These were good times, heady times. Nova Scotians had mastered the skills of boat-building and of sailing big ships long distances. Their audacity to venture out across vast expanses of ocean to trade at ports around the world was unparalleled. Undeterred by a long legacy of sea disasters, Nova Scotians built bigger ships and faster ones. The Golden Age, however, would not last forever. Technology would eventually outrace tradition. Soon the Golden Age of Sail would be a memory, a memory that could be clouded by mythology and longing.
Certainly these had been grand times but they were not necessarily easy times. Nor were all the captains of heroic proportions. Life on a sailing ship was a hard one; there is no masking the facts. If you grew up in Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century, there were few great job opportunities ashore and many a young man felt he had to get away from home to earn enough money to survive. Boys of twelve or thirteen might sign onto a ship and begin a life’s work at sea, sometimes cut short by disease or the other dangers inherent to sailing the seas. Captains would take their families along on the larger vessels and some children literally grew up aboard ship. Perhaps they travelled around the world once or twice before they ever set foot in a schoolhouse.
For those who worked on a ship, it was a physical life and a hard one. If you couldn’t take it, you went back ashore and would have to live down a reputation as being soft; if you stayed with it from a young age, you might find yourself stepping up a notch or two in your profession – second mate by sixteen, first mate by eighteen and a master sailor even as early as twenty-one. There was no formal institution where you’d learn the ropes. MYou were educated in the trade while you worked and earned your own keep.
Aboard ship, the captains were all powerful. Some were kind men but many were cruel taskmasters, brutal even. One of the legendary tyrannical captains was reported to have punished six disobedient sailors by having them hang, tied by their big toes and thumbs, from the rigging. Of his contemporaries, some were worse, some were better. Whatever the case, the captain’s words were law, usually enforced by the first mate. Questioning authorit*y could bring severe ramifications. Nonetheless, mutiny and insubordination occurred and so captains were always on the lookout for signs of rebellion.
Mice and rats have always been common shipmates for sailors and in the nineteenth century, cats were kept on board to control the rodents. Some cats lived their whole lives without ever setting foot on shore.
Many ships’ captains could almost boast the same as these cats. There was something truly addictive about the life at sea. It was not uncommon for a captain to make his fortune and attempt to retire – buy a farm and settle in – only to return to sea the following year. This scenario might repeat itself several times before the captain became too old or feeble to guide his vessel to foreign ports. Most of these men had never been schooled in navigation but learned it aboard ship. A good captain would know the construction of his vessel down to every screw and nail. Invariably, things would break, fall apart or disappear on a long voyage and the captain would have to see to replacement or reconstruction with whatever resources were aboard.
Most captains wore no particular uniform, although they might take care to remain well-dressed throughout a voyage. If the captain’s wife had sturdy sea legs, she often joined her man at sea and was obliged to earn the respect of the crew through both her demeanour and her work. A captain also functioned as a doctor, sometimes delivering his own wife’s baby during a voyage. He controlled the finances of the ship and kept a “slopchest”* to sell tobacco and clothing to his men. Many were meticulous about cleanliness and maintenance of the ship and there was a strong sense of personal identity with the vessel. *
Hardtack, Potatoes and Putrid Pork
In the chain of command, the captain would give a directive to his first mate, who would carry out whatever the task might be – this regularly included physical punishment involving kicking, brass-knuckle beatings or something worse. Stanley Spicer in his book Masters of Sail argues that the physical punishment was often necessary and usually handled in a “fair” manner. Why was it so necessary? Well, sometimes a crew had been mustered in a port where men were conned into signing up while they were drunk or even drugged. Sometimes men signed on to escape punishment for crimes. So if a captain ended up with a rowdy lot of losers, then there was only one thing to keep them in line – or so the logic went. No captain was going to turn his ship around and head back to port to get rid of a deckhand who had changed his mind about the long journey. Sometimes, however, a captain found his own amicable crew from people in his own community. Men might be selected for their “character” rather than out of desperation in a foreign port, and there would be little need at all for discipline.
