An Old Mariner’s Christmases

A Christmas card from Captain Nickels to his daughter Priscilla

A Christmas note from Captain Nickels:

As you know from my story, I was born in 1836 on a farm in Prospect, now Searsport, Maine. My mother was from a Congregational Church family, my father was a Presbyterian. Except for there being two different versions of the Bible in my extended family, both contained the New Testament – so both recognized the birth of Jesus, and therefore Christmas. 

The year I was born, Christmas was not yet a holiday in New England. That was the year it became recognized as a holiday in the south, though, where there were a lot of Catholics and Anglicans, and even Methodists, folks who made a much bigger deal of Christmas than we did on the work-focused seacoast of Maine.

I grew up in a community of merchant mariners, shipbuilders, and farmers. Of them, only the shipbuilders and farmers were in Maine for Christmas – and it was not a holiday for them; it was a work day like any other. The Captains and the seamen, and the Captains’ families were at sea in the winter months, mostly trading in the South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the South China Sea, and occasionally stopping in New York. 

When I was small, there’d be little gifts for each of us for Christmas: hats and scarves and stockings knitted by mothers, aunts, and grandmothers; whistles and toys carved by fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. But otherwise, it was another work day – unless it fell on a Sunday – then it was a Church day.

I went to sea in 1852 with my uncle. I spent my sixteenth Christmas in Portugal, a very Catholic culture where Christmas was a colorful and joy-filled event. It surprised me that no one was working, even on the docks. I was never home in Searsport for another Christmas.

Eight years later, I was in Bucksville, South Carolina, on Christmas Day 1860. I was First Mate to my brother Captain James Nickels. He was the Master of the Brig Waccamaw. We arrived in Bucksville on December 12th, loaded with stone and other goods from New York destined for our ship owner Henry Buck’s plantations. Henry was a Methodist who once lived in Bucksport, Maine – just a short way from Searsport. The Buck family decorated their home on the Waccamaw River in anticipation of Christmas, and they were preparing to enjoy a peaceful Christmas with their large family when we arrived. 

It took the better part of the week to discharge our cargo, then to begin loading the lumber and marine supplies we were to take to the West Indies. James and I stayed at the big plantation with the Buck family, while our crew stayed aboard Waccamaw to see to the cargoes. We planned to spend Christmas and the New Year with our old friends, then set sail for the West Indies just after the first of the year. Politics intervened.

Perspective of the location of Bucksville, SC

Eight days after our arrival in Bucksville, and five days before Christmas 1860, South Carolina seceded from the United States. That upended all of our plans. Henry Buck ordered us to sail for Searsport as soon as possible, there to fetch his recently married eldest son William and his daughter-in-law Desiah home to Bucksville. More secessions were rumored, and possibly a war, Henry needed all of his children with him at his three plantations. 

Rather than the happy Christmas the Bucks had planned, we were suddenly engaged in loading ballast and lumber aboard Waccamaw to make a dangerous and unwelcome mid-winter trek back home. If you’ve read my story, you know how that all turned out.

In 1862, I became Master of the Brig Waccamaw, when James became Master of the Bark McGilvery. Still, I was at sea or in a foreign port for every Christmas. But so were my cousins, a veritable litany of Searsport captains and seamen. We were away from our home port every Christmas, but we more often than not still had family to share our days.

In 1870, my wife and children and I stayed in Charleston, then went upriver to Bucksville to pass the Christmas-to-New-Year week, this time with our new Brig E. F. Dunbar. That season was made more memorable by Dunbar’s frightening demise at sea three weeks later. You’ll recall that story, too, I expect.

In 1871, my family and I arrived in Boston from the West Indies on Christmas Day with our Bark Emma F. Harriman. On Christmas Eve 1874, we left Boston for Cuba. For a merchant ship and her crew, Christmas was always a working day. Except for one or two years I happened to be in Boston or New York on Christmas Day, I spent the next twenty Christmas seasons at sea or in a foreign port with my wife and family. 

