The Ingenious Life of Melbourne Smith: One Man's Revival of Historic Sailing Vessels

The Ingenious Life of Melbourne Smith

One Man’s Revival of Historic Sailing Vessels

Woods Maritime © 2015

Text | Paul Wood

Photos & Illustrations | Melbourne Smith unless otherwise noted

Cover photo by Woodson Woods | Lynx rounds Upolo Point to finish her 2,500-mile run from Newport Beach, California to Hawai’i Island

Title page illustration by Melbourne Smith | U.S.S. Hornet, proposed Sailing Ambassador for the State of Florida, 2015

Design | Curt Carpenter

Thanks to Mick Philp for his eyewitness accounts.

NOTICE OF RIGHTS

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-9964454-0-5

Woods Maritime

Post Office Box 7049 | Kamuela, Hawai’i 96743

Contents

1 Cap de la Hague | 1959

2 Manhattan | 1957

3 Cadiz | 1960

4 Hamilton | 1930

5 Antigua | 1960

6 Guatemala | 1961

7 Placencia | 1962

8 Maryland | 1962

9 British Honduras | 1965

10 Baltimore | 1975

11 Inner Harbor Baltimore | 1976

12 Three Days North of Puerto Rico | 1986

13 Annapolis | 1978

14 New York City | 1841

15 Spanish Landing | 1983

16 Erie | 1987

17 Penobscot Bay | 1998

18 West Palm Beach | 2012

19 Sandy Hook | 1849

1 Cap de la Hague | 1959

Don’t wear your sea boots if you’re going to abandon ship.

—Melbourne Smith

…

Many of the best sailing trawlers were built in Upham’s yard in Brixham.

Throughout his Greenwich Village period, even though the purchase of a worthy boat was fantastically beyond his means, Melbourne Smith kept looking at sailboats, visiting them, studying them, and painting them. He undertook a succession of watercolor portraits of classic sailing ships. Each portrait was a side-view depiction of a single ship under sail, every detail exact to the original vessel, including the fine lines of the rigging, the taut sails, the curves and minute features of the hull. Often he would add a lively detail—say, the fl uttering of a colorful pennant at the top of a mast. These portraits were not oil-thick dramas in which boats battled typhoons or tacked in a cannon-blasting turmoil of old naval warfare. Each was done in lucid gouache watercolor, each a celebration of the design ingenuity and proportions that characterize specific nautical breeds. They were instructive, fi nely drafted replications.

I had the goal of doing three hundred of them, he said later, all different classes of sailing vessels, fifty each—fishing boats, yachts, cargo ships, historic ships…. He took his paintings to a publisher in New York. The publisher praised them and suggested that Melbourne could find a better arrangement for this project if he went to publishers in England.

In 1959 Melbourne left New York and crossed the North Atlantic on the SS Salacia. He disembarked in Swansea, Wales, with over a hundred of these paintings in his luggage. But the paintings would have to wait. All of a sudden he had money in his pocket, enough to purchase a very fine sailing ship and to outfit it for adventure.

The money came like this:

He had read an advertisement for a cheap old sailing craft at a Staten Island boatyard, and he went to see it. He did a lot of that in those days—visiting boats, learning boats, wanting one. There’s a fine line between pretending and visualizing, and Melbourne managed to cross it.

When he saw the old boat, he quickly realized that the vessel was derelict, not worth a dime. He should have known. The entire yard was that way, flat, cold, deserted, and choked with more-or-less abandoned vessels begging to be scuttled. The dark seawater lapped foamy gobs of rubbish against the pilings, and the air carried a bothersome stink.

As Melbourne finished his inspection and climbed out of the rotten sloop, he found himself standing next to an older man who had apparently responded to the same ad. But this fellow was clearly not the nautical type—short, pudgy, with thick glasses, a slender tie, sweater, wingtip shoes, a city-style woolen overcoat, and a homburg hat.

Don’t bother looking down there, said Melbourne cheerily.

Why is that?

