Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester
Figure 20.1 Captain George Laurenson, his wife Barbara and their children
Figure 21.1 Ballast, stiffening and cargo sequence
Figure 21.2 Typical apprentice’s reference issued on completion of service
Figure 22.1 Captain John and Susie Isbester with the halfdeck in the background
Figure 22.2 The final page of John Isbester’s last letter to Susie
Figure 23.1 Dalgonar on her beam ends
Figure 23.2 Dalgonar from port side, as seen from Loire.
Figure 23.3 The rescue as seen from Loire.
Figure 24.1 The sail plan before attempting to wear ship
Figure 24.2 The sail plan while attempting to wear ship
Figure 24.3 The effect of swell on Dalgonar’s ability to turn
Figure 24.4 Mr Mull’s tracing of Captain Jaffré’s track chart
Figure 24.5 The lifeboat stowage
Figure 24.6 View looking forward from the poop
Figure 24.7 Launching a lifeboat with radial davits
Figure 24.8 Launching a lifeboat, Step 3
Figure 24.9 Lifeboat outboard and almost ready for lowering: Step 6
Figure 24.10 Mr Mull clambering along the ship’s side listed to 70 degrees
Figure 24.11 Dalgonar’s final passage
Figure 24.12 The value of centreline shifting boards
Figure 24.13 Intended securing of the Callao ballast aboard Dalgonar
Figure 26.1 Figure of a generic three-masted square-rigged sailing ship
FOREWORD BY PROFESSOR TONY LANE
At last a book with an original slant on the men and, yes, the women, of commercial sail’s last years. For more than one hundred years, scores of books have been written by seafarers recalling and commenting on their experiences of working and living aboard square-rigged sailing ships. All were written from memory, some helpfully jogged by saved letters and ‘telegraphic’ diaries/logs. A great deal of this genre, very popular from the early twentieth century and into the 1960s, makes for fascinating and sometimes exciting reading. I’ve been collecting and reading these books for forty years and I’m persuaded of their essential authenticity by the sheer repetitiveness of accounts telling of deaths, desertions and unrelenting danger; appalling food, low wages, and long hours; brutality not always leavened by solidarities, acts of bravery and skill, and occasional kindnesses. Probably the best of these accounts is David Bone’s, The Brassbounder first published in 1910 and thereafter more often than not in print. It certainly has literary flair but like the more prosaic authors, Bone has little to say about the family circumstances of either themselves or their shipmates. Now, however, thanks to Jack Isbester, readers have a unique opportunity to see beyond the rigours of daily life in sail (without ever losing sight of them) and find in satisfying detail something of the social origins and familial life of one of the last shipmasters in sail. In this book there is a consistent interrogation of a life at sea intimately interwoven with family relationships despite lengthy separations and scattered, infrequent and unreliable means of ‘keeping in touch’.
The story begins in, and often returns to, the Shetlands, the birthplace of Jack’s grandfather, Captain John (‘Jack’) Isbester. His family’s daily life and broader social and economic circumstances have been sieved by the author’s unremitting diligence in digging down and around in the detail of Shetland’s self-supporting agriculture and its fishing industry where Captain ‘Jack’ learned to be a seaman. All of this has been additionally informed by the author’s family’s passion for keeping letters and documents. It’s an extremely rare thing to be able to read letters passing between a shipmaster, his wife and other family members. Experienced readers of sailing ship days will find themselves in familiar territory when the story goes to sea. A broad reading will have revealed stories of shipwreck through grounding, ships consumed by fire with crews thereafter making lengthy passages in lifeboats, rescues of crews who have experienced the foregoing, a capsized ship drowning its master, its crew saved in a masterpiece of a rescue. But readers won’t have found all this in one career as they will here. There is so very much to admire in this book apart from what I see as the real prize – the letters exchanged between Captain ‘Jack’ and his wife, Susie, and her letters home when she’s at sea with her husband. Then there’s another bonus – photographs which are just plain wonderful as also are the author’s explanatory diagrams and ‘user friendly’ maps. Here is a biography written as a splendidly rounded social history of a late 19th century Shetlander.
Tony Lane
Professor Emeritus
Cardiff University School of Social Science
My father Allan Isbester, eighth child of Captain John Isbester, cherished his parents’ history and often expressed the view that the story of his father’s life should be written. He saved documents, letters, postcards and newspaper cuttings, and was always ready to reminisce about family, sailing ships and Shetland. Without his compiling and guarding of the Isbester Archives this account would have been much diminished. My mother Jean Isbester was an avid and discriminating reader and correspondent who had a big influence on my writing. She would have enjoyed this book.
My wife Audrey shared the considerable task of transcribing all the family correspondence – she read while I typed – and welcomed the fact that this book, unlike my previous ones, actually contains human interest. Audrey and my daughter Claire Isbester have read every word that I have written and both have helped with constructive suggestions and encouraging comments, for which I am very grateful. Claire also met me regularly in the London Guildhall Library where we spent many hours tracing John Isbester and his ships in the microfiched pages of Lloyd’s Lists
The late Captain John P Thomson OBE of Sandness in Shetland knew John Isbester as a respected elder when he himself was a young officer. On his own retirement in the 1960s he went to considerable trouble to gather together a record of all the ships on which John Isbester sailed and sent it to my father. I have found this record and the commentary with which he accompanied it very helpful.
Useful advice on nautical sources and their interpretation