VI
MAURICE BLAKE GETS A VESSEL
Three days after Johnnie Duncan fell out of Crow’s Nest the new Duncan vessel designed by Will Somers was towed around from Essex. She had been named the Johnnie Duncan. I spent the best part of the next three days watching the sparmakers and riggers at work on her. And when they had done with her and she fit to go to sea, she did look handsome. She had not quite the length of the new vessel of Sam Hollis’s, which lay at Withrow’s dock just below her, and that probably helped to give her a more powerful look to people that compared them. Too able-looking altogether to be real fast, some thought, to hold the Withrow vessel in anything short of a gale, but I didn’t feel so sure she wouldn’t sail in a moderate breeze, too. I had seen her on the stocks, and knew the beautiful lines below the water-mark. And she was going to carry the sail to drive her. I took particular pains to get the measurements of her mainmast while it lay on the dock under the shears. It was eighty-seven feet––and she only a hundred and ten feet over all––and 44 it stepped plumb in the middle of her, further forward than a mainmast was generally put in a fisherman. To that was shackled a seventy-five foot boom, and eighty-odd tons of pig-iron were cemented close down to her keel, and that floored over and stanchioned snug. For the rest, she was very narrow forward, as I think I said––everybody said she’d never stand the strain of her fore-rigging when they got to driving her on a long passage. And she carried an ungodly bowsprit––thirty-seven feet outboard––easily the longest bowsprit out of Gloucester. Topmasts to match, and there was some sail to drive a vessel. But she had the hull for it, full and yet easy, with the greatest beam pretty well aft of the mainmast, and she drew fifteen and a half feet of water.
I was still looking her over, her third day in the riggers’ and sailmakers’ hands, when Clancy came along.
“Handsome, ain’t she, and only needing a skipper and crew to be off on the Southern cruise, eh, Joe?”
“That’s all. And according to the talk, you’re to be the skipper.”
“Well, talk has another according coming to it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But what happened at Mrs. Arkell’s the other day?”