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.”                                

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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