A Brush with the Past

A few weeks ago I wrote about mysterious sights at sea. Here’s another one:

My grandfather, the painter Charles Hopkinson, had a lifelong love affair with the sea and ships of all sizes. In school and college he filled his books and papers (at times including examination papers, to the consternation of his teachers) with doodles and detailed sketches of skiffs, sloops, schooners, ketches, yawls, catboats, brigs, barques, and clipper ships. Long after school – indeed,  throughout his life – he would draw little sketches in the margins of books on ships and the sea to explain how a particular part of a ship's rigging worked, or to correct an error in the text or an illustration.

He sailed whenever he had a chance. As a boy summering in Maine he learned to handle small boats, and he was seldom without a sailboat of his own after he was married and settled down at the house in Manchester, Massachusetts, where he lived and painted for the rest of his life. Racing was not his thing, and he did not go in for long cruises either. Messing about in small boats was what he loved best, and he took great pleasure in passing along this joy to daughters and grandchildren alike.

Some of us took to it more than others, for this gentlest of men ashore was a stickler for perfection at sea: we soon learned that there was only one way to tie up a dinghy, fasten a halyard to a cleat, or to “shoot” a mooring (bring a boat up to the mooring buoy by turning into the wind and letting the sails luff at just the right point so that the vessel came to a complete halt just as its bow kissed against the buoy). If you didn't manage these and the myriad other skills a sailor must know just right, he'd have you do them again and again. To a small boy (and he started to teach me to sail when I was 8 or 9), he would seem a gruff taskmaster. But I remember that when I did master one of these skills at last, he was warm with his praise.

Charles Hopkinson in his (other) element

One July day in 1945, when I was eleven, he decided I was ready to handle his 17-foot centerboard sloop, the Armada, alone (almost alone; he'd be a passenger while I rowed us out in the dinghy, made sail, and handled tiller and sheets on a short sail around Egg Rock and back). The day was bright and clear, with a gentle breeze ruffling the water, and not a cloud in the sky.

He put a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, squashed a weather-beaten hat on his head, and took

the oars out of the hall closet. The oarlocks clanged together, bringing John Joiner, his little Welsh terrier, bounding out of his wingback chair to join us. He was not about to miss a sail.

We walked together the half mile to the cove – through the woods, past the barn, through the orchard and along the lane to Kettle Cove, where the Armada was moored. I carried a bag with our lunch and our sweaters; my grandfather carried the oars across his shoulder; the oarlocks, dangling from their lanyards, chimed (e-flat) as they swung together with each step he took.

The tide in the cove was high. The venerable rowboat bobbed at the end of its running line fifty feet off the beach. I waded out a few feet to uncoil the line from its rock and pulled in the dinghy hand over hand, the water dripping off the line and soaking the front of my dungarees. The dinghy scraped on the gravel shore, the dog leapt aboard, I untied the boat, swung it around and we climbed aboard.

Under my grandfather’s watchful eye I rowed us out, carefully feathering the oars at every stroke. We were soon aboard the sloop. I tied the dinghy’s painter to the eye splice on the mooring pennant with a bowline, finished off with two half-hitches, unlaced the sail cover and stowed it away under the foredeck, hung the rudder on the transom, lowered the centerboard, hoisted the mainsail and jib, and cast off, leaving the dinghy rocking on the mooring.

We were soon out beyond Egg Rock. My grandfather hadn't said a word about my steering or sail handling. I was aglow with happiness. Then, almost without warning we were in thick fog.

The wind died away at the same moment, and we were left to rise and fall on the oily swell coming in from the east. The sea was gray satin, with only an occasional ripple to show there was still a ghost of a breeze.

We sat and waited. After a while he took a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and sharpened it with the jackknife he produced from another pocket. The shavings curled over the side. He produced an envelope from somewhere else, flattened it out, and began to sketch: a Gloucester fishing schooner heading home from the Banks with a trip o’ fish, thrashing along under shortened sail into a sou’wester. In a few strokes he had captured the driving wind, the long dark seas, the pounding of the hull into the waves, the decks awash with water pouring through the scuppers, the struggle of the helmsman to keep a sharp lookout and hold the vessel on course.

“Time for a bite to eat?” he asked me. I started to fish the sandwiches out of the bag, then stopped. I had heard a voice, off to port.

Then another, louder, more distinct; then a muffled laugh.

Then the creak of a block as a line worked back and forth over its sheave. The sound of heavy spars rubbing against one another. Something huge was out there in the fog, just beyond our narrow circle of vision.

Then the fog scaled up, and ... O, GLORY! A huge square-rigged ship loomed up above us, all sails set and drawing in the gentle breeze, easing along to the westward. We stared dumbfounded at the sight. Could it be real? Was it a mirage? A trick of the fog? A warp in time? What square-­rigger could be still be sailing in 1945? My grandfather would know, I was sure -- but a look at his face, as open-mouthed as mine, told me that he was as astonished as I, and not quite sure whether we were looking at reality or a ghostly apparition.

Three or four men stood along the vessel's starboard rail high above us; one, smoking a pipe, leaned over the side to wave, looking real enough. The water bubbled along the square-rigger's broad flanks and rippled outward to lap against our hull, rocking us back and forth; that too was real. John Joiner, loafing in the bilges, didn't seem overly impressed.

As quickly as the ship had appeared, she passed us by to disappear into the mist once more. But we both saw her name as she ghosted by: Joseph Conrad was picked out on her broad black transom in bright white letters.

The Joseph Conrad now lies at Mystic Seaport, where's she's been moored to a dock for most of the sixty-four years since her ghostly appearance off Cape Ann.

The Joseph Conrad

The Author, 1945
Portrait by Charles Hopkinson

A version of this story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times in 2009