Sorry, but I need another few months of winter. I am not getting to everything I would like to, but that is no surprise. When the last issue was done and off to press, I worked on inputting more vessels from the List of Merchant Vessels for 1960. I am up to about 7,500 with the hope of getting the last 12,000 in before summer. That looks highly unlikely as I got side-tracked by questions on sardine carriers. I located an old file I had done back in the 1990s, reformatted that and started filling in a lot of the information that was missing. I made notes from John Gilman’s book “Masts and Masters” and cutting and pasting information from the custom house records for Passamaquoddy and other sources I have transcribed, especially commercial fishing publications. It is going to take a lot of time going through these other sources, but hopefully I can have most of this done by the end of summer. What became painfully obvious is that I should have worked on this years ago. The main reason is that so many of the people who could have helped add to these vessel’s histories are now gone. It is sad to say that there are not many crew members left who know the details, so I am hoping by going through what was published in the periodicals captures the basic history of these boats and those that were involved with the carriers can add some much needed details.
The sardine industry on the coast of Maine and in the Canadian Maritimes started due to the Franco-Prussian War in the mid-1870s. They needed boats to go from the weirs, and later purse seiners, to the plants. These boats started out small and then grew to more than 80-feet in length. It is the early boats that will be hard to fill in all their information. One person I would like to know a lot more about is Maurice Dow of Rogue Bluffs. He built a number of boats in the early 1900s. It is known that he built six boats (ABBEY, DORIS, ELK, FRANCES, LILLIAN, and MILDRED) just in 1904. John Gilman had an interesting comment saying that they sailed well loaded, but empty they rolled badly. It will be these early boats that I bet I have trouble finding information.
I do not always stay on the coast, and I had a chance to go out to Nashua, NH. I booked a hotel in Nashua and planned a number of stops at antique shops on the way down. I hit about eight shops, which overall were interesting, but I only picked up a couple of books. The next morning, I hit a number of shops in the Nashua area. The one that stood out was New Hampshire Antique Co-op in Milford. I had been warned that they had a couple of Antonio Jacobson paintings. Okay, I did not expect so many maritime items, and especially as rare as these are, this far from saltwater, but that sounded good. The first room I went into there was a watercolour of the bark MARY H. VOSE of Boston, Captain William Savage, leaving Marseilles in 1857. I checked my database and found that she was built by J. W. Cox of Robbinston, Maine in 1853 and had been sold to a French owner. It became obvious very quickly that this was no ordinary antique store, and one you rarely find. Most everything was higher end, and not for those of us who live in an ordinary or even above ordinary home. Several items were for the very high-end. Next, I found a room of nautical items, which consisted of paintings, models, scrimshaw, books and a nice medical chest. Just a couple of the books came home with me. I wandered through all sorts of unique items and found my way up to the art gallery on the second floor. Here, I found the Jacobson, which was of the four-masted bark ROANOKE for $30,000. This was next to a nice James E. Buttersworth for a mere $95,000 and then next to that was a Fitz Henry Lane ship portrait at $250,000. I love artwork, especially by any one of these artists, but they were out of my league.
I am always amazed that you do not see more wooden ship models for sale in antique stores. We all know that many of those that are sold new are never started, or if they are, not completed. Well, one of my last stops I found a plank-on-frame model of HMS VICTORY, one of my favourite models. It was 75 percent off and for $50 I took it. Now, I hope that she does not end up back in an antique store when I leave earth because I did not get it done.
