The space between this artist and her easel has been filled for these last many many many months with the voice of the great narrator, Patrick Tull, reading all 20+ volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s PRODIGIOUS series of novels featuring the swashbuckling seafaring adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Well over 200 hours of being immersed in that world and for me, it was the second time through. I have two hours to go. The last two chapters he wrote before his death. The last sentence of which was never complete.
As many before me, I was lead to the books by my love of the movie Master and Commander. Definitely falls under the category of IYKYK. The first time I heard the thrilling command of “BEAT TO QUARTERS !” I was hooked and it opened up endless chests of drawers, oak planked decks and scores of floating wooden barrels for my curiosity to play amongst.
The lubber’s holes of history, masted ships and sailing slang have come in handy for one of my other pursuits which is the editing of old ship’s logs. I am currently working my way through the American Naval Vessel USS Jamestown during her Civil War service from 1861-1865. The Old Weather Project is a citizen scientist venture to record and digitalize the handwritten log books. They started with Whaling Ships and once completed have moved on to US Navy, US Coastguard and British Naval vessels. I chose to start with a schooner of war only a half century distant from Captain Aubrey’s ship the Surprise.
It has been a thrilling adventure for me and a huge learning curve requiring an ever growing stack of reference books by my side ranging in subject from, “Seamanship in the Age of Sail” to “The Sailor’s Word Book”, to historical texts about the founding of the US Navy and Civil War. I have bored the socks off of any of the friends who dare to ask and have raised a glass of port with one or two of stalwart among them as we carried away long into the night with a shared love of all things maritime. And it rattles Herself out of her chair when I come home and tell her I got to transcribe…”Beat to Quarters” today.
We are currently moored in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, (my ship and I) in December of the year 1862. Having spent over a year as part of the very young but rapidly growing US Navy, where she was stationed along the eastern coast as part of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, charged with preventing Confederate ships from sailing and capturing ships, crew and cargo as spoils of war, we are now headed to do the same somewhere in the southern hemisphere…I don’t like to peak ahead.
While restocking in port, the men are busy at work painting and tarring the ship, taking on water and firewood, rounding up deserters (the temptations on land are hard for these sailors to resist so almost every day I have to write…”confined in double irons…so and so, and there are some frequent flyers on that list). And every so often, taken in shifts or “watches”, the men get a day off.
In the O’Brian books this is known as a “Make and Mend Day”. I just love that. Look for a painting with that title in the near future…simply for the love of the phrase.
When I look back at this painting and write these notes, I see The Little Lady taking her own make and mend day.
Come to rest with her bloomers open to the fresh island breezes for a spell,
she spends her day “down island” for a bit of shore leave.
The comings and goings of the boatyards in Vineyard Haven do have a bit more bustling for her to watch.
But her basin home tucked into the “up island” village of Menemsha must find a way to cope…
until all her decks have been swabbed
and her yards strung taught
and she can sail away home…
from the Dry Dock.