Melbourne explained in detail the terminal ailments of the sloop in question, and the formal stranger smiled, quite impressed by the lanky young man’s enthusiasm and detailed understanding of hulls and rigging and the principles of buoyancy. The man’s name was Aubrey Young. He was an engineer from New Jersey who worked in New York and felt that he would like to purchase a sailboat.

Why? Melbourne asked.

Why what?

Why do you want a boat if you don’t want to sail?

Well, said Mr. Young. It might be a good investment.

Melbourne looked at him, thinking about that concept.

Aubrey Young looked left and right, then said, Well, I have two sons. They’re not quite grown. But they… have a lot of… energy. I thought that some extended adventures on the open sea would….

But where would you keep the ship? Who would be the skipper? Where would she sail?

I don’t know yet. As I say, I’m just testing the idea. When Melbourne didn’t react, he said, You, for example. You wouldn’t want to purchase this boat here. So what would you buy—if you had the money? And what would you do with it then?

I’d go to England and buy a Brixham trawler, said Melbourne.

Mr. Young’s face registered surprise and a slight smile. He had no idea what the fellow was talking about.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Brixham trawlers, Melbourne said. In fact, he had given deep study to Edgar J. March’s recent book Sailing Trawlers: The Story of Deep Sea Fishing with Longline and Trawl. I think one of them would make a great charter boat. I’d get a small crew together and sail her to the West Indies. That’s my dream.

The West Indies? said Young. Maybe I can help you out with that.

He offered Melbourne a kind of partnership deal. He would front Melbourne five thousand dollars. Melbourne would go to England, buy the boat, and go into business. Once Melbourne paid back the loan, the two of them would become equal partners. And I know a couple of boys who could learn to crew for you once you get established.

…

Melbourne and his young wife Gisela left quickly. They first went to Hamilton, Ontario, and put their toddler son, Sean, in the care of Melbourne’s mother. She was already providing childcare services for others, and she welcomed her little grandson into the household.

They brought with them a potential crew member—his wife’s best friend, named Maxine Ofield. Maxine’s husband had abandoned her and gone out to Hollywood to find work in the movies. So she was at loose ends and ripe for an adventure. Melbourne said later, Maxine was eager to learn and never flinched at adversity. The three of them went directly to the classic fishing towns fronting the English Channel.

It was bitterly cold and damp that November when they found rooms over a waterfront pub at Poole, near Bournemouth. Melbourne got work in the pub, where he served beer and sold loose cigarettes for tuppence each. His customers were mostly poor. They would order a glass of beer, tenderly sip half of it, then come back asking for a bit more to freshen the mug. Melbourne always refilled their glasses to the brim. Soon enough, the half-beer returns began to dwindle until customers were coming back with only an inch in the glass. If their timing was right and the owner wasn’t looking, Melbourne would still top them off.

By day Melbourne haunted the waterfronts. Soon he found what he wanted—Sanspareil, B.M. 326.

Sanspareil’s white hull made her unique among traditionally black-hulled Brixham trawlers. Here she is easy to spot, making her way out to sea along with two other smacks.

She had a white hull, which made her unique among traditional black-hulled Brixham trawlers. And she was beautiful, built in 1912 by Upham, a historic boatyard founded in 1817. During her fishing fleet years she had developed a reputation for speed. Later, in 1931, she was converted into a yacht with a thirty horsepower motor added to supplement her sails, and she was furbished with no expenses spared. Her price was three thousand pounds sterling—in U.S. currency approximately ten thousand dollars. This figure being twice what Mr. Young had advanced initially, Melbourne had to renegotiate the deal via long-distance communication. Young agreed, and wired the additional funds.

…

A yacht is a craft reserved for pleasure, for the art and joy of wind-borne cruising. So to turn a trawler into a yacht was comparable to turning a railroad car into a restaurant.

