Jl <Poet's <Daugliter at Sea: tlie "Wander <Bird" by Lesley Lee Francis
I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over. (from "Sea Fever" by john Masefield) here is a special bonding with the sea that requires a feel for metaphor, the passion of an enthusiasm disciplined by danger, which calls upon the poetic imagination. We know that writers such as John Masefield, Henry Thoreau, and Jack London inspired young men to leave everything behind and go to sea-Warwick Tompkins, Irving Johnson, Rockwell Kent, Sterling Hayden, among others. Less is known about the remarkable women who joined the all-male captains and crew on the high seas. In doing so, they broke the gender stereotype in a realm long considered a man's world. The 1883 pilot schooner Wander Bird, ex-No. 5 Elbe, now beautifully restored and returned to Hamburg, Germany, recently celebrated her 125'h an niversary. Com missioned by the German government, designed by G ustav Junge and built in the H. C. Stulcken shipyard, Wander Bird was launched as No. 5 Elbe on 9 August 1883 and soon joined the fleet of pilot schooners at the mouth of the Elbe River. For the next 41 years, No. 5 Elbe would serve pilots tending clipper ships, whalers, colliers and coasters, ocean liners and the last of the big windjammers. By 1924, she had been abandoned and left to rot in the backwaters ofHamburg, only to be rescued in 1928 and restored by Warwick Tompkins of California.
No. 5 Elbe as a German Pilot Schooner on the River Elbe
children, Ann and Warwick Jr., ages two and fo ur at the time. They wo uld recruit young adults, most of them college students whose parents paid for their experience, to round out the crew and provide for them a working seagoing adventure, not unlike the many programs available on sail training vessels today. Despite the omnipresent constraints of gender-especially in the 1930s-Mother was driven less by our modern-day concepts of feminism than by a hunger for adventure-adventure as an expression of romance and poetry. Poetry had been ingrained from an early age on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where she lived with her parents, Elinor and Robert Frost, and her younger sisters and brother. Educated at home, she became a keen observer and journalist of her surroundings . She learned early to care for her younger siblings and to assist her often ailing mother. Mother often spoke of the two strong alternating forces, physical action and contemplation, that dominated her life. Her voyage in Wander Bird was the culmination of years of longing to experience the adventure and dangers of the sea, lured by Longfellow from her inland home in New Hampshire to the sea where her ancestors had landed as seamen: 'Wouldst thou! -so the helmsman answered, 'Learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery!'
(from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation ofthe Spanish ballad, "The Secret ofthe Sea" or "The Galley ofCountArnaldos")
My mother, Lesley Frost (1899-1983), the eldest daughter of the American poet Robert Frost, had met and been inspired by two skippers, Irving Johnson and Warwick Tompkins, as well as by their wives, who invited her to participate in what was to be one of her most memorable sea ventures . For six weeks in the summer of 1934, in search of Masefield's "vagrant gypsy life," she would leave her work and family behind and sail aboard the 85-foot pilot schooner Wander Bird. Sailing from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to the Baltic Sea (Gi:iteborg, Sweden), she joined a crew of eightsix men and two women. Capt. Warwick Tompkins owned and operated the yacht, accompanied by his wife Gwen and their two 10
As a thirteen-year-old, Mother got her first taste of ocean voyaging (and seasickness) on a trip across the Atlantic aboard the cargo ship SS Parisian when her family moved to England. There, Robert Frost published his first two books, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). With the outbreak of World War I, the Frost fami ly ret urned to the United States, settling first in Franconia, New Hampshire, before moving on to Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father held his first academic appointment and began a lifelong association with Amherst College. After h igh school, Mother studied one year at Wellesley College before working the final months of the war making wooden propellers in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Although she completed another three semesters at Barnard College in New York and another semester at the University of Michigan, she never completed her undergraduate degree. She spent the 1920s pursuing a whirlwind of activities, including jobs in publishing and managing bookstores in New York and Massachusetts. She got a longer exposure to ocean voyaging when she took a job running the bookshop aboard the Cunard liner SS Franconia during its world cruise in 1927. She returned to New York and SEA HISTORY 129, WINTER 2009-10