Down to the Sea with Irving Johnson by William P. Coughlin
Route 47 winds down , cutting Hadley , Massachusetts roughly north to south. On this chill October morning, the grass is tan and encrisped and reddened leaves carpet the land. Hunch backed willows, rooted in the Connecticut River, drape monster shapes; beneath it all , black cows munch sociably in a corner of a partitioned field. Time-thinned gravestones-page markers in myriad yesterdays-fi le by at the townline; a dairy farm, si lo, red barn and all, looms on the horizon beyond sloping emerald pastures. Mitch 's Marina slips astern at a river bend , just as a familiar silhouette, a brigantine driving hard with everything drawing full and by, heaves into view. Aye, mate. She 's got the unmi stakable bearing of the old Yankee, two-masted out of Gloucester, Captai n Irving Johnson commandi ng, standing in from a thousand celebrated yesterdays. But in truth she's a painted image on the porch wall of a rambling white house at the river's edge, the homestead of Irvi ng M. and Electa Search Johnson, the natal place where 84 years ago, come this July Fourth , began the career of one of the sea's most remarkable sons. Thi s pl ace at 42 degrees, 30 minutes North Latitude; 72 degrees, 35 minutes West Longitude, lyi ng 100 miles from the nearest salt water is where Sailorman Johnson , Explorer Johnson , Adventurer John son, Wartime Daredevil Johnson, Writer, Teacher, Lecturer, and Inspirer of Thousands Johnson and Sea Captain Johnson was " led astray by Jack London , Conrad and all the rest. " It is where he answered the sea's first call. And , it 's where as a boy he learned to row retrieving logs and ferryi ng Smith and Mount Holyoke College g irls across the Connecticut, and secretl y built hi s body to Atlas proportions with the help of a mail order book, "Earl Liederman 's Speci al Introductory Offer to Build Your Body. Only $8," and then practiced for a lifetime of masthead gales, standing on his head atop a swaying telephone po le across the roadside. " It did the job," Captain Johnson said, "I've never had a fight, never had to throw a punch. Everybody wants to be fri ends with someone built like that . .. . And that pole-I dreamed a make believe that it was a tall mast-gave me confidence." Now the octogenarian John son sits, smiling, in the same farm house where he was born , just six feet from where he watched Joshua Slocum and hi s father Clifton di scuss a book. Making the best of advancing Parkinson's ("one good thing, there 's no pain ") he yet dreams of sailing while patiently taking on a steady flow of old friend s, visitors and interv iewers anxious to know the man who battled Cape Horn 's worst in the world's largest sailing ship, the four-masted bark Peking. He is also the man who: -as mate with Captain Paul nearl y went down seven times while driving Sir Thomas Lipton 's badl y leaking J boat Shamrock V home through an Atlantic hurricane; --commanded the famed transatlantic yacht Highland Light in Bermuda and Fastnet races and was mate with the ce lebrated Captain Warwick Tompkin s on a 14,000-mile odyssey in the schooner Wander Bird; -seven times took hi s wife Electa, their young sons and a crew of paying adventurers around the world in hi s own 95foot schooner and later brigantine and, still later, cruised 28 times through all of Europe 's canals, the Baltic and Mediterranean in a 50-foot ketch-"all for the fun of it! " -because of his knowledge of the South Seas was re luctantly (because he lacked a college degree) commissioned by the Navy in World War II, and who crept ashore on scores of Pacific islands under the guns of the Japanese garrisons to map uncharted reefs and channels weeks ahead of naval amphibious assaults; SEA HISTORY , SPRING 1989
All that youthful dreaming, scheming and body-building paid offfor a Connecticut farm-boy: Captain Johnson at the helm of his great schooner Yankee, May 1935 , halfway through their first round-theworld cruise with young people in crew.
-says hi s " life was so perfect it is unbelievable, and the top thing was getting the right wife at the right time." Captain Johnson fi xes a steady blue eye on an interviewer, and dishes it out in pla in words , like sa lt horse to a foc 'sle hand. " My fa ther wrote children 's and trave l books. A hundred of them." They line an upper shelf in the living room near eight volumes by Irving and Exy about the ir own expeditions from the thirties to the sixties. Captain Johnson te ll s of "getting caught" in 193 1 while aboard the Shamrock " in one of the strangest seas I ever saw .... Everyone of them was pyramid shaped, and literally jumped up under and all aro und her in 25-foot high lumps. I've never seen seas anything like it before or since. They came up and hammered under her long overhangs, and she was leaking pretty badl y, twi sting so much in those seas .... ButthoseNorwegians we had as crew were awful good sailors. They took her when her own crew could not, as a way to get home to Norway . And we made it. " Yellowed news clippings fill in the thrilling detail of that incredible, 19-day October run to Bi shop Rock. Mate Johnson to ld a reporter later: "A man named Peterson was at the wheel; he weighed 220 pounds. A great sea broke over the quarter, tore the binnacle out, bolts through the deck and all , and swept it overboard with the compass. Again , a wave came aboard and Peterson who is six feet five inches tall was lifted upside down so that he came to with hi s feet up the mizzenmast .... 7