After all, a trawler is a commercial vessel used only for the industrial purpose of trawling—which is to drag a huge net along the sea bottom and scoop up the particular species in season, especially sole, cod, haddock, halibut, fluke, and turbot, then hoist this harvest up through the cold resistance of water. When trawling was done by power of sail and muscle alone, the work was grueling and primitive enough to ensure that the oceans would not be overfished.

But even as a commercial vessel, Sanspareil had possessed the beauty inherent in sailing ships, a beauty that industrial machinery could never match. The powerful steam and motor ships that followed her retirement soon swept the waters clean of plentiful fish harvest. And they stunk of petroleum and rust.

Here is the difference between the old clean technology of sail and the present progressive technology of sludge: sailing trawlers depended only on the wind. They had to be capable of at least nine knots free speed in order to maintain one or one-and-a-half knots with the heavy trawl down. It took a smart sailing vessel to sustain that speed. Speed under sail always creates clean, quiet harmony, because non-motorized inventions necessarily have to adhere to the great dictum: Form follows function.

…

During the nineteenth century the boat builders of Brixham on the south coast and Lowestoft on the east coast of England created a design that enabled their fishing fleets to harvest the sea with ultimate efficiency. Their sailing trawlers all had plumb stems and long overhanging transoms (rear ends) to prevent squatting when hauling a trawl. Most were ketch-rigged with a vertical mainmast and a smaller mizzenmast aft and strangely raked forward. Both masts carried gaff sails and set topsails aloft. A staysail was set forward and a bowsprit was run out to set a flying jib. A running (that is, moveable) bowsprit was necessary in those days so it could be run in on deck whenever the sailing trawlers entered crowded fishing ports to land their catch.

These sailing trawlers became icons, particularly due to their reddish sails. In the bygone Brixham trawler tradition, sails were dressed with a mixture of cutch (a resin from India) and red ochre. This process was called barking, and it was done annually to preserve the cloth. Iron oxides in the ochre gave the sails a deep red-earth hue. The look was featured often in paintings of the old maritime masters, with Turner-esque skies all gold-glowing in veiled sun and resentful shadows. Local shipyards built hundreds of these ships between the 1880s and the 1920s. By the beginning of the twentieth century the number of sailing trawlers totaled three thousand.

…

Today precious few remain. The Second World War was particularly hard on the fleet. Nazi submarines amused themselves by capturing Brixham and Lowestoft trawlers, shooing away the fishermen, then shooting up the boats as a form of target practice. Today Brixham’s heritage fleet consists of only six vessels.

…

The agent selling Sanspareil was George Cork, who owned Admiralty Dockyard in Falmouth on the peninsula of Cornwall.

Cork had a large, vivid indentation in his forehead. Melbourne asked him about it. Cork said that he’d first gone to sea as a boy, and his responsibilities had been to cook and to come up on deck quickly whenever the trawler tacked. When that happened he had to hold the fore staysail clew to windward until the captain shouted to let go.

After several miserable days of incredibly hard work and little sleep, young Cork thought he had mastered backing the headsail. One day, though, he let the sail fly before the captain gave the order, causing the vessel to miss stays. The sail had a large heavy block at the clew, and the sail came back with a vengeance. The block walloped him on the forehead, laying him out cold.

When he regained consciousness in his bunk, little Cork expected sympathy. But the captain came below, looked at the split head and blood, then ordered the lad to stand up and turn around. The skipper gave him a wicked kick in the butt and yelled at him: You’ll remember now, I suppose, to follow orders!

Life under sail answers the sea’s demands, and the sea carries a swift razor. Melbourne never forgot seeing Cork’s damaged forehead. But a sharper lesson for him lay just ahead.

…

Melbourne bought Sanspareil knowing she needed repair. Her bottom was foul with seaweed and barnacles. Her transom had some dry rot. And she was making a bit of water, which probably meant that her caulking was less than tight. He puzzled over the best place to have her hauled out. England, it turned out, was expensive for this. Word among the tongue-waggers in the pubs of Poole suggested that he should sail her across the Channel—across La Manche, as the French call it, the sleeve—to a boatyard in Cherbourg. There, a boat owner could get a better deal. Melbourne liked that idea. Having spent time in Montreal, he could speak some crude outlander French.