After my girls were married, I still sailed and spent Christmas somewhere in the world besides home. Both of my daughters married sea captains. My granddaughter Alice spent her very first Christmas in Buenos Aires; after her younger sister Emmie was born, they spent her first Christmas in Dublin. We were merchantmen, and we didn’t have the notion of family Christmases at home. Our ship was our home.

Bark Mary E. Russell, 1875 - 1895

On December 12, 1895, I struck a reef and sank the Bark Mary E. Russell in Bimini. I spent Christmas that year in Nassau doing the paperwork on the accident. By then, Christmas had become a universal holiday around the world, and a far cry from the early barely-noticed early ones I spent in Prospect, now Searsport, Maine.

The first family Christmas holiday I ever spent at home with my family was Christmas Day 1907. I was seventy-one years old. I retired from the sea that year, then my wife died just before Thanksgiving. I lived in a large rented home in Brockton, Massachusetts, with my two widowed daughters and my five surviving grandchildren. Despite being saddened by my wife’s recent death, it was the most memorable and peaceful Christmas I had ever had. There was a tree in our living room – a first in my life – and we had gifts, gifts from the department store where my daughter worked.

Front of a Christmas Card Captain Nickels sent to his daughter

My remaining Christmases – from 1908 to 1920 – I lived at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a retirement community for old mariners on Staten Island. They made a very big deal of Christmas at The Harbor – even the many old sailors who were not Christian by faith, believed in and loved the magic of Christmas there, and the enormous banquet we were served, and the gifts we received compliments of The Harbor. 

All of us had spent a lifetime of Christmases at sea – and it was wonderful to have that day in the fellowship of other old seamen, and to tell our stories of Christmases past. Yes – I told and re-told the story of my 1860 Christmas in Bucksville, and its scary foreshadowing of that defining War Between the States. 

And I heard their stories of Christmases at sea and in ports all over the world.

It was really nice to sit snugly by the great fireplace on Christmas Day, smoking cigars and reminiscing about ‘olden times’ and places most folks would never see. Yes it was.

Happy Christmas,

WSN

The Civil War – A Family Story Becomes a Book

The chimney from the first of Henry Buck's lumber mills dates to about 1828.  It is perhaps fifty yards from his house, now occupied by the widow Patsy Buck.

(Photo by the author, April 2013)



Captain Nickels’ great-granddaughter asked me a simple question last night – “What surprised you most during your research?”

I have an answer, Berta. Hands down, it was the macro- and micro-views of the American Civil War that Captain Nickels gave to me. It took me two years to sort that out. Because it involved families – families I never knew were related in any but the most oblique way to ours, and to our Captain. I did full genealogies on both the McGilvery and Buck families, so I could see how the puzzle pieces fit the Captain’s life. I did genealogies on their ships, too – Who built them? Who commanded them? Where did they travel? Who bought them? How did they end?

The McGilverys were complicated – but with the important exception of William McGilvery's daughter Desiah, they remained rooted in New England during the Captain’s life. But those Bucks! The prolific Bucks of the Penobscot were everywhere I turned. Where there was money to be made by hard work and ingenuity, the Bucks were there making it. Shipyards in Maine and South Carolina, tobacco plantations in Virginia, cotton warehouses in Maryland, a shipping company in New York City, a horse farm in Saratoga (to shelter the prize blood stock of both sides from war service), and the lumber mills on the Waccamaw. There are stories galore there – but this was the Captain’s life and when all was said and done, they weren’t my stories to tell – except for the folks who left the Penobscot and set up housekeeping on the banks of the Waccamaw River.

