To see those waves coming astern was enough to give one heart fa ilure. So, we looked ahead instead. It was hell on the hi gh seas, and how high! " The yacht was without li ghts becau se waves constantly extingui shed the lanterns , and the food mostly spoiled. "We were getting weak fro m lack of food and loss of sleep, and we knew that the last time the Shamrock went back home it took 46 days. We decided it was better to drown than starve; so we wo ul d dri ve no matter what came . ... Why she d idn't break in two, I don't know. It wou ldn ' t have taken us long to get to the bottom because we were half way there in the trough of those waves ." The Captain ho lds the listener transfix ed. It 's as if a half a century never had intervened. Once again, yesterday is today in the o ld sail orman's eye. Be loved Exy clatters away in a comer, answering a stack of letters and responding aloud to an occas ional question: "Exy, how do you spell Preussen ? ... Exy, how do yo u spell Mariehamn?" The Windjammers He's te lling of the great stee l windjammers, so called at first as an insul t by the scornfu l steam ship men they challenged in the ir heyday ("Look at 'em jammin ' inta th ' wind with their ya rds braced all aro und 'ginst the backstays"). But the sobriquet " wi ndjammer" soon was to become the laudation , if not the glory, assumed yet today, though inappropriately , by impertinent li ttle sail shi ps seeking summertime passengers. Captain Joh nson relives the 93 wild days that began at Hamburg on Friday, 13 December 1929 in the four-masted bark Peking, " the shi p that had tremendous effect on my life. " For starte rs, on departu re, with some of the superstitious crew fearing the worst, she walked into one of the worst storms in years lashi ng the Chan ne l, a ki ller that sent 69 strong ships to the bottom. She was bound forTalcahuano , Chile with general cargo. (Johnson's book about th is voyage, The Peking Battles Cape Horn , is available from NMHS. The film is available from Mystic Seaport Mu seum , on videotape.) Swaying crazi ly in 300-foot arcs 175 feet up on the royal yard as the Peking ro lled down 45 degrees, her decks and struggli ng men awash in tons of cold, swirling sea ("the grandest sight I ever looked on") and nearly being swept away by a rog ue wave while shooting hi s Kodak camera from the chart house roof, the 24-year o ld Hadley farm boy made an epic fi lm record as " she bashed to windward and crashed her way westward- the wrong way-through a pairof Cape Hom Ri p Snorte rs." Captain Johnson lived again every thri ll of that day with the glass dow n to 28. 19 inches and seas as high as 50 feet sending spray and scud streaki ng over the upper tops ' I yards. He again saw new heavy canvas boom away in shreds as three quarters of an inch thi ck steel wire parted with the sound of a cannon bl ast; he heard again the crashi ng wave that bent in a 20-foot long section of the Peking's stee l hul l, and he remembered agai n that she had logged on ly I 0 miles, Sunday to Wednesday. And he recalled the sadness he fe lt when told that the Peking had lost five sailors overboard on her homeward run. He sm iles now abo ut the cond itions: "The turkey got sick so we ate that. Then one of the hens got sick and we ate that . ... And the men were wet all the time, and no heat. But nobody caught cold. You never get a chance to get warm so you fe lt good all the ti me." The o ld mari ner glowed with unabashed fondness for the Peking's master, Captai n Jurs. "T hat master of sai l and super expert on Cape Hom , was the finest professional man in the world ... it was his 56th trip aro und the Hom ." Jurs's seamanshi p and rugged di scipline (better known to old tars as the
8
Exy at th e helm of Warwick Tompkins's old schooner Wande r Bird sailing San Francisco Bay in the fall of" 1983. Thev 111e1 a/ward the \"essel in Europe. some 52 years earlier. Photo . .li111 Linderman .
rope's end) kept all in order, Captain Johnson recall s. " When the mate got tired whacking them (the ship 's boys) he'd send them up the masthead while he rested hi s arm . And when he got tired chasing them around the deck, he'd set the skipper's dog after them, biting, to keep them running." He spoke also of other great ships, the fiv e- masted bark Potosi, which once ran from Hamb urg to Chile in a record 66 days, spreading, like the Peking, up to 55,000 square feet of sa il ; and the greatest of them all - the 440-foot, 11 , 150-ton five-masted ship Preussen, carry ing no less than 59,000 sq uare fee t of canvas. He told how Preussen was lost needless ly in 19 10 when a steamer, mi sjudgi ng Preussen' s great speed ran across her bows, and smashed away her headgear, leav ing her helpless, unable to ail off from the Dover cliffs where she broke into pieces. Thus perished the pride of Ferdinand Lae isz's great German fl eet of Flying P Liners, so named because every ship 's name began with the letter P . These Flying P Liners, along with Finnish Captain Gustaf Erikson's fl eet of second-hand square riggers, of Mariehamn , Finland, were indeed the las t of the Cape Homers-the true w indj ammers that made a li ving lugging nitrate from South America to Europe through the earl y 1930s. " And the top thing was getting the right wife at the right time," the venerable Yankee had said. A Rochester NY nati ve,Electa Search, then 23, was that woman who, in 1931 , won this Yankee fa rm boy 's proposa l. They met in Le Havre when he was the mate of Wander Bird with Captain Tompkins, cruising European waters. With hi s proposal came marri age in 1932, a marriage before the mast, and a lifetime of high adventure, perhaps never again to be equalled in thi s age; a sailor 's job as second mate aboard thei r Yankees, scrubbing and chipping paint, nav igating, ri gg ing, and standing four-on four-off watches; as mother and teacher of the ir sons Arthur and Robert ("S he' d take them to the masthead and read to them of the great men of Greece and Rome, the ir legs dangling over"); and as the " we" in their co-authored e ight volumes . She smiles when asked if she minded be ing called " Mrs. Gulliver," "a feminine Marco Polo," or"Mrs. Zanzibar. " The appellations, she knows, SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1989