The Last Days of the Coriolanus by Fred T. Comee It was early in the evening of July 17 , 1929. The iron bark Coriolanus swung to her anchor off the Hen and Chickens buoy, five weeks behind her intended schedule. That sultry morning she had taken aboard the last of her passengers and cargo at a wharf in New Bedford , and the tug had come about noon . Now she awaited a fair wind for the start of her voyage as a packet to the Cape Verde Islands, this time to her home port of Praia on the island of Sii.o Tiago. It was destined to be her last voyage. Foremost among the passengers was Norman Matson, a thirty-five-year-old author from Provincetown , Massachusetts , who had booked passage for seventy dollars. He had been given the best cabin , the Captain's cabin in the original scheme of things and now that of the old bark 's owner, Senhor Abilio Macedo , when he was aboard. In the course of the voyage, Matson was to write a book , The Log of the Coriolanus, which was published in 1930, depicting this passage and his shipmates. Provincetown, where Matson lived , is situated at the bitter end of Cape Cod some fifty miles east of Boston-a natural port of refuge for ships seeking shelter from the gales of the North Atlantic . During the late 1920s and early 1930s when I was growing up there , schooners in the coastwise trade frequented its waters and almost every winter saw at least one shipwreck. Commercial fishing and summer visitors were the main means of livelihood , supplemented for some with furtive rum running. Fascination with ships and the sea and the vanishing days of sail, was for me, inescapable. Provincetown had been a haven for artists and writers since the early 1900s, and during my youth Norman Matson was a familiar figure along its narrow streets. But I was unaware of his seagoing adventure or of the Coriolanus until I discovered and read his book in the local library. Christmas of 1934 brought me Alan Villiers's Last of the Wind Ships and from it I learned that the Coriolanus was laid up at Bath, Maine. Early in 1935 I contrived a trip "down east'' to find her. An apparent derelict, she lay in a dilapidated slip near the Bath Iron Works, her fore topmast and everything above it missing, together with the uppermost yards on the mainmast, and her decks splintering and cluttered with debris. In the summer of 1965 when I was living in the San Francisco area, a local paper reported the 33ft sloop Spirit, out of the St. Francis Yacht Club, as having sailed to Newport , Rhode Island , to participate in the Bermuda Race that year. Among her crew was a Norman Matson of Sausalito, California. Investigation revealed him to be a nephew of the elder Norman Matson-the son of hi s brother Alfred . I obtained the author's address in New York and wrote to him , recalling Provincetown days , expressing my long-ago enjoyment of his book and asking if he had taken any pictures during his time in the Coriolanus . That fall his wife replied that Norman had died on October 18th and that my letter, which he had been unable to answer, had given him great pleasure. He had taken pictures and when she could find them among his things she would send them to me.
* * * * * Above left, one of seventy-four cars brought to the Cape Verdes from New Bedford. Seven were carried as deck cargo. At left, Capt. Piedade at the helm. Matson noted in his log on July 23, 1929: " Now we go SE by S, a fair wind, constant and strong. The mainsail, willing to take all the pull, must be drawn up by her starboard corner so that the foresail may do her share."
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