The Seafaring Tapleys Of Brooksville Adventure on the high seas

Adventure on the high seas by Jeffrey Bradley T he century that followed the Revolutionary War established Maine’s world-phenomenon maritime prowess and the long and storied lineage of great sailing ships and their able masters.

Back then trade routes stretching from the Far East to New York or California might take months to navigate. Even “fast” passenger packets between the east and west coasts of America took weeks for having to round Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. Profits depended on speed, so fast “clipper” ships came into vogue that could cross the Atlantic in a “blistering” thirteen days! When the Suez Canal opened in 1849 bigger, slower ships used this shortcut to deliver more goods in slightly less time.

But until the opening of the Panama Canal in the early 1900s and the advent of steam a sailing voyage could still take the better part of a year. That much time at sea increased the odds of natural disaster — rogue waves, entangling seaweed, storms, shoals and shipwreck all took their toll.

Many a ship just disappeared without ever leaving a trace. But there was a romance about it. Standing on the heaving deck of a stout-hulled oaken ship heeling before the wind while leaving a hissing white wake with the rigging thrumming under a leaden cloud-scudded sky was, it was said, to feel God’s own pulse beating against the planking.

In Brooksville the adventurous Tapley clan heeded this wild call. Seven of eight brothers went down to the sea in ships to become Master Mariners and live adventurously before the mast.

A few led fairly mild careers. Capt. Abram, for instance, commanded brigs and schooners before retiring to Hampden as manager of the Knickerbocker Ice Company on the Penobscot River,

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while brother Capt. John engaged sedately in the West Indies trade — although his son, Capt. James H. Tapley, liked to fondly recall his “adventure” with a German submarine off the coast during World War One.

Some lived more precariously. Capt. Jerome moved quickly up the ranks and was in command of the David Wasson when a tidal wave struck in 1873 and disabled the vessel east of Bermuda. With no word of their whereabouts, they were eventually given up for lost — until turning up four months later in Montevideo! A British tea merchant had apparently found and “brought them hither,” but getting back to Maine first involved a transatlantic crossing that added months to their schedule. Joy on returning home was tempered by the loss of local crewman Wassie Jones, washed overboard earlier and drowned. Later Capt. Jerome again found himself battling the elements, this time off the Madeira Islands when a fierce gale drove his ship the Nellie Clifford ashore. Aground and dismasted, he finagled new spars, sails and rigging aloft and still delivered his cargo on time. A faded collection of photographs shows a jumbled wreckage of ships left behind by the storm.

Older brother Capt. Thomas was also stranded mid-ocean when a sudden squall swept his vessel. With Yankee ingenuity and the materials at hand he retrofitted his ship and entered port with all goods intact. In keeping with family tradition, Ira, his son, became a captain in the Old Dominion Line aboard the Princess Anne, largest ship in the fleet.

Others were not so fortunate. Capt. William commanded the schooner Mattie Holmes without mishap for years but his two captain sons met untimely ends. The elder, Angier, perished piloting a government vessel when a gas buoy exploded; younger son Robert died suddenly when serving aboard the 25

American Hawaiian Line. Then there was Capt. George. He went to sea at age thirteen and lived to be 90, piloting schooners, brigs and ships before retiring in 1894 and logging an incredible nineteen voyages to the West Indies, crossing the Atlantic twenty-six times, circling the globe four times, doubling Cape Horn off South Africa nine times and crossing the Equator seventeen times! Then tragedy struck. In 1869 in command of the bark Ironsides and accompanied by his wife — not an unusual occurrence given the time spent at sea — somewhere off the west coast of South America she gave birth to a daughter and died. Her body was taken ashore in Peru and buried. Continuing the trek overland and on foot, when alas; the babe died, too. He pressed indomitably on, packing his little girl in a keg of rum then interring her in the family plot then returning all the way to Peru to fetch his poor wife’s body home! What feelings accompanied (cont. on page 26)

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these macabre tasks one can only imagine.

Eldest brother Capt. Robert had an easier, if somewhat more lengthy, time of it. Sailing the Hattie E. Tapley (built for the brothers in Bangor in 1862), he made passage for Japan with an even dozen Tapley menfolk aboard. On the manifest — an organ bound for a missionary in Nagasaki. After cruising the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, in navigating the treacherous Straits of Java during a dense fog they “made breakers” and escaped only narrowly by dint of “lively work.” Nearly half a year later they finally raised Japan. The return leg included stops at remote flyspeck Ascension and St. Helena Islands before reaching their New York destination in 1880 — after some 700 days at sea! Whether that organ ever reached the missionary in Nagasaki goes unreported. (Thanks to the Brooksville Historical Society’s “Traditions and Records Collection 1935-36” sourced online at http://genealogytrails.com/maine/han- cockco/misc_shipsandsailors.html for assisting in this article.)

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by Brian Swartz W ounded twice during a suicidal charge during the Civil War, John H. Douglass came home to Bar Harbor and opened one of the town’s first hotels.

