MARINE ART
'M)riteJj Pai~ S eiifarer: Tile Captain ]ofm ]. Bertonccini CoCCection by Dave Hull
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the sea called to him as a child. H e was a painter, the son of an Italian father-an artist-and a Swedish mother-and it was "the sights . .. " that embodied for him the essence of an experience, as in the blackbirding experience. And, of course, h e was a seafarer from the age of twelve; he sailed out of San Francisco as a whaleman and eventually as a shipmaster (including a 1925 passage in the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park's historic ship Balclutha, then named Star ofAlaska). The Captain John J. Bertonccini Collection is a remarkably rich gathering of his work that illustrates lavishly those three elements: writer, painter, seafarer. Most notable among his writings that have so far come to light are the two manuscript autobiographies included in the Collection. His writing is graphic, detailed, and understated in the style common to seafaring men ; even with three adjectives, this example is an unadorned account of a dramatic incident: I was leaning over the bow of my boat, clearing a line, when Bertonccini depicts a classic New Bedford East Coast whaler, very similar to the Charles W. Morgan I heard a frenzied shout beof184 1, preserved today at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. As Atlantic whaling died out, these ships hind me. Looking around, I found new homes in San Francisco. saw a sight I'll never forget. Outofthewater, berweenour boats shot up a whale's lower jaw, with the whale's head on the other side of Spencer's boat so that the boat was fair in the whale's mouth . Next second came the sickening crunch as the frail boat was crushed. All had jumped clear except Mr. Spencer whose head and one arm was protruding outside the whale's jaw. The newspapers loved the return of Bertonccini to port; there was always good copy in the fount of adventures that his life was. The Bulletin from johnny Cake Hill, journal of the Whaling Museum ofNew Bedford, reviewing a painting by "Johnny the Painter" in its Spring 197 4 issue, concludes: "Left unsaid in this bare chronicle of voyages are the untold adventures of a veteran Arctic hand. A proper biography of he North called to me when I was a ing-there was adventure, I said to myself, child, my nose in a book picking out and so I headed for San Francisco, of all the stories of the Norsemen. I was ports in the wo rld the port of adventurers." In that phrase of hope and exploration, twelve years old when I first shipped out of Stockholm as deckboy in the brigantine John Bertonccini nails the mystique of this Henry, lookingfor adventure. I expect to go great city whose reputation is enrwined with the adventure of gold. The mystique on looking so long as I live. So begins Captain John J . Bertonccini began in the months-long voyages around in the first of a series of seven articles he Cape Horn during the Gold Rush as seawrote for the Seattle Star in December of weaty passengers kept their hopes alive with 1920. H e knocked about the seas of the dreams of gold, waiting patiently for the world until he qualified as able-bodied sea- day when they would step ashore in San man; then the South Seas called and he Francisco, where their dreams wo uld begin "drifted down into the dream y, treacherous to come true. And, as John Bertonccini waters of Polynesia," where he served in the demonstrates for us, 50 years after the Gold "blackbirding" trade, that latter-day slave Rush, a large part of the city's mys tique trade perpetrated upon the natives of the continued to grow around its early mariFijis and the Solomons under the guise of time roots. The mystique remains today, "contract labor." though its roots are but dimly understood. He did not stay long in that trade for, as h e wrote: "The sights and smells of Johnny the Painter blackbirding were not according to my Three elements defin e him as, perhaps, the tastes, I suppose. I wanted to get into th e quintessential seafaring man of San Franreal North; I wanted to breathe a wind cisco at the turn of the rwentieth century. charged with the scent of sea-ice. Whal- H e was a writer, "his nose in a book," when
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SEA HISTORY 90, AUTUMN 1999