he first saw the light of day. He came to Canada in one of the old sailing ships that held the Atlantic passenger trade ’tween-decks seventy years ago. One of the sweetest word-pictures ever listened to, Rogerson sketched, of his old mother cooking their meals on deck in the brick fire-place included in the culinary appointments of the Atlantic trip in those days. Soon after his arrival in Canada his father died, and he was apprenticed to an uncle, a master figurehead carver of Saint John, about 1850. Figuring it out, it would seem that for a hundred years at least, there have been figurehead carvers of this one family in the old city of Saint John, that, with Halifax, is Canada’s Twin-Gate to the Atlantic.
When Rogerson had completed his time as an apprentice and worked awhile with his uncle, “he felt”, to use his own words, “that he was repeating himself.” So he gathered up his tools and went off with them over his shoulder to Boston, much as any ambitious art-student, whatever his chosen medium, hies him to Paris. Boston, in those days, was the centre of the sailing-ship trade in America. “Out o’ Boston” sailed the “clippers” in the China trade. Rogerson tells how at evening, after his day’s work was done, he used to go along the docks from ship to ship studying “The Figure on the Bow.” And he tells, too, how he worked for first one leading firm and then another of the master figurehead carvers of old Boston till he himself presently stood in the first ranks, able to turn out any figure on demand in red-hot time. “Skippers couldn’t wait in those days”, he adds. And even as he talks you see that his memory has reverted to the time when “sails” must need jump when winds and tide beckoned. Then having learned all that he could in Boston, he returned with high hopes and the skill and confidence of the “Master-Carver” in his fingers, to the business-opening he recognized in Saint John, with all the new ships a-building on Bay of Fundy “ways”, at Parrsboro, Windsor, Hantsport and, who knows how many more of the old bay’s outports.
And now he follows with such a list of Figureheads, as seems incredible, until one recalls Rogerson’s long span of life, and that he worked “in red-hot time.” Among those standing to the credit of this Saint John carver “The Highland Laddie”, “The British Lion”, “Ingomar”, “Governor Tilley”, “The Sailor Boy”, “Honolulu”, and “Lalla Rookh,” held high place. About each, Rogerson relates some interesting legend. Of his “Sailor Boy” he tells how a man came into his shop some years after it was carved and told him he had a rival carver somewhere—that “there was a ship out in the harbour with the finest figurehead on it he had ever seen!” This haunted him so, that next day he closed the shop, got a boat and rowed out to the vessel. On coming round her bow, there, above the waves and himself, stood his own figurehead!
Of “The British Lion”, he says, “It was a rouser!”
The ship that bore Governor Tilley at the bow had a long and successful career, but was at last wrecked on the Norwegian coast. Through one of those mysterious channels of Marine Intelligence, that sailors on the waterfront know, Mr. Rogerson learned that though the ship was a total wreck the figurehead was salvaged, and that his “Governor Tilley” now stands in a Museum in Norway; and Rogerson thinks that it should be brought back to Saint John.
The “Lalla Rookh” he had not seen since it left his hand to sail forth upon the high seas till we showed him a photograph of it obtained while the ship, at whose bow it stood, loaded deal at West Bay, near Parrsboro, for the trenches of France. To think it was so near and yet this old carver did not see it! Yet it pleased his old heart to know that “she” was still afloat and carrying-on in the hazardous runs across the Atlantic, with only sails and the courageous spirit symbolized by the figure on the bow to aid her against enemy submarines—submarines, the last word in sea-craft. It was on the “Lalla Rookh” that Frank T. Bullen served his apprenticeship as sailor.
Of the “Ingomar” Rogerson says: “I always think it was my finest piece of work. Strange to say,” he continues “I have no photograph or even rough sketch of it. It was to be, I suppose, for the ship that bore it was wrecked near here in the Bay. I went out to see the figurehead and found it had escaped damage and I made every arrangement to return and take it off; but the very next day a gale of wind came up and when the gale abated not a vestige of my figurehead remained.”
“Old-timers among ship-owners had fads for names”, Rogerson says. “Sometimes it ran to Indians, sometimes to mythological figures, sometimes to reigning sovereigns; at other times to their own wives or daughters, or to some popular man about town, or to a popular governor, etc.” Among his Indian figureheads he recalled “The Indian Chief”, “The Indian Queen”, “Pocahontas”, “Hiawatha”.
When fancy ran to the name of the ship-owner’s wife or to those of well-known persons, the figurehead carver worked from a favourite photograph, so that some old figureheads of this type are in fact sculptured figures of the people themselves, people who in most instances have long since passed away. The “Governor Tilley” figurehead is a case in point and Rogerson is right in saying it belongs to New Brunswick rather than to Norway.