Born in Montrose, Scotland in 1799, William Stuart Douglass emigrated to the United States in 1815. He settled in Maine and married Priscilla Doane, born in Bucksport in 1805.

The couple lived in Northport when a son, John H. Douglass, was born on October 7, 1840. When he was 12, Douglass “commenced … to make my home in the Town of Eden on Mt. Desert Island,” he wrote in 1910.

“My parents being very poor, I at the age of 13 … started to go to sea, as cook of a fishing schooner,” he recalled. The work paid him “5.00 per month” plus “my board” and “lodging.”

Douglass remained a sailor until spring 1862. He married Margarette Higgins of Eden on April 19. They would have 10 children, of whom six would survive to adulthood.

That summer Maine organized five infantry regiments, numbered 16 to 20 and all destined for battlefield glory. Douglass joined a so-called “Ellsworth company,” commanded by Captain Zemro Smith, that became Company C, 18th Maine Infantry Regiment.

Commanded by Colonel Daniel Chaplin, the regiment mustered at Bangor on August 21, 1862. “On the 27th of … August we left Bangor, Maine for Washington D.C. for further orders,” Douglass recalled.

Then ten companies and one thousand men strong, and the 18th Maine went into the forts protecting Washington, D.C. “After 3 months delay … we were made into the 1st Maine” Heavy Artillery, according to Douglass. The transformation added eight companies and 800 men to the regiment, and the soldiers trained on the siege guns and other artillery in the D.C. forts. The book The First Maine Heavy Artillery by Horace H. Shaw and Charles J. House, describes Douglass as “m.” (married) and 21 when he joined the 18th Maine, a name almost forgotten (cont. on page 28)

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by history after the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery went to war in May 1864.

To reinforce the battle-damaged Army of the Potomac, Major General Ulysses Grant summoned several heavy artillery regiments from their District billets. “In May 1864, we left the defenses of Washington D.C. on board of a U.S. Transport & went down to Bellsplain [Belle Plain] Landing” on the Potomac River in Virginia, Douglass remembered long afterwards.

The 1st MHA lads “went on shore & started across country to Fredericksburg,” he wrote. “Our first engagement against canon (sic) and Bullets was” at Harris Farm on May 19, and “we lost heavily in Men & officers here. I had 3 bullets cut my clothing, but no blood brought in this Battle.”

Moving south with the Army of the Potomac, the 1st MHA crossed the James River on a pontoon bridge and “went in[to] camp for a day or two of (cont. from page 27)

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very much needed rest,” Douglass recalled. “We had to go out foraging for something to eat. We lived on Old Dry corn on the cobb for a while.”

Then the regiment gained immortality outside Petersburg on June 18, 1864. Ordered to charge across open ground to capture Confederate fortifications, the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery advanced in three lines “about 4 o’clock … with 900 able-bodied young men,” Douglass noted.

Shredded by enemy fire, “600 of our Regt fell dead & wounded in the charge,” he wrote.

“I got up within 20 yds of the forts and was shot with two Bullets – one through the right arm above the elbow and another Bullet through my left shoulder. This Bullet broke up my collar bone, split off some of my shoulder blade [,] passing out just clearing my backbone and through everything,” Douglass wrote.

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Evacuated to an Army hospital and then a hospital ship, he sailed with “some 700 badly wounded boys … down the James River and out to Sea bound North.” At 4 p.m., June 29, eleven days after “I received my wounds in front of Petersburgh (sic) … I had my wounds dressed” at a military hospital in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Douglass recalled.

Mustered out on January 10, 1865, Douglass later served as a lightkeeper at Goose Rock Lighthouse, located off North Haven. Dissatisfied with the job, he returned to Eden and built and operated the three-story Atlantic House, “situated in a park [on Atlantic Avenue], and free from dust,” according to a period advertisement.

Located a five-minute walk from the “Steamboat depot,” the hotel offered “croquet and other grounds” and represented a “superior chance for Surf Bathing, and all the privileges found at

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the other Hotels,” the ad noted.

The hotel opened on July 4, 1873. Unfortunately, a “fire … said to have been caused by children at play with matches in the stable” flattened the Atlantic House in late August 1873,” reported The New York Times. “Two sick guests were removed to safety,” and “the exertions of the guests and islanders” prevented the fire from spreading to “several adjoining houses.” The loss was calculated to be $3,000. Douglass had $1,500 in insurance coverage.

According to the January 6, 1917 edition of the Bar Harbor Times, Douglass “was one of the pioneer hotel keepers in Bar Harbor.” He rebuilt the Atlantic House “on the site of the present Louisburg [Hotel],” the paper indicated, and the newer Atlantic House “is part of the Louisburg structure at the present day.”

Margarette Douglass died in Bar Harbor on March 2, 1887. John Douglass married Lorinda “Rena” Anderson in Ellsworth on April 13, 1888, and two of their five children reached adulthood.

A Mason and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, Douglass moved with Rena to Longmont, Colorado in 1906 and died there on Monday, January 1, 1917. He was survived by Rena and seven children.

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