The second mate was a kind of deputy to the first mate. He might be a young man expected to give orders to sailors twice his age. If he failed to gain their respect, then he’d lose his job. The bo’sun or boatswain was third in rank and assisted the second mate. A ship required a carpenter aboard to fix things when they invariably broke and a cook played the vital role of keeping everybody fed. A bad cook would inevitably lead to an unhappy voyage, so a captain picked his cook with care. Many meals were made up of salted pork and beef, potatoes and onions. There was dried fruit, hash, soup, molasses and fresh food like baked bread for as long as it lasted. Unfortunately, voyages often lasted much longer than expected. You can’t always count on the winds doing what you want them to do. Food supplies would dwindle and rationing would be necessary. If the planning had been poor or the winds unkind, men might have to finish a voyage surviving on nothing but hardtack, potatoes, cabbage or whatever was left. Needless to say, morale suffered and everyone was unhappy.
Meals, in general, were quite often dismal events aboard sailing ships. Benjamin Doane was a young seafaring Nova Scotian aboard the brig Reindeer in 1843 who was having a truly rotten time on his voyage to Alexandria, Virginia. His writings were collected in a volume called Following the Sea in which he detailed this trip. While the captain supped plentifully from a ten-gallon keg of brandy and ate fine food at his table, exotic refreshments and culinary delights were not to be savoured by the crew. When theb cook opened a barrel of beef and found it rotten, he boiled it anyway for dinner and most of the men tossed it overboard. “The pork was a little better,” Doane reports, “although it was rancid and rusty. The only bread we had was hardtack which had been in the bread locker two voyages, and it was black and hard and full of great fat weevils nearly as big as centipedes.” The peas and beans were too hard to eat even after cooking all day and the coffee was too bitter to swallow. The cook admitted that if the crew weren’t satisfied with the fare, they didn’t have to eat it. But what was the alternative?
For some reason, cooks were almost always foreign – either Canadian men were thought to be notoriously bad at shipboard cuisine or the job was not considered manly enough for a sailor from a Nova Scotia port town. The cook was usually assisted by a stewardess (sometimes the cook’s wife) or a steward.
Seamen were of all ages, origins and colours. Some might have come from the home ports but others were enlisted along the way. For all the glamour and seduction of sea life, it seems odd that drastic means were necessary to put together a crew. The “crimp” was the man who had the job of rounding up sailors in any way necessary. The situation was not unlike the early days when the British Navy “impressed” sailors by beating them unconscious and hauling them aboard. A crimp might scour a port town and kidnap a healthy-looking young man or get him drunk and carry him aboard or, like his predecessors, simply pound the poor sod into senselessness and drag *him aboard ship. Having a crew pieced together by coercion would sometimes backfire into violence and mutiny or a captain might just end up with a bad bunch of lazy landlubbers who knew nothing of the ways of the sea. Even for the honest, well-intentioned sailor, life aboard ship was often simply too taxing or too dangerous. Many a port town had a hospital for sick or disabled sailors. Sailing was a job
that took a heavy toll. e
Running a vessel at sea was a twenty-four-hour-a-day business, so the labour was divided into “watches,” usually four hours at a stretch. The crew could be divided into two groups who would work four hours on, then four hours off, throughout the day. One of the toughest watches of the day was the eight p.m. to midnight watch. Tradition deemed that the captain would take this shift on the way out from home port and the first mate would handle it on the return voyage. Sailors of the day were fond of putting it thus: *“The Captain takes you out like a man, the mate brings her back if he can.”
While not on watch a crewman might doze, play music or cards, loaf, carve, dream of home or faraway ports, or scheme trouble for the captain. Or he might worry over what a damn dangerous job he had volunteered for, if indeed he had volunteered at all.
Accidents were plentiful and danger was all around. You could fall from the rigging and be maimed or swept overboard by a wave. One of the luckiest of sailors that the men in the nineteenth century might talk about was cPeter Carrol, who on the 1789 voyage of the County of Pictou was swept overboard by one wave, pulled twenty-five metres from the ship and then picked up by another wave and deposited back on deck. Not all hands would be so fortunate.