My genealogy training teaches me to present facts as facts, without judgement. I was schooled in the 1950’s and 1960’s – when U.S. History was taught from recorded history, before the years of revisionist history, before history became an entrée served with a side of opinion, interpretation gravy, and editorial soup – now washed down with a super-sized gulp of politically correct brew. Surely, you can argue that history is always recorded by the winners. But in a Civil War, there are no winners – only survivors – and the letters written by folks on both sides of the conflict show that they were simply families trying to take care of each other, hoping to emerge whole on the other side of a war no one wanted. Like most people my age, I studied this war, the brother against brother, the father against son, but it didn’t seem terribly personal to me -- that is until my great-great-grandfather introduced me to his place in the Civil War, and I got rather closely acquainted with his friends and cousins, the families of William McGilvery and Henry Buck -- and walked a virtual mile in their shoes.

“You think we lived in a vacuum?” the Captain asked me. “We had jobs to do, families to feed, lives to live. You need to look closer. It wasn’t all about Searsport or Addison or romantic trips to the Orient. You need to dig out Mary Ann’s diary. You know, the one that your cousin Ronie Strout sent you last year? You need to read it more closely. There are clues aplenty there. It wasn’t the first time we all had been to Bucksville, you know. We had a very long history with those folks. Start digging.” That was near the end of 2011.

April 2013 was the first time I visited the Buck family and stood with Patsy Buck at the old chimney near Henry’s home on the edge of the Waccamaw River -- and I knew to my core that my great-great-grandmother Priscilla, and her sister Mary Ann, and her brother Sidney, and her daughters Alice and Priscie, and her husband Captain William, and his brother Captain James, all of them had stood in this very same place many times during the decade that straddled the Civil War. That was then I discovered that the men, my Captains James and William, and great-great-uncle Sid Austin, had been here in this very same place on the day that first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. That was the moment I knew this man’s story had to be a book.

MRP
 

Ed Cutts (descendant of Henry Buck), Patsy Buck (widow of Henry Buck IV), and Janice Cutts (Ed's wife) welcomed us to a picnic on the shores of Henry Buck's home on the river. Note our 2012 blue Jeep parked in the background.

(Photo by the author, April 2013)

 

Reflections on A Life at Sea

Photo by Monica Pattangall, January 2015

Like any other job, merchant shipping can be a boring life. The daily routine. You are manager of a warehouse, and you own part of it, too. More often than not, you own a share of the inventory, as well. There’s bookkeeping, enough you feel like a clerk much of the time. You keep track of your goods, your cargo; you make sure it’s safe and not burning, rotting, shifting, rusting, leaking, being eaten by vermin, or consumed by your crew. Then, of course, you have to make sure your warehouse is moving along the water in the right direction, avoiding bad storms, finding fair winds, making good time, and remaining whole and safe. And then you have employees – the crew who are with you day and night for weeks on end. You keep them busy tending to the warehouse; you see to their doctoring, their diet, their safety, their training, and their comfort (such as it is), and sometimes see to the wrapping of their remains in a spare tarp, and committing them to the sea. Is it lonely? Not so much as some might think. Some men enjoy being master of their own small universe. I do.

Men in the business of tending floating warehouses, buying and selling goods, moving everything from wood to wine, fish to fruit,  limes to limestone across the sea – we are born loners. We are also born to live in denial. We are little different from the merchant in your hometown. He has all the same worries in one way or another. My warehouse could sink. Two of them already have. But theirs could be taken by storm or fire, too. The difference is that they are the more sociable creatures. They will rebuild their warehouse on exactly the same plot where the old one stood. They live in the midst of family and friends. They are there when those family and friends are born, are married, are sick, and when they die. They go to weddings, christenings, meetings, parties, and funerals. I don’t.

Except for my wife and my daughters, whom I choose to keep with me at sea, all of my relationships are temporary, too short to become attached or over-involved in each other’s lives. For a month or two here, a few weeks there, I meet up with them very briefly – we talk, share cigars, trade stories and news; I hear of the events that happened back in the home towns or at sea, relate what I have heard of family, prices, wars, disease, and ports; then we take our leave an get on with the business of moving our warehouses across the oceans. We will meet again in another time and place. In one or another enormous port city where it is so much easier to be alone, yet enjoy the company of well-known strangers.

