Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester
than 50 years, has been a considerable and welcome help, while Dr Alston Kennerley responded to my appeal for information on the loading, stowing and securing of cargo and ballast aboard sailing ships, suggesting a number of helpful and interesting sources.
From Shetland Davie Smith, retired fishing skipper, has helped me with his extensive knowledge of Shetland boats and fishing; John Goodlad PhD has made his fascinating study of the work of the Faroe smacks available to me; Marion Hughson, former Whiteness Registrar, has helped me to sort out details of the Isbester family history; and Florence Grains has clarified the story of Maggie Smith of Strome who ‘couldna leave the sheep’ to marry John Isbester in Liverpool.
A shipmate of mine from the 1950s, the late Alan Thompson, found himself sixty years later with the task of sorting through a neighbour’s posthumous papers. Recognising that the correspondence included letters from my aunt reminiscing about life at sea with her father, he traced me and sent them to me, for which resourceful and thoughtful act I am most grateful. The aunt in question was the late Kathleen William Margaret Davies, née Isbester, and I am grateful to her son the late John Davies, his widow Aeurona and their son Philip for memories shared and documents loaned.
When needing a second opinion on sailing ship matters I have been fortunate to be able to consult two experienced sailing ship men, Captain Peter Hamer BEng and Bill Dineley ExC. Bill also explored the resources of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park and put me in contact with Gina Bardi, librarian, and her colleague Stephen Canright, park historian, both of whom were most helpful.
My warm thanks go to my grandsons Jonah and Reuben Privett who spent many hours searching through 5,000 wreck reports on the internet to identify large sailing ships which had been abandoned or lost between 1876 and 1914. Jonah also redrew and improved my diagrams, while Reuben created a Hard Down! website for me.
I am grateful to my nephew Andrew Isbester who discovered the record of John Isbester’s sighting of the intra-mercurial planet Vulcan; to Dr Anna Pegler-Gordon who provided me with a revealing story about events in Frisco; to Allen Martin who translated Captain Jaffré’s account of the rescue of the survivors of the Dalgonar disaster; and to Scott Muir who gave me some simple but effective advice on searching the internet.
Dr Rick Lupton earned my gratitude by honing my computing skills, while Dr Sean Privett-Main advised me on medical issues in my manuscript, and Claire Woodhead ACR preserved and digitised the 100-year-old Loire/Dalgonar trackchart tracing, while John Theobald skilfully digitised most of the ancient photos of family and ships. Alan Hanson from the Otago Shetland Society in Dunedin provided useful information about Isbester family members in New Zealand.
I am indebted to Captain Hdjalmar Styra in Bremen, Captain Jean-Daniel Troyat in Brittany, the late Captain Einar Sjuve in Tønsberg and Bjørn Tore Rosendahl PhD in Kristiansand for help with research in their localities.
Dr Keith Whittles and his publishing team have ‘gone the extra mile’ to give me a book of which I can be proud and for this I am very grateful.
If with all this help, so willingly and generously given, the book is less than perfect, the fault is mine.
Jack Isbester. Autumn 2018
My grandfather died 21 years before I was born, so the main link between us is that we both spent much of our lives at sea: 47 years in his case and 35 in mine. Even my father’s links with his father were diminished by the fact that Captain John was 48 when my father was born, and he died when my father was 13. For me one of the greatest pleasures derived from writing the story of my grandfather’s life has been discovering how many of the same ports we visited and how often we carried similar cargoes. Liverpool was his home port throughout almost all of his career: that was where he joined and left most of his ships, and that was where he studied for and passed all his exams. Liverpool was my home port, too, for the first 20-odd years of my seafaring career, but during those years I was completely unaware that I was treading in my grandfather’s footsteps. The only surprise is that my grandfather did not marry a Liverpool girl. He found a wife on his doorstep at home in Shetland, and left the privilege of a Liverpool wife to me!
It is a happy circumstance that much of the detail of a merchant seaman’s life – when the voyage started and ended, who was aboard, how old they were, where they came from and what disasters befell them – has to be recorded in the ship’s official log book (OLB) or Articles of Agreement (AoA), and while many of these records have been lost many survive in archives in the world’s seaports. It is an even happier circumstance that in times long before the internet or even the widespread use of the telephone, communication was by letter and my grandfather and his family were committed letter writers.
I have been very fortunate that my father was a hoarder of family documents and that throughout his life he was happy to correspond with anyone interested in my grandparents, the ships and Shetland. I have been fortunate, too, that my unusual name enabled one former shipmate to trace me and provide me with intriguing letters and photos 60 years after we had last spoken.
In this story I have quoted extensively from my grandfather’s writings. They vary considerably. His handwriting is always admirably clear, and when writing in the official log book, or composing a letter which he would have considered important, for example a birthday letter to a 13-year-old son or condolences to a friend of his wife’s, the punctuation and spelling are good, with few mistakes. When he was writing to my grandmother, however, his punctuation was sometimes missing and the spelling more arbitrary. It may be that when writing his personal letters he was writing colloquially, but it could be that he had a glass of Scotch beside him. With the exception of a couple of lines to be taken away by the pilot or the tug, and once when a trusted sea pilot had the con, he appears never to have written letters while at sea. To remove the distraction which might be caused by the minor errors in his letters I have, throughout the book, usually inserted punctuation and corrected spelling where necessary in the documents I have quoted.
I have usually referred to my grandmother as ‘Susie’ because that is who she was to her husband and friends, and so that, throughout the book, is how we usually meet her. I do, however, have the clear impression that as the well-bred daughter of a Victorian Shetland landowner and as wife of the captain of large sailing ships she was conscious of her place in society. She died a year before I was born, but I suspect that had we overlapped and had I when a child addressed her as ‘Susie’ rather than ‘Grandmama’, it would not have been well received! So I do have a slight feeling of lèse-majesté when I use her given name.
Jack Isbester
On the face of it my grandfather John Isbester could hardly have had a poorer start in life. He was born at Mailand, in South Whiteness, Shetland, on 9 February 1852 to Sarah Anderson, who was illiterate, and John Isbister, a seaman who left for the Antipodes without marrying Sarah and never returned. That my grandfather survived the further blow of his mother’s death when he was 15 to become a master in sail at the age of 32, to sail in command for 29 years, and to command for 13 years one of the largest three-masted square-rigged sailing ships flying the red ensign, is a testament to his character, ability and determination, as well as to his good fortune.
John Isbester’s first surviving words were not written until he was 32, but there is plenty of information about his family, and about his life and times, to help us to understand his background and early years.
Mailand was the home of the Anderson family, and at the time of the 1851 census the household consisted of Mary Anderson, aged 66, her sister-in-law Elizabeth, 73, and her son’s wife Catherine, 22, in addition to a farm servant, Christina Robieson, aged 20, and of course her daughter, Sarah, aged 20, who was to become my great-grandmother. Catherine’s husband, Laurence Anderson, was probably away at the fishing at the time of the census. The Andersons were a big