Tales of the clipper ships

by C. Fox Smith

He found the “Philopena” in a derelict, melancholy wet dock somewhere among vacant lots and chemical works down in the Isle of Dogs, along with a couple of dilapidated coasting colliers and a broken-down tug—a smoky Thames-side sunset burning like a banked fire behind the cynical-looking sheds of a shadowy and problematical Griffin—and he fell in love with her on the instant.

There is—or perhaps one should rather say was, since it is doubtful if the Age of Steam has cognizance of such sentimental weaknesses—a certain kind of thrill, not to be satisfactorily defined in words, which runs through a man’s whole being when first his eyes fall upon the one ship which, out of all the thousands which sail the seas, seems especially made to be the complement of his own being, as surely as a woman is made for her mate. It is a feeling to which first love is perhaps the thing most nearly comparable—it can make the most commonplace of men into a poet; and even that lacks one of its qualities—its pure and sexless virginity. Other ships there may be more beautiful; but they leave him cold. They are not for him as she is for him....

That thrill it was—that awakening of two of the root instincts of mankind, the instinct to cherish, and the instinct to possess—which ran (surprising even himself) through that most matter-of-fact and unimaginative of men, David Broughton, when he first set eyes on the ship that for twenty-odd years to come was destined to provide the main interest and object of his existence.

There seemed to be nobody about the wharf, but Broughton untied a leaky dinghy that he found moored under the piles and pulled out to her. The nearer he got to her the better he liked her. Stern a bit on the heavy side, he fancied—with too much weight aft she’d be inclined to run up into the wind if you didn’t watch her. She’d want some handling, all right, but it wouldn’t do to be afraid of her, either. Her lines were a dream! He pulled all round her, viewing her from every angle; and as he rowed under her keen bow he caught himself fancying that her little dainty figurehead looked down upon him with a kind of wistful appeal—a sort of “You won’t go away and leave me, will you?” look that won his heart on the spot.

He made the boat fast to the crazy Jacob’s ladder and swung himself on board. She was filthily dirty, appallingly neglected, with that unspeakably forlorn and abandoned look which ships seem to get after a long lay-up in port. The grime and litter everywhere made his heart ache. The Dagoes had had her for the last year or two, and her little cabin reeked of garlic and stale cigar smoke. The shipkeeper, a drink-sodden old ruffian with a horrible red-running eye, who was probably none too pleased at the prospect of losing his job now his temporary home was sold, followed Broughton round grumbling and croaking. Lor’ bless you, she wouldn’t sail, not she! No more’n a mule’ll go if he don’t want to! There was plenty had had a try at her, and they all told the same tale. Somethink wrong with the way she was built, must be ... or else they’d laid her keel of a Friday or summat....

Broughton smiled to himself. Somehow, he thought, that ship was going to sail for him! He couldn’t have explained the feeling for the life of him, but there it was.

And so, in point of fact, things turned out. Just as a horse which is an unmanageable fiend in the hands of a crack jockey will let some snip of a stable lad do what he will with him—just as a dog made savage by ill-usage will attach himself for life (and perhaps—who knows?—beyond) to someone who first masters him and then shows him kindness—so did this little wild “Philopena” under her new name of “Maid of Athens” show no sign of the tricks and vices, whatever they might be, which had brought her, like some lovely but wilful lady fallen among evil companions, to the obscene desolation of that forlorn Millwall wet dock. Twenty-five years ago ... ah, well, they had been happy years, on the whole! A reserved and rather lonely man, not over fond of company, Broughton had drifted into a negatively disastrous sort of marriage in his young days with a woman considerably older than himself. With the best will in the world to do so, he had been unable to feel any but a superficial grief at her death a few years later; and in the house where his married stepdaughter now lived he always felt like a stranger on sufferance during his brief periods ashore. But he had found an abiding content in the daily routine of his life at sea. He gave himself up to his ship without grudging. She was his one interest in life, his hobby, his love. He laid out his spare cash on little items of personal adornment for her as for a loved woman, and on the new gear of which Old Featherstone stinted her as his natural tendency to stinginess increased with age.

It was a brother skipper, Tom Pellatt, of Maclean’s pretty little clipper “Phoebe Maclean”—a silly, noisy chap Broughton privately thought him—who had first put the idea into his head that the “Maid of Athens” might one day become his own property in name as she already was in spirit.

Pellatt had been dining on board when both ships were in Sydney Harbour, and just as he was going he said:

“Tell you what, Broughton, you’ve been the making of this ship; and if old Nethermillstone don’t leave her to you in his will he damn well ought to, that’s all!”