I spend two-thirds of my life on the sea, at the center of my own small world where I am in control of my destiny, my family, and the lives of the few men who help keep us afloat and moving ever onward to the next harbor. I find it easier to deal with news in the abstract, far away from the place and time from whence it comes.

Perhaps it was losing my mother, and so many of my family, when I was a boy of eight that makes me want to distance myself from the land and people of my blood. I know I am never comfortable among them for very long. Even with my brother – we enjoy each other’s company so very much at sea or in a foreign port, but not so much at home. Our separateness is also our bond.

Perhaps I am just a wanderer, in search of eternal adventure like the generations of people whose blood runs in my veins along with the sea water. I know for certain that when the time comes that I must leave the sea, I want to be among others like myself – the loners and adventurers who wandered the oceans without boundaries, and whose memories are of far-off places, wooden ships, and canvas sail. If that cannot be, I pray my soul will be committed to the deep, for it could not bear to be bound to the shore and an ordinary life.

WSN

The Waccamaw: Congratulations. You Survived the Begats

Waccamaw – it’s a river in Horry County, South Carolina. If you’ve made it to page 67 without giving up, you are about to start the brief, but amazing journey through the Civil War.

Waccamaw – it’s the name of a brig, a brigantine, more accurately, or even more accurately a hermaphrodite brig -- half brig, half schooner. Actually there are two brigs Waccamaw, but we love the second Brig Waccamaw best, because she will become Captain William Sewall Nickels’ first command.

If you got to page 67 without napping, you are at the place where the book turns from a chronicle to a story. After all, in fifty-or-so-pages you have been on a whirlwind tour of local history from the American Revolution to the Civil War. A lot to absorb in a few pages with pictures. And much of William’s early life is chronicled between the wars. By now, you have also discovered that the heart of the ongoing story lies in the news clippings, so when you go on with the meat of the tale, you won’t overlook them as often.

Now we know where every key person was in 1860, and how they got there. You are only a short hop to Bucksville. You are done with the begats, mostly, and a fascinating story will emerge, a story that stitches the lives of our Captains James and William Nickels to the lives of the McGilvery and Buck families, for much of their lives.

And the lives of those families become irrevocably entwined those of the sons of Captain David Nickels. Or at least until one or another of these men meets their Maker. The dynamic will change, but the men who are the base of it merely pass on leaving their children to build on their dreams or live with their failures. By now, you have met the Austins of Addison, too. They will be with you to the bitter end.

If you are a grown-up, you may have made the connection between the shipbuilding on the Penobscot and the slave-hewn lumber of South Carolina. It’s just a fact, like any number of facts to be learned, but not judged. Squirrel that away, though. It will come back to haunt some of these men, but not all.

Hang in there. It gets better, and even better. (You just said “I certainly hope so!” I heard you. Hang in there. Captain Nickels was just a rookie before the war, like I was at the beginning of the writing.)

Welcome aboard the Brig Waccamaw, the first family home Captain William Nickels shared with his bride, and not long afterwards, his newborn twin daughters.

And welcome to the shores of the river named Waccamaw.

Monica



View of the Waccamaw River from Henry Buck's front yard
Photo by the author - 2011

The Begats

If you read the prior post, you know what the Captain wanted, how he wanted his life recorded, and how I attempted to do it his way. Your book is on its way (or not, if you didn't order one). You pick it up, open it, and say: "A Granny Book?" "What the hell is a Granny Book?"

A Granny Book is a book written by somebody’s Granny. In this case, me. It is a gift to the future. A labor of love like the hand knitted sweater or crocheted afghan with an occasional dropped stitch or skipped row or mismatched yarn. This Granny Book tells a tale, sometimes awkwardly, that could forever go untold as more generations pile up on the Captain’s descendants list. It is a seed packet, too. Each little fact has the potential to become a garden of stories. It is a trail of breadcrumbs to lead a yet unborn historian to some now-hidden truths when the information superhighway reaches more hidden places where the golden Easter eggs of history are shrouded today.

