Mark Myers and West Country Seafaring by Peter Stanford captions by Mark Myers Mark was born in 1945 and grew up in the sea-haunted city of San Francisco. San Francisco was a last refuge of deepwater sailing ships and seamen, and from an early age Mark made it his business to know both. He began sketching and painting the ships, and today it is a main strength of his work that he does this from a seamanly viewpoint. More than that, he got to know Karl Kortum, director of the then San Francisco Maritime Museum, himself veteran of a Cape Horn passage in the last Yankee down-easter Kaiulani, and Karl, sensing the reality of Mark's interest, introduced him to the wider world of seafaring. Mark came to New York to get to know the port the Cape Homers came from and made himself very useful to Norma Stanford and me, working in the dust and confusion of the fledgling South Street Seaport Museum. He went on to England, sailing with Alan Villiers in a couple of his ventures with vessels authentically rigged (this Villiers insisted on) for the movies, and later with Adrian Small in the replica topsail ketch Nonsuch. Using his artist's pen, he wrote for us a charming account of his visit with Adrian in the Nonsuch to the enchanted port of Exeter in the West Country, which appeared in Sea History 33. And in the meantime, while all this was going on , Mark fell in love with a West Country girl, married her and settled down in this ultimate seafaring community, where he and his wife live in an old forge on the north coast of Cornwall today, with two teenage daughters and a young son. In that wet windy corner of the ocean world, he designed and illustrated John Harland ' s great work Seamanship in the Age of Sail, wherein you may discover such mysteries as how to boxhaul your ship if short of sea room. And he achieved the distinction of being elected vice president of the Royal Society of Marine Artists and fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists. There is a singular appropriateness to the basic movement
of Mark's life, as there is to every line he draws in a sketch or painting. Settled in the country of Drake and Hawkins, he sits where the trail of English-speaking seafaring runs home. This pleasant land with its deep-sunken lanes seems to run by a different clock; it is in touch with the tides of time, never far from the smell of the eternally challenging sea. In a pub you might hear of the poor American boys drowned when the German E-boats got loose among the landing craft in a D-Day rehearsal at Salcombe, or smugglers beaching their craft on moonless nights in one of the tiny coves along this rocky, indented coast, or wrecks like the great American schooner Thomas W. Lawson, cast ashore in the Scillies because the skipper wouldn't take a tow, or where the money went from Drake's fantastic raids against the Spanish Empire, and then, always, the simple workaday but ever at risk voyaging of topsail schooners and fishing craft of all kinds, and steamers with salt-caked stacks. The memories run together but do not blur. In Appledore last year, your editor saw Mark's show , "Western Approaches," an exhibit radiant with the excitements of seafaring and the sureness of touch of an artist who has come home, home being defined as the place where people say: "He is one of us." Mark ' s countrymen can say that with the special meaning: He speaks for us. Everything in these pages, then, is real-more real than any camera could make it. When I was with Mark in Devon, the discussion of the paintings began with his explaining to me that the foremast sails were all let fly in "The Black Rocks" in order to bring the ship's head up faster, then flowed into a beer in the adjoining pub. "You've changed since the sixties," I said to him, thinking of the kid that showed up one day in South Street and of the accurate but stiff pictures he drew. "Well, I've come home now," he said. Would anyone quarrel with that? D