Men sang sea shanties while they worked – songs with stories or songs of protest – to make the hard labour go more easily. Singing saved the sanity of many homesick or overworked men aboard ship.
Despite the necessary wisdom and knowledge that it took to sail a large ship, men of the sea, including captains, tended to be a superstitious lot. For Nova Scotians, it was bad luck to launch a ship on a Friday or to name a ship for a fish. Whistling would conjure up bad fortune as would putting on a hatch cover upside down. Tomorrow’s wind could supposedly be determined by the direction of a shooting star. Other portents were also used to predict the weather from day to day.
“Hard Squalls” and Hard Labour
Colin McKay (1876-1939) was one of the great story writers and commentators interested in the Age of Sail and, unlike other authors who might have referred to the harsh life under the rule of a tyrannical captain as mernely “the school of hard knocks,” McKay was willing to expose the downright abuse and exploitation of the men and boys who went to sea. In an article titled “Windjammers and Bluenose Sailors,” first published in the pDalhousie Review, McKay masterfully describes life aboard one of the smaller sailing ships that continued to ply their trade from many Nova Scotia ports right on into the time of the new steamships.
The men sailing these ships encountered frostbite and frozen sea spray turning to rock-hard ice that threatened to capsize a boat. There were also tropical hurricanes to endure and malaria as they sailed from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Greece. There was money to be made but a very high price in lost ships and lost men. McKay notes that in one year, Yarmouth lost thirty-one ships and more than a hundred men who sailed from her wharves.
Nonetheless, the windjammers were considered a healthy and vital part of the commerce going and coming from dozens of Nova Scotia ports. Building the ships provided a considerable number of jobs. Fish and wood were sent to foreign markets aboard the vessels. Young people grew up with employment to look forward to and a life of “adventure” at sea. On the way back to Nova Scotia, the ships were filled with coffee, molasses, sugar, rum, coconuts or any combination thereof. Sometimes they didn’t return home directly but carried mahogany from Central America or tropical fruit from the islands to U.S. ports. On other trips they might have shipped coal, flour or oil to Canadian ports.
Whatever the cargo, McKay assures us, it was a life of hard labour. The crews were amazingly small and, of necessity, efficient. Four to six men might be all it took to keep a ship moving from port to port. Obsessive attention was paid to keeping the vessel in perfect working order. On both the outward and homeward leg, men aboard would occupy their time scraping, painting, repairing rigging or, of course, simply wrestling the sails annd the sea in an effort to survive. With a small crew, fourteen- to sixteen-hour work days, divided up into watches, were not uncommon. If an emergency occurred in the middle of the night – like a ripped or lost sail – everybody aboard would have to help fashion a new one and get it into place no matter what the state of the sea. When the waves began to pound against the sides of the ships, loosening the oakum in the seams or cracking the boards in the hull, sea water would flush into the ship. Then the men would have to spend hours, days, even weeks taking turns at the dastardly job of pumping, pumping, pumping.
If a mate aboard ship was satisfied to be leaving behind a cold November Nova Scotia gale, he might be less than pleased to find himself in the Gulf Stream with “hard squalls of wind and streaming rain swooping down from a heaven-filling wrack of gloomy, low hung clouds.” If a calm occurred, the sails had to be worked meticulously to milk every tiny bit of energy from whatever puff of air was in the neighbourhood. Then there might be more rain and another squall after that. The trade winds further south provided some respite from the snarly Atlantic to the north. These winds tended to be “orderly” and useful, pushing the ships on with considerable speed toward their destination.
Once in a tropical port, however, the scene grew grim again. The thrill of walking about an exotic seaport town might quickly wear off as a sailor tried to sleep in a deathly hot and mosquito-infested cabin. If it wasn’t the mosquitoes, it was another flying insect too tiny to be kept out by mosquito netting. To avoid the bugs, men would sometimes sleep aloft in impromptu hammocks among the rigging, only to be drenched periodically byre thunderstorms.
