All Sail Set. Armstrong Sperry

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      Old Messina Clarke.

      “Anyway,” I ventured, “McKay is going to pay me three dollars a week, and maybe he’ll let me draw ships, too.”

      “Draw ships!” Messina exploded. “It’s high time you was a-sailin’ ’em!”

      Needless to say I was disappointed in the way the old man received my good news. For the first time I felt that he had failed me. It didn’t occur to me then that it might be a blow to him to see me turning to someone else for nautical training.

      My mother took it differently. “Donald McKay is a splendid man and he was a good friend of your father’s. You mustn’t mind what old Messina says. He’s a little touchy, you know. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity, but I shall be thankful if the association doesn’t lead you into sailing.”

      The fact that I must leave school to make my own way in the world did not upset me. What school could have rivaled the interest of the surroundings in which I now found myself? From six o’clock in the morning till six at night I labored over a drawing table in the mold loft of Donald McKay’s shipyard.

      My work in the beginning, in all truth, was elementary enough: I was allowed to trace the simpler details of ornament for the great-cabin. Today I realize that it was only the kindness of his heart for the son of a friend that prompted McKay to take me into his office. In those first weeks, if the destiny of the ship and the fate of all who manned her had been dependent upon my efforts, I could not have felt a greater sense of responsibility.

      Through our offices filed a procession of shipwrights, chandlers, underwriters, lumbermen, engineers, sailmakers, captains active and retired. I kept my eyes upon my work, for McKay was a hard taskmaster, but I kept my ears apeak, and they missed no detail of all that there was to hear.

      Donald McKay not only designed his ships, he superintended their construction as well. When he first began to build, it was the custom to hack frame timbers out of the rough with a broadax; when a timber must be cut lengthwise, it was sawed through by hand, a laborious process and a slow one. Here McKay showed the independence of his mind by setting up a sawmill in his yards to do both these jobs. It was an innovation, I can tell you. The saw hung in a mechanical contraption in such way that the workmen could control the tilt of it and thus get the desired bevel of cut. Once men had had to carry the big timbers on their shoulders; McKay erected a steam derrick to do it for them. It caused a lot of amusement among the scoffers but did the same work in jig time.

      So active had the New England shipbuilders become that the seaboard forests were being stripped bare of timber. Men had to look farther for wood. McKay met this problem after his own fashion: he made a full set of patterns for every stick and timber in his ships; these patterns were taken into the northern forests during the winter; lumberjacks felled trees of the necessary number and size. Then over snow and ice the logs were hauled to the rivers before the spring thaws, and down in East Boston his adzes and hammers and his caulking irons rang to high heaven.

      Sometimes the poet Longfellow dropped in to pass the time of day. If old Messina hadn’t always snorted at poets and suchlike, I might have paid more attention to Longfellow. But I do remember that after a visit to our yards, he once wrote a poem about a launching, and Donald McKay tacked a copy of it up on the wall of the mold loft. Probably it has never come to your eye, since they tell me that these enlightened days of the twentieth century hold Longfellow something of a fogy with a goodly coating of moss to his back. Maybe so. Anyway, here is the stanza:

       Then the Master,

       With a gesture of command,

       Waved his hand;

       And at the word,

       Loud and sudden there was heard,

       All around them and below,

       The sound of hammers, blow on blow,

       Knocking away the shores and spurs.

       And see! she stirs!

       She starts—she moves—she seems to feel

       The thrill of life along her keel.

      Not bad for a poet, moss or no moss. Once Richard Henry Dana, who wrote Two Years Before the Mast, stopped by for a chat with Donald McKay: a quiet, studious-looking man he was, with little look of the sea about him. Aye, it was all-absorbing to a lad like me, you can imagine.

      Up in the mold loft the air was charged with activity. Draftsmen, down on their knees, drew diagonals and trapezoids in chalks on the floor. No one but a shipwright could have made head nor tail to them. McKay hovered over his men like a hawk, his keen eyes catching out any error of workmanship. With mammoth calipers he checked every line that the draftsmen drew, and they trembled lest the master find so much as a quarter-inch difference in their renderings of his plans. Sometimes СКАЧАТЬ