"A Living Connection"
The Chanty Movt: by John and
A Peking Hand Salutes His Ship by
Captain Irving M. Johnson
PHOTO BY JOEL GREENBERG
In 1987 the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City celebrated its twentieth anniversary. A high point of the year was the hauling out for bottom work of the museum's four-masted bark Peking. The work was undertaken by the Caddell Dry Dock and Repair Co., Inc., of Staten Island, which came into being in 1903 when sailing ships still crowded the port of New York. In that year, John B. Caddell, a shipbuilder from Nova Scotia, moved to New York and started in the drydock business at Pier 2 in Brooklyn's Erie Basin. The company passed to his son, Leroy W., in the 1930s, and thence to Leroy's son John B . Caddell, II, in 1967-the year South Street was founded. The picture of Peking towering above the floating drydock on Arthur Kill gave rise to this communication from our senior advisor, Irving Johnson, who shipped aboard her in 1929 for a voyage from Hamburg, Germany, to Talcahuano, Chile-a voyage well and truly told in his book Peking Battles Cape Horn, published by the NMHS. In 1975 I made a special trip to England when Peking was drydocked there in preparation for her crossing of the Atlantic to come to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York. The drydock company sent out a hurry call for rivetters and quickly rounded up some of the oldtimers, minimum age seventy-six. You should have seen those fellows proudly showing up the young squirts who couldn't do a proper rivetting job. Several yachtsmen , especially Americans, showed up at the dock exclaiming about that long flat run aft which made them feel she should be driven through a storm to the limit of any captain's daring. One thing we must always remember: 42
these ships in line of business always sailed in ballast or down to their line. Neither of these extreme conditions was ideal of course, but what a dream it would be to tum Captain Jurs loose on a yachting trip around Cape Hom , ballasted to his orders and furnished with a set of Hood sails! I suppose her displacement when loaded must have been close to 8,000 tons. I remember joining her in 1929 in Hamburg with a quick look aloft and then at a pair of hands that with other hands and no other power of any sort were expected to sail this monster ship the wrong way round the Hom . Now I live on a Massachusetts farm where I used to stand on my head on telephone poles , dreaming a make-believe that they were tall masts . The old books made it sound so romantic. I am so tickled that those telephone poles gave me the confidence and extraordinary pleasure to sail into the teeth of Cape Hom storms aboard the great bark. Another dream fulfilled , of course, was the round-the-world voyages aboard the Yankee rigged as a brigantine, especially fitted for conditions where one could still discover an uncharted island or witness a volcano erupting with no one but our ship's company within 100 miles, or rescue Pitcairn Islanders who had been shipwrecked and perform a marriage ceremony. Meeting Exy at exactly the right time in Le Havre where she came aboard the motorless German pilot schooner Wanderbird fulfilled a life I wouldn ' t exchange with anyone in the world. All these and many other experiences are a great satisfaction now. And it is a great satisfaction to know that the Peking is kept at South Street where she can be an inspiration to young men and women who dream of the challenge of the sea today. J,
J,
J,
While American tall ship gatherings have been emphasizing the size, scope and hardware of historical ships (how American!), The Press Gang have had the opportunity to witness quite a different emphasis on the maritime heritage in our last few singing tours in Europe . The cultural-and particularly the musicalside of life at sea has been an expanding focus over there . Sea chanty festivals by the fistful have been springing up all over Europe, in England , France, Belgium , the Netherlands , East Germany, Finland and Poland, among other countries. Here, the life of the sea and the culture and camaraderie of the sailor is the focus of popular interest while the ships themselves are the stages for the action. This puts the seafaring life a little more in perspective and, one suspects, more closely resembles the way it really was. We first stumbled on the European sea music scene in 1984 when Tony Davis , leader of the English folk institution, the Liverpool Spinners, invited The Press Gang to perform at the Cutty Sark Tall Ship Festival in Liverpool. The chanty festival was the cultural end of the 1984 tall ship race, and it featured dozens of grand mini-concerts, workshops and evening dances and skylarks for the literally millions of festiva l goers who jammed Merseyside. The festival ended as throngs of people two million strong lined both sides of the Mersey to sing the tall ship parade out to sea with "The Leaving of Liverpool '' led by the venerable chantymen Tony and Stan Hugill on BBC radio. Incredible! We have since been back twice more to British festivals at Liverpool , Bristol and the tall ship gathering at Newcastle '86. This summer, we had the privilege of being invited for ten days to Poland for Gdynia '87, along with Stan Hugill and a handful of other British performers. British and American enthusiasm for things maritime and historical, particularly music , pales beside that of the Poles. Festivals highlighting the " chanty movement,'' as they call it, attract thousands who compete in contests for the best work chanty group , best focsle singers , best original songwriters, best instrumentalists and so on, before audiences of tens of thousands more who jam the auditoriums and outdoor festival parks where the events take place. To the Poles , the music means a lot more than just a good time on a summer night, as it might elsewhere. They do this all year long, crowding into sea music clubs in the dark winter months for rounds of song swapping and honing of other niautical skills. In fact, one of the major ssea song festivals takes place in SEJ.A HJSTOR Y, WINTER 1987-88