Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester

       5 SERVICE AS AN OFFICER

      At the end of his voyage to Australia John Isbester, Able Seaman, paid off in Liverpool on 18 August 1876 and seven weeks later, on 3 October 1876, aged 24, he was awarded his second mate’s certificate of competency, no. 02269. He must have enjoyed an enormous feeling of satisfaction at the achieving of his first ambition. Captain R.S. Cogle, writing nearly 40 years later at the time of John Isbester’s untimely death, wrote under the heading The Loss of the Dalgonar:

Sir,- it was with a sad heart that I read the log of the above in the Shetland Times of last week. It has been my privilege to have known the late Captain Isbester for about forty years. He passed all his Board of Trade examinations under my guidance and never failed once.1

      Captain Cogle was a Shetland man who ran a private navigation school at 35 Pitt Street in Liverpool and, in retirement, lived in Hoylake on the Wirral coast, just a few miles away.

It was not until six months later, in April 1877, that John Isbester returned to sea with an appointment as second mate. It appears that he had taken a voluntary winter holiday in Shetland – in 1884 he was described as having been ‘seven years south’,2 i.e. away from Shetland for seven years – which fits with what we know of his movements. Winter in Shetland would seem like a second best when there was an officer’s job to be enjoyed, and sunlit seas, gentle breezes and graceful palm trees to be found. It may well be that jobs were hard to come by, as they certainly were two years later, or he may have decided that he had earned a break and wanted to do a bit of courting. This appears to have been the time when John Isbester ‘left his watch’ (a Shetland expression for an informal betrothal) with Maggie Smith of Strome in Whiteness, the village of his birth. John Isbester eventually joined the wooden ship Nelson, of 943 tons gross, in Maryport as second mate. She was bound for Quebec, where she spent a month discharging and loading, and was back in Ayr at the end of June to end a round trip of two and a half months. Ten days later he rejoined the Nelson in Greenock for another trip to Quebec, this time under a different master. The fact that he was prepared to travel to Maryport and to Greenock to join the ship hints at an eagerness to grab a berth on a good ship – or perhaps on any ship from a shrinking choice.

      A month after leaving the Nelson in Gravesend at the end of the second voyage, John Isbester joined the iron barque Parthia, 1,063 tons gross, in Liverpool for a voyage to Valparaiso in Chile, where, after discharging they sailed north to visit Iquique and load nitrate in Antofagasta, thence to Falmouth for orders and on to Liverpool. That voyage, with its rounding of Cape Horn in both directions, took 11 months and should have convinced John Isbester, if he needed convincing, that he had a good knowledge of the work of a second mate in square-rigged sail.

Back in Liverpool in October 1878, John Isbester found that there were no second mates’ jobs to be found, and on 12 November he took a decision that could have been life changing – he enrolled in the Liverpool Constabulary as a third class constable.3 Enrolling in the same period were men with such Shetland-sounding names as John Gifford Inkster, Peter Anderson, Hector Bain, John Irvine and Magnus Irvine, so it may have been the ‘thing to do’ at that time.