to the old men’s croaking. In Topliff’s News Room the Marine Intelligence column of the Transcript published Arrivals and Clearances that confounded the wiseacres. China and back within six months! Ridiculous. But true. Ships that averaged, if the Transcript didn’t lie, 15¾ knots an hour. Well, muttered the die-hards, you couldn’t believe everything you saw in print. But the old order was changing. Men were talking speed—speed in terms of dollars.
I determined to try to see Donald McKay. That afternoon as I made my way to Border Street, the wharves were humming with activity despite the biting December air. News had just been signaled from Telegraph Hill that a clipper was in sight, Boston bound. Men were grouped on the street corners, speculating as to her ownership, laying bets on her speed, her cargo. Clerks poked their heads out of countinghouse windows; spyglasses were trained to eastward. It was a scene that I knew and loved. Vessels were moored at the very doors of the warehouses, discharging their cargoes or lading for the far places of the world. Clippers and brigs and barkentines shoved at one another, the arrogant angle of their sprits jutting up across the street as high as the third story of the storehouses. I saw the house-flag of Enoch Train’s packets fluttering its white diamond on a red ground. Here was the sea come to meet the land and declare a truce. Here men made ready to have their business upon the great waters.
I hurried along Border Street, past Central Square. There they were—the McKay yards! I turned in at the entrance to a fenced-in area and my ear was assailed by the whir of saws, the ring of axes, the fused sounds of wood and metal in the shaping. A smell of fresh-sawed pine and oak smote my nostrils. Outside the frame building that housed Donald McKay’s drafting room and mold loft, I paused. It took some courage to enter. Once inside it wasn’t so bad. I looked at the stool perchers bent over their ledgers, and took heart. Pale men they were, existing on the salt edge of adventure. Nothing scary about them.
The prestige of my father’s name turned the trick. I was permitted to climb a narrow wooden stair leading to the drafting room above. The sanctum sanctorum. I lifted my fist to knock. I stopped. Behind that door Donald McKay was at work. I realized that I was trembling. Swallowing hard, I thumped the panel.
“Come in!” boomed a voice.
I opened the door and entered. In the gloom of the vast room all I could see for a moment was the square of light where the window gave on the shipyards. A man was bent over a drafting table. My eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom, took in many things at once. A high-ceilinged room with rows of shelves lining the walls; in a far corner a cherry-bellied stove glowed to defeat the outer chill. There was a clutter of nautical paraphernalia everywhere: a model clipper with false gunports painted along her sides; a mounted shark whose slim hull was marked off in geometric sections; samples of copper and wood and sailcloth; whale-oil lamps above the drafting table; a set of bellows worked by pedals that could create a miniature wind of hurricane hazard from any point of the compass; wooden lift-models and mechanical drawings; many strange sea-going devices that would have baffled a landlubber.
I started to speak, then stopped. My attention had been caught and riveted by the model of a ship cradled in its wooden brace. Clean-lined and eager as a greyhound she was; no trailboards, no cathead carving, no ornamental barnacles of any sort. She had the lean belly of a sprinter, and from the sudden sharpness of her stem the figure of an angel rose with trumpet poised, like a herald of good tidings; and in the uprush of the figure I could almost hear the ringing gladness of the trumpet blast! Here was the core and essence of a ship, a ship to carry herself with pride before the wind. From truck to keel, from rudderpost to jib boom, she was a miracle of proportion and grace. In the shaft of cold sunlight that slanted through the window she seemed almost to breathe, and I caught my own breath in wonder.
I felt as if all the sinews of my body had been plucked by an unseen hand and set a-humming, as a vessel’s cordage hums to a sudden-bursting gale. I wanted to shout and sing, but my tongue was silent. Only a model of a ship. But enough. She was beauty moving toward perfection.
Thus I first saw the Flying Cloud.
Aye, as if
