then Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she met my father. Their marriage produced two daughters, my sister Elinor and me, but ended in divorce in 1932 . By 1933-34, she was living with women friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she ran into an old friend , Irving Johnson, recently married and the skipper of his own ship Yankee. Mother first met Irving Johnson years before in Amherst, before her half-formed desires had taken shape and long before he and Warwick Tompkins would make possible her dream ofsailing before the mast. The Frosts had moved to Amherst in 1915, where Mother completed her high school studies. During the summer holidays, Mother remembered spending time with Irving in walks in and around Amherst and his hometown of Hadley. Irving was the yo ungest son of a family of writers who tried to farm a tract of land along the Connecticut River. His two older brothers went on to college, but Irving hated school and everything about it. Strong as an ox, he loved nature and the struggle to master it, but deep inside he wanted to conquer the sea more than the land. He and Mother, it seems, worked each other up into a fever of wanderlust: I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander-thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay. There's a schooner in the offing, With her topsails shot with fire, And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire. I must forth again to-morrow! With the sunset I must be Hull down on the trail of rapture In the wonder of the Sea.
(from "1he Sea Gipsy" by Richard Hovey) Irving was further inspired by the novels of Jack London: "I didn't know they were novels," he once told an interviewer, "I thought they were real." In his early teens, Irving purchased books about sailing and bodybuilding, or "physical culture," as he called it. By the age of eighteen, he had dropped out of school. "Everything is in books if yo u can find it," he said. "They didn't teach the kinds of things I was interested in at college, so I went to sea." Still a teenager but determined to make a life at sea, Irving disappeared without saying a word to anyone. He seldom spoke of his plans, so his family didn't worry very much, probably guessing his intentions. Eight months larer they received a postcard from Santiago, Chile, signed by Irving, explaining that he had just come around Cape Horn as a sailor before the mast on a square rigger. He spent the next ten yea rs "doing the sort of thing that might naturally culminate in the purchase of a deep sea schooner with plans for a world cruise." On the docks of Cherbourgh, in 1931, while looking for a ship in which to work his way home to the States, Irving came across the little sailing ship Wander Bird and its captain, Warwick Tompkins. He signed onboard as mate, and it would be aboard Wander Bird that he would meet his future wife, Electa "Exy" Search. SEA HISTORY 129, WINTER 2009-10
Lesley Frost with her daughters Elinor and Lesley Lee (seated), 1936 A few years earlier, Warwick Tompkins had met and courted Gwendolyn Bohning Carter of Fort Worth, Texas, in Paris. She had recently graduated from Smith College and was in Paris to study music. Tompkins had landed in Paris after traveling half the globe since his college graduation. He had been to Manila, where he had successfully starred a newspaper, but eventually tiring of that, he shipped aboard a Chinese junk bound for Singapore. By age twenty-three, he assumed his first command. He worked his way to Paris and there tried his hand at journalism and art, actually exhibiting several engraved woodcuts in the Grand Palais. In a relatively short period, he and Gwen were married and living in a Paris garret. The Tompkinses worked to save enough money to purchase Warwick's dream vessel, a pilot schooner. The couple traveled to Hamburg, Germany, birthplace of many fine pilot schooners, where they found abandoned vessels in varying degrees of decay along the waterfront. Under a good amount of accumulated grime, they espied Wandervogel (Wander Bird), the former No. 5 Elbe: neglected and disheveled, but sound. With limited funds, but strong in determination and enthusiasm, Warwick and Gwen purchased the schooner (changing her German name, Wandervogel, to the English Wander Bird) for $1,500, borrowing an additional $ 17,000 towards her restoration. For their voyage back to the United States, the couple, heavily in debt, offered passage and training to young men who, "for a multitude of reasons, are yearning for the sea and its romance and color." Warwick would have to rely on his extensive background in sailing and just plain good luck to help overcome what he realized was "a grim picture of financial difficulties." 11