A friend Stockton Springs coined the term ‘Begats’ for the three chapters. He said ‘Once you get past the Begats, it isn’t bad’. From a Mainer, I take that as “it’s pretty good”. That’s what the Captain wanted. He wanted you to know his roots. His 'Begats'. That’s what I give you.

For most of the book, almost everyone, except perhaps Chris Appleton, will need to have a map of the world or a globe handy – or a phone to ask Siri or Google “Where is Surabaya?” If I had mapped and explained every one of the places our Captain and his brother James sailed, I would have needed a second volume just to explain the references to oceans and port cities. 



The Captain's Hometown
[(c) 2015 Google Landsat Imagery]

 

Except for the Tory commanders at Fort Pownall, every one of the families in the early chapters will show up again in the Captain’s life, and not necessarily back home in Maine.

See those two crystal balls on my desk? At times, they were my portals, my access to the Captain’s thoughts. Strapped for ideas or frustrated with my progress, I gaze at them and ask “Where to next?” “What am I missing?” “Why the blazes did I even start this?” “Is it good enough?” “Should I quit now or go on?” The answer was always that I would forever regret a failure to finish that which was already begun.

Captain Nickels was born in 1836. Just sixty years after the Declaration of Independence, forty-nine years after the US Constitution was ratified, and sixteen years after Maine separated from Massachusetts. He died about two years after the end of the First World War, probably never giving a thought to the possibility there would be a Second World War for his great grandchildren to fight. To him, it was simply the World War.

His life as a newly minted Master of Sail, and as a young husband and father during the Civil War, gives a different view of that conflict – that of a merchant mariner, and of some real living breathing people trying to live their lives during an awfully trying time.

Bye for now,

Monica

Captain William Sewall Nickels of Maine

Then She Wrote a Book about My Life ...........



Captain Nickels speaks:

She spent a lot of years hassling me. I even had to show up in her dreams once; I had to point her to places I’d been; sometimes I had to drag her by the hand to see something important she'd missed.

Me:

The only time I saw the Captain, he said “I have a message from your father. I’ll be right back”. And I never saw him again; I felt him, but I never saw him again. And the message from my father? No. Don’t think I got that either --- unless it was “Stop messing around and get on with it.” Or maybe I did get it and didn’t realize it. Maybe the Captain in my dreams was the message from my father.

Captain Nickels:

I’m the ghost, but it was she who was doing the haunting. “What did you do next?”, “Where did you go after that?”, “Oh, and how did that make you feel?”, and my favorite one of all, “You mean you took those two little babies off to sea in the middle of a blasted WAR?” She has a mouth on her, my grandson's granddaughter.

So I finally told her “You need to start at the beginning, Girl. Like in the Bible – you need to start with the 'Begats'. You tell people where my people came from, and my friends’ people, and my wife’s people. Not that they’ll be any better off for the knowing of it. Likely bore them comatose. But, it’s part of the 'why' -- why I was who I was and why I did what I did. And you will be the better for it, Lass. You will understand why I took those babies and their mother off to sea in the middle of a bloody war. Then you can tell of my life as I lived it. We were all interconnected, you know, everyone in that part of Maine. Everyone who went to sea had someone back home on the farm and in the shipyards. It’s just the way it was.”                                

⚓ ⚓ ⚓

Me:

After many false starts, I finally put the Captain’s story down as I had learned it. In the order that I learned it. The first three or four chapters cover the 'Begats', and see young William off to his first decade at sea. The first thirteen chapters are told in third person, present tense (“William is here, James is going there, The twins are spending their birthday on the passage...”) – well, that’s because it's how he lived it. It took awhile to wrap my mind around that.  It isn’t until he is nearly retired, in Chapter 14, that he finally has the time and inclination to tell his own story. The reader will find, here and there, the remnants of the first few discarded starts, some leftover past tense verbs that didn’t take well to translation to the present tense, but at the Captain’s request – I tried to tell his story as he lived it.

Monica