But he had no charts for the trip, and he’d never sailed La Manche before. He needed to hire a trustworthy pilot.

Enter Mr. Leo Toms, a middle-aged Limey who rose one evening from his perch at the bar and announced that he knew the waters between Poole and Cherbourg like the back of my hand! He had been both a yacht hand and a yacht captain, he said. Melbourne decided to trust Mr. Toms, pay him to pilot the crossing, then pay for his passage back to Poole.

After what happened later, though, and for the rest of his life, Melbourne would stiffen his shoulders and growl whenever he heard that expression: know it like the back of my hand!

They studied the weather for several days. Then when the prospect looked good, this peculiar and rather understaffed crew slipped their berth at the first lightening of dawn.

They intended to motor-sail across the channel heading south under power with staysail and mizzen—small sails fore and aft—raised to keep them steady. A favorable wind from behind kept pushing the stern up, so the pilot had to pay attention to prevent yawing.

Problem was, the bilge began filling with water.

This leaking wasn’t bad at first. Melbourne spent about five minutes each hour hand-pumping seawater. But the need to pump kept increasing by about five minutes every hour. Soon he was pumping as much as he wasn’t. Something was going very wrong.

Whenever he could break away from the pumping, Melbourne searched urgently for the source of this incoming water—the through-hull fittings, the bearing on the prop shaft. Nothing. He started tearing up floorboards and some of the beautiful mahogany paneling, but there was no perceivable leak to be addressed. By then every hand was turning-to without cessation at the bilge pump.

As the frigid December darkness closed in, the wind freshened. Soon they could see the loom of the light from Cherbourg on the eastern horizon. There was no port nearer than Cherbourg. He knew they had about two hours, under good conditions, to make port. But Toms’s back of my hand course had not allowed for the Channel current, and now they were perilously far west and leeward of Cherbourg.

The wind soon built to force seven. It struck them from the east and took control of Sanspareil. By then, the water in the saloon was hip-deep. The engine, now submerged, quit altogether. Suddenly they were almost helpless in the talons of this storm, which was driving them at its own pace right into Cap de la Hague, a sawtooth headland of raw pre-Cambrian granite.

They had lowered the mizzen long before. But now the wind tore the entire staysail from its boltropes and swallowed it in the darkness. The ship was now ungoverned, wavering at the mercy of the elements.

Stumbling in the dark across the wave-swept deck, Melbourne tried desperately to raise the mainsail, working both the peak and throat halyards, hoping to grab some navigational control over the vessel. Maxine, who had long since given up her role as cook, took up his slack. If the ship could just get enough sail to turn against the wind, maybe it could catch the tidal race, the currents that naturally swept around Cap de la Hague out into the open sea. That way, at least, they wouldn’t smash to pieces against sea cliffs. Gisela was massaging Toms, whose hands and legs were cramping badly.

Then the bilge pump clogged.

Melbourne sent Gisela below decks to get the life vests, also the passports. She came back soaking wet. She’d had to dive for them. In the saloon the air space that remained above the water line was less than two feet.

Another hour passed. They could hear the roar, the noise of the shore, the smashing of wave after wave colliding against implacable rock.

Suddenly a large buoy appeared, flashing in the darkness. Steer for the buoy! Melbourne shouted. He could see its occasional flare in the surging confusion. The buoy was ten feet tall, perhaps six feet around, crowned with the usual grid of angle iron. The presence of the buoy marked the boundary between survival and sure disaster. Melbourne had heard of desperate sailors climbing onto such floating structures and clinging all night while riding out other terrible storms. He grabbed a hawser, played it out, then bent it into an enormous byte or loop. Like a lunatic cowboy he hurled the rope, hoping to capture the buoy. He threw it high into the air as hard as he could on that treacherously rolling deck.

Toms shouted from the tiller: You’re not allowed to do that!

What?

No one is permitted to interfere with the buoy!