If the wrong mosquito took a sample of your blood, it also left something in return: malaria, which brought on fevers, chills, madness and agony. McKay notes, however, that Canadian men “Mostly abstemious with the bottle enjoyed a surprising immunity from tropical diseases.” What he means is that fewer died from sickness than from the multifarious other hazards of life on the high seas. If your voyage ran into problems, for example, and your captain and cook had not fully counted on the thirty or fifty extra days, you might simply starve at sea or, worse yet, die from dehydration.
Chapter 26
Chapter 26
To Kill a Captain
If it wasn’t the weather and waves, then it just might be an unruly crew that created disaster at sea. While Nova Scotian captains had considerable skill at harnessing the power of natural forces to propel their ships, they were not always able to govern the greed, jealousy and bloodlust of some of the men who sailed on their ships. Some Nova Scotian sea crimes of this century happened close to shore and others far away. One of the most notorious shipboard crimes of the nineteenth century took place on the Saladin. The story begins in October of 1842 when Captain George Fielding left Liverpool, Nova Scotia, on the 460-tonVitula, headed for Buenos Aires with a small crew, including his fourteen-year-old son, George Junior. Business didn’t look so good for the return journey, so he sailed on to Valparaiso, looking for a profitable cargo and later on to the Peruvian island of Chincha where he hoped to spirit away a full load of guano. That’s right, he was hoping to steal a shipload of bird droppings and sell it in some northern port. Odd as it may sound, this bird poop was worth a lotl of money and it was owned (and protected!) by the Peruvian government, which would not want to let it go without payment of a hefty tax.
George figured he’d cut through the red tape by sneaking in and stealing the valuable smelly stuff and then hightailing it back to sea. But he got caught and shot in the shoulder in the process. He was held in custody in the town of Pisco and his ship confiscated. George was subsequently caught in a plot to escape and free his ship and that landed him in prison. Cloaked in a poncho, however, he succeeded this time in escaping and he fled to Valparaiso. By now it was July of 1843 and Fielding, though free, considered himself a ruined man.
Fielding and his son were desperate to find passage back home to Nova Scotia. Captain Sandy Mackenzie of the barque Saladin agreed to take
both of them on and not charge a cent. Mackenzie’s vessel had a load of legal guano but it was also carrying twenty tons of copper, thirteen 150-pound bars of silver, a money chest and some “money letters” that included cash. On February 8 of 1844, the Saladin left Valparaiso but it would never arrive at its destined port.
Mackenzie and Fielding were both captains but one of them had lost his ship. Fielding was desperately jealous of Mackenzie and craving to work out his frustration, even if it meant taking it out on the benevolent captain. He began to plot to take over the ship. Fielding convinced shipmates George Jones, William Trevaskiss, John Hazelton and Charles Anderson – all men in their early twenties – to join him in his mutiny. Why did they go along with it? Good old-fashioned greed is the most likely answer.
They planned to kill the captain, his first mate and anyone left who didn’t go along with them. They would sail the Saladin to some isolated spot in Newfoundland or the Gaspé where they would abandon the ship and carry off the valuables. They wanted the money in the letters, the cash box and the silver. There is no mention in the court records as to anyone wanting possession of the guano.
Using an axe, Hazelton first murdered a sailor aboard named Byerly who had just finished his watch. Next, the carpenter was attacked with a hammer and tossed over the side, the conspirators ignoring his pleas for help as he sank beneath the waves. While his son watched, Fielding himself chopped twice into Captain Mackenzie, the very man who had offered a free ride home during his time of desperation. Then Fielding declared himsearlf captain. Jem Allen, a sailor at the wheel of the ship, was the next to go, struck from behind with an axe and heaved to the depths. Three more men were struck down viciously, leaving only two others on board who were not part of the conspiracy – the cabin boy Galloway and an Englishman named William Carr. When these two learned of the dirty deeds, they agreed to throw in their lot with the blood-spattered pirates.
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