GEORGE
B.
DOUGLAS:
by Robert B. Streeter It began in an attic where most things usually end, lurking in the shadow, lost among the treasures of another time. The paint peeled from the model ships the old man 's hands had crafted; the sails were soiled and tom . Hi s writings were yellow and brittle, remembered by only a few and read by practically no one. Decades had passed si nce my greatgrandfather, George B. Douglas, had lived and breathed the salty air, when my grandmother took me as a boy up the ladder and into the attic. Unshaded light bulbs hung from the rafters, projecting a light much brighter than the kerosene lamps the old spirit once knew. A couple of ships, roughly three feet long, shone in the light and we touched them with caution. We picked them up. Somewhere the spirit stirred. My grandmother and I each cradled a ship in our arms, moved toward the door, and the three of us climbed down the ladder. George B. Douglas had come out of the attic. George Douglas was a well-known authority on ships and ship modelling during the first three decades of this century. He wrote for The Rudder and for such publications as Mode/maker, Shipmodeler, The Mode! Yachtsman and Science and In vention. In the 1920s he wrote Ship Model Book, published by the Rudder Publi shing Company. He also sold hi s plans of famous ships so modellers could depict "the vessel as it should be." Indeed, he was a master at making models as they should be. Science and Invention awarded him their Trophy Cup for his model of a Chinese junk, calling it "exceptionally accurate" and a San Francisco newspaper said his model of the famous down easter Shenandoah was "perfect in every detail. " But of all the ships that George Douglas studied , it was the Benjamin F. Packard that stole hi s heart. She was hi s princess of the sea. He describes the ship and his voyage aboard her from New York to San Francisco in 1894 in The Rudder: "Where is anything afloat handsomer than one of those fine three-skysailyarders that trade between New York and San Francisco, thence to England with wheat, and back to New York again in ballast, also making an occasional voyage to China with case-oil, and then home with a cargo of tea, matting or jute? "S uch a ship is the Benjamin F.
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Packard, she hav ing been in all the voyages mentioned many times. This ship was built of oak and yellow pine by Messrs. Goss, Sawyer and Packard at Bath, Maine , in 1883 , for Mr. John R. Kelly and is now owned by Messrs. Arthur Sewall & Co. of Bath. She is 244 ft long, 43 ft beam, 26 ft deep and registered as of2026 tons." He went on to recount how he shipped out in the Packard. The captain was a friend and invited him, but he shipped as ordinary seaman, observing that he had "been out to Frisco before in the Shenandoah, one of Sewall's large four-masted barks, so knew what I had to expect." "We left the dock at the foot of Maiden Lane early Sunday morning, April 22, 1894, and lay off Liberty Island until the next morning, when we were towed out to sea, and we did not see land again until we saw the Golden Gate on September 27th, 157 days later, having in the meantime sailed nearly 16,500 miles. "There were three boys aboard, two of them being sons of wealthy men, who had sent them to sea to try and break them of sundry bad habits and to give them a little experience. They got it before we arrived." He notes that he himself was "fat and stuffy" at 210 pounds when he signed on; when he arrived in San Francisco he was "strong and healthy" and weighed 175 pounds. He records the bill of fare en route to Cape Hom: "Either mush or oatmeal with molasses, or crackers, hash or Iri sh stew , with two pieces of hard tack or two pieces of dry bread, and coffee sweetened with molasses and no milk for breakfast. For dinner, bean or pea soup, with three slices of salt beef or salt pork, potatoes and dried bread, with a piece of dried apple pie for dessert on Sunday and Thursday. For supper, tea sweetened with molasses, two slices of cold beef or pork, two slices of dry bread and on four nights a week either dried apple sauce or a piece of ginger bread. I could not eat salt beef, so with that cut off I sometimes had a rather slim meal. If one is on good terms with the cook or steward you may get an extra piece of ginger bread, a couple of cold fishcakes or a couple of cold pancakes from the cabin leavings.... " And he notes how the Cape Hom winter kept all hands on the go: "We were off Cape Hom in July, and
we had a hard time of it. Ice, snow, rain and spray contrived to make it miserable for us, to say nothing of gales and head seas. In every watch for thirty days we wore oilskins to try and keep as dry as possible, but they did not do much good. Our boots leaked, and to stand around for four hours on a dark, cold, rainy night with wet feet and damp clothes and then to go to a small room with damp bedding and three to four inches of water to be bailed off the floor before you tum in, is no fun . And then you might get called out in a hurry in the middle of your watch below. It is an old saying at sea that you are always sure of your watch on deck but never sure of your watch below." In 1925 , thirty years after that voyage, a newspaper reporter found George Douglas, then age 61, admiring the Packard as she lay at dock in New York City, never to sail again. The old salt shared thi s story with what JllUSt have been a gleam in his eye: "When we neared southern waters the 'old man,' as sailors call the captain, said we could round the Hom in twenty-four hours if the breeze kept up. But the winds roared like a cyclone and the waters boiled like a maelstrom. For thirty days we battled with the elements before we rounded the treacherous cape. "In the Pacific we shipped a bad sea. The Packard stuck her nose into it and the waves went completely over her. We were lucky that no one was washed overboard. The sailor on watch on the forecastle head near the knightheads was thrown back to the maindeck,*a distance half the length of the ship! "Yes, the Packard is some ship. It is my ship and I love her. One' s ship is like one 's sweetheart or wife. Women are very much alike, as ships are, yet all are really different. Each has distinguishing features which only the lover remembers. The fact that there have been faster ships than the Packard does not matter. The fact that another vessel may have been a better boat in some respect does not matter. " The Packard was the last of her kind in New England waters, and only a few others like her survived on the West Coast, most of them employed in the *Probably Douglas said "mainmast" and the reporter wrote it down wrong. -Ed.
SEA HISTORY 56, WINTER 1990
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