Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most particularly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand. The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength; and the power of directing and employing the common strength, forms an unusual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.
The evolution of the surviving coasting schooners from freight to a summer vacation platform where people could get a taste of what had previously been available only aboard the yachts of the rich is largely credited to Captain Frank Swift and his efforts from 1936 to create what he saw as a kind of dude ranch escape on the waters of Penobscot Bay.
In time, other owners joined in.
Notably, in 1973 Captain John Foss purchased the Louis R. French and removed her from the freight trade. He spent three years restoring the vessel to her original sailing condition and outfitting her hold for passengers. Oh, my, did he!
In 1986, he sold the schooner to his brother-in-law, who sailed and captained the French out of Rockland and then Camden until she was purchased from by Captain Garth Wells in 2003, who in turn sold to Captain Becky Wright and Nathan Sigouin. Maybe “passed her on” would be a more apt description.
Meanwhile, the already legendary Foss turned his attention to renovating the American Eagle, which he purchased in 1984. It’s now one of the few schooners that undertake longer voyages to places like Grand Manan Island near me or down to Gloucester on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in addition to venturing offshore looking for whales.
At first, those names meant little to me. Now, however, I understand why they’re often uttered in reverential tones.
first, flapping fabric as wind kicks in
then a surge at my seat and flooring
like riding a stallion
muscular under the saddle
The Federal and State Governments are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, instituted with different powers, and designated for different purposes.
The 1990 application to include the restored and repurposed Louis R. French in the National Register of Historic Places includes much more than a detailed physical description of the schooner and her history.
The National Park Service document, Louis R. French (Schooner), available online portrays the two-masted coasting schooner as the most common American vessel type, with tens of thousands of them functioning as the “freight trucks” of their time, carrying coal, bricks, iron ore, grain, oysters, lumber, and even ice between ports.
Yet, at the time of the application, only five of them were surviving in the United States.
In addition, the French was the oldest surviving sailing vessel built in Maine, the center for wooden shipbuilding in the United States after the Civil War.
As the application noted, until the outbreak of World War II, the coasting schooners were so common that nobody paid much attention to them. Designed to run fairly close to shore, the coaster lacked the fishing schooner’s ability to ride out a gale offshore on the fishing grounds. Nor did the coaster approach the scale of the great four-, five-, or six-masted coal schooners that transported coal from southern to northern ports.
Deepwater sailors, who occasionally took a large schooner across the Atlantic, scorned the useful and ubiquitous little coasters, sometimes accusing their skippers of “setting their course by the bark of a dog.”
The application quoted maritime historian Howard I. Chapelle, who observed “the straight fore-and-aft-rigged schooner is decidedly a coastwise vessel, and attempts to use such craft for long voyages have invariably been disappointing and disillusioning, if not disastrous to the adventurers.”
The schooner supplanted the square-riggers in the coasting trade for practical reasons:
Fewer sailors were required to handle the vessel, and a schooner could be worked into and out of harbors and rivers more easily than any square-rigged craft. Her trips could also, as a rule, be made in quicker time, as she could sail closer into the wind, and it was hardly necessary for her to sail from Maine to New York by way of the Bermudas, as some square-rigged vessels have done during baffling winds.
Put another way, they were the errand boys, the short-haul freight droghers, and the passenger buses for many a year, and their contribution to coastal community life, especially in New England, was substantial.
“Without them, the country could hardly have been settled,” as the report quotes one source.
These days, there’s nothing Plain Jane about them, though. Not in my boat – err, book.
… who can think it possible that the president and two-thirds of the senate will ever be capable of such unworthy conduct. The idea is too gross and invidious to be entertained. But in such a case, if it should ever happen, the [ruling] so obtained … would, like all other fraudulent contracts, be null and void by the laws of the nations.
Somewhere in the past I heard about a kind of public journal that wasn’t overtly personal but carefully recorded by devoted individuals. News items, witty thoughts, chance encounters, weather observations might fill them.
Recently, I came across one of those, the Record Book Kept by Daniel C. Osborne (1794-1871), Quaker and Banker. The copy was online at the Friends of Allen County’s website – the highly regarded genealogical center at the public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
What especially interests me is that he was a member of Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire. His entries provide fresh insights on the life of the congregation and the broader community, both the subjects of my book, Quaking Dover.
A record book, as this one demonstrates, is a collection of random accounts the individual found fascinating or significant. Daniel’s, for instance, has entries on the manufacture of watches in U.S., John Jacob Astor’s will and estate, the popular vote for president 1848, the wife of president Franklin Peirce president-elect, population of the states 1855, English Bible translations list, executions for murders, steam boat accidents and Atlantic Ocean steamers lost, even the royal family of England – most of those notations are on distant events – but they accompany family genealogies and other things closer to home.
Daniel, a son of Marble and Mercy (Nock/Knox) Osborne, operated an iron foundry and was later president of the Strafford Bank, now part of TD Bank. He lived in a Georgian Colonial style home his father had built adjacent to the Quaker meetinghouse, where Daniel continued as an active member while the congregation aged and declined.
These entries note visitors from other locations to Dover Friends Meeting, perhaps all of them in traveling ministry.
Although his penmanship was impeccable, I’m not confident in my ability to decipher it clearly. Even so, I find his records filling in details I’m not sure I’d uncover otherwise. The family genealogies, for instance, have details otherwise lost from the Quaker records when an individual “married out of Meeting,” was “disowned” for other reasons, or moved from the area.
The accounts of deaths, mostly around Dover but sometimes including U.S. presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, or soldiers at Lexington, Massachusetts, also name neighbors who weren’t Quaker. Perhaps they were even involved in business dealings with him. Notations in the margins point to a surprising number of suicides and, especially, drownings. One 53-year-old man was killed by his own father. Mention of the passing of Quaker evangelist Joseph John Gurney reflects the branch of Friends that Dover followed while that of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher indicates an openness to religious liberalism.
Notations of family marriages point to a much broader interaction of Dover Friends with fellow Quaker families in Rhode Island than I had suspected, including the Wilbur family, prominent in a schism in the yearly meeting, through no blame of their own. I’m guessing it’s because so many attended what’s now the Moses Brown School in Providence.
I wasn’t expecting this tidbit.
Of special interest to me is this notation, “10th mo 22, 1864. Israel Estes of this City, died this day, aged 64 years. He was a lineal descendant of Joseph Estes, who died in Dover Neck in 1626, coming over with Edward Hilton, in the first vessel, and had lands assigned to him as early as 1631.” If true, it would add another person – and, obviously, eventually a wife – to the settlement before the Puritan invasion that multiplied the frontier settlement now known as Dover. As the history stands now, Thomas Roberts was the only other person who arrived with Edward, and they were followed a few years later by brother William Hilton.
It would also place the origin of the surname in America at Dover rather than Massachusetts.
Well, that’s what I get in a first sweep through the record book. I suspect there’s much more to glean.
Yes, time marches ahead. I can’t count the number of times I rewound and reset this before Quaker worship in Dover each Sunday, or First-Day, in the old parlance. Some Friends said the ticking kept reminding them, “Slow down, slow down.” Others found the sound disturbing.
It’s hard for me to believe my book Quaking Dover has been published more than a year now.
Jnana's Red Barn 