We don’t know exactly what Melbourne said at that moment, something derogatory, no doubt, about the punctilious nature of a certain British barfly. No matter. The storm took that hawser and whipped it away forever. Sanspareil brushed against the buoy. Melbourne knew they were going in. He dropped the anchor full length, but there was nothing below on which it could catch.

…

This was about three in the morning and very dark. Through the pelting rain that shone in the light from Sanspareil’s masthead, they could see sheer cliffs ahead. Directly to leeward were monstrous rocks and a small stretch of steep and rocky beach.

Then it happened. With a terrible breaking sound Sanspareil smashed her port side amidships. She had been holed by an enormous rock. Surf was crashing across the deck. The only hope of survival was to leap onto that conquering rock, then somehow get to the next one a bit farther, and from there to the beach.

When the surf pulled back, they could see bottom. It was as if they could just walk up to shore, if only the sea would stop moving. But five seconds later the next surge came smashing in.

Melbourne shouted, When you see the next wave, go for the rock. Go!

Mr. Toms made the jump first. He landed securely on the rock, then he was gone.

Maxine tried to jump. She had already cleared the deck when she screamed. Her timing was bad. A great chasm had opened between the rock and the ship’s hull. Melbourne grabbed her, but he was too exhausted to actually lift her back over the railing. He held on. They both scrambled for traction. Then he caught hold of her pants, ripping them, and he pulled back, both of them tumbling onto the deck.

With the next surge Maxine leaped and landed successfully on the rock. She got up and disappeared into the freezing December blackness.

Then Gisela and I both went together, Melbourne recalled. I had her at the back of the neck, gripping her coat collar. I never let go of her. They fell together into the sea. Saltwater soaked into their layers of pants and coats, feeling strangely warm in contrast to the icy wind. The sea pulled them rolling underneath the doomed ship. It sucked them back out to sea.

The following is Melbourne’s own account of the scene:

"The seas were a turmoil as we turned over and over fighting for air. One moment we would surface, only to be smashed against the rocks and be swept out again. The kapok life jackets protected us somewhat from the sharp rocks, but the seaweed would slip through our fingers as we fought against being washed away again.

It is difficult to remember how many times we were washed in and out, but it was some time before we were lifted higher than the next wave could reach. Inch by inch we made our way up the rocks, exhausted, spewing up the water we had swallowed. In movies you see people depicted crawling up the beach. No way in this case. Our soaked clothes weighed more than we could lift. All we could do was lie there and let the water drain out of our clothes.

When they were able, he and Gisela crawled up the beach. Suddenly the wind seemed to encase them in ice. His teeth chattered so hard he was afraid to talk for fear of biting his tongue.

Mr. Toms was doing all right, sitting well up on shore. Well, this will be a good story to tell when we get back to the pub!

Crawl crawl crawl.

They’d lost Maxine. For a panicked time, they scrambled along the shore shouting for her. They heard her cry in the distance. She had been washed into a gully about a hundred yards away. The seas were breaking over her, but she had a firm grip on a rock. Her torn trousers were hopelessly knotted about her ankles and pinned in place by her waterlogged sea boots. Melbourne cut her free.

The light at the masthead still shone even though Sanspareil was beginning her metamorphosis into driftwood, a transformation that would entail the loss of every personal and essential item on board—all of Melbourne’s original artwork, his watercolor ship portraits, everything gone. The flashlight still shone a strong beam. Melbourne could hear the commercial jingle in his head. Eveready battery does it again!

Another fierce set of waves began storming the land. We’ve got to get inland, he shouted. Let’s go! Let’s move!

Slogging and nearly frozen, they began searching for some way to climb from the battered shore to the flat farmland above. They tried scaling the cliff, then fell back. Finally the flashlight revealed a nearly vertical footpath and they took it up and up, scrambling, the wind pushing them left and right and dousing them with icy sprays of rain. They made gasps and cries of pain that really sounded like the yearning to weep, but it wasn’t time for that. The four of them reached a kind of plateau, a seaside