In the foreword to William Bunting’s adventure-filled beguilement, Sea Struck, Llewellyn Howland III, writes: “As well as being wide-ranging and authoritative, Bunting’s text is witty and beautifully written. It is the work of a sailor-scholar for whom the sea is a source of perpetual wonder and historical research a perpetual delight.”
These words could be applied to any of Bunting’s writings—especially so in Live Yankees, his latest look into one aspect of enchantment with sea and sail, a realistic voyage into the seafaring life, shipbuilding, ship owning, and Maine coast capitalism, in a time spanning a century when great vessels were kept afloat and profitable far into the steamship era. And, too, it is an intimate biographical rendering of one family, its individual components, and the touching of the Sewalls on many other lives in an industry that enthralled with its ever-present romantic lure and incipient danger.
The Sewall boatyards built huge wooden vessels, in rapid succession, all with hand tools. Ships slid off the greased weighs, with segmented ownership by captains and other investors, heading from east coast ports, on the line, which meant down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, with crews of questionable skill and temperament, controlled hopefully by a vigilant highly disciplined mate.
Dissatisfaction and accusations about injustices were frequent, more commonly against the Sewalls than other boat builders. Bunting gives us great detail about the personality traits of captains and crews, all miraculously retrieved research available through the well kept and maintained files in the Sewall office. “The Sewall collection is unique,” Bunting tells me. It is housed at the Maine Maritime Museum. “It is a miracle that many of the records survived and a credit to the Sewalls that they did.”
There are 315 linear feet of documents in the Sewall family papers, “one of the great family archives, “Bunting writes. “There is enough material in the Sewall papers to write a number of books. It took me a full year just to read the papers. I assembled a collection.” And what a collection! Just the separate life histories of the Sewalls, their captains, the building of their 100-fleet of ships at sea and at work are staggering in their detail and historic relevance.
Live Yankees is divided into 14 parts and several appendices, all written with Bunting’s jaunty debonair yet utterly serious style. Part one, for instance, begins, as do all the parts, with an italicized paragraph and then a quote referring to something we will read about shortly,. Thus, Part One begins: “We first meet Arthur Sewall, the most notable of the maritime Sewalls…” and after several intriguing thoughts of what is to come, the quote: “Take your hatchet, Mr. Preble…” Bunting’s inimical fondness for odd facts and fundamental background settings never ceases to lead the reader through hundreds of pages, with gripping sadness when the end of reading is nigh. Rarely is historical data written with such fun and high finesse and yet with utter authenticity. Who would not relish continued reading time after the sentence: “In the spring of 1939, the old shipbuilding town of Bath, Maine, lost two unique voices when Dr. Edward E. Briry… and his parrot Charlie were buried in the same grave…”
The chapters give us, along with dated portraits, of the characters involved in this history of the years of the historic storied great square-riggers. Social life and customs and decorum slips into this pictorial remembrance of a time dating from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.
It was not unusual for family members to accompany a captain on his lengthy years-long voyages. While a fairly rough-necked crew might be contending with each other and their mate, the family would be sequestered in often-elaborate quarters, strictly apart from the sometimes maniacal men that manned the multi-sailed ship. It was interesting to note that bringing a piano along was not unusual. How did they keep it in tune in the damp and jostling aura of a sailing ship?
There were many merchant sailing vessels of the time, but most kept slipshod records of their daily involvement with their ships—thus the Sewall records are both rare and a genuine true novelty of the shipping industry and the lives it encompassed both a sea and ashore.
In the Sewall captains’ regular reports, arriving sporadically by rail or ship, therefore arriving in Bath weeks and months after the sending, reveal much about the education, or lack of it, of the captains, and their cleverness in the face of mutinies, plagues, shortness of supplies shipwrecks, near-disasters and spoilage of cargo. These reports are the reality show of this era, and have survived thanks to the preservation of the Sewall archives.
The Sewalls tried to delay the end of worldwide trade by sailing ship as the era of steamship and steel hulls quickly made the majestic square-riggers obsolete. Wonderful (and, too, despicable) personalities people these pages. A new crew, gathered by a captain from shore side taverns and such, “came onboard in fighting trim,” quickly put to the mast and rigging in whatever rough manner deemed needed. The photos reveal a vanished world, as do William Bunting’s endless stories.