Kennedy - Sea change: a man, a boat, a journey home

Valkyrien

Islandport Press

P.O. Box 10

247 Portland Street

Yarmouth, ME 04096

Copyright 2018 Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by
Islandport Press. International copyright reserved in all countries.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-944762-40-7

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-944762-22-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952109

Printed in the USA by Bookmasters

Dean Lunt, Publisher

Cover and book design by Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press

Cover image and interior images courtesy of Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

Printed in the USA by Versa Press

This book is dedicated to my wife, Vicki, with All My Love.

Contents

Before the Mast

My wife Vicki gave me a print of a painting by Ed Ruscha and Nancy Reese for my fortieth birthday. The painting depicts a clipper ship tossed by a storm at sea, heeled over, decks awash, sails full and shining through the spray, scuttles pouring forth frothy oceanmaking her way forward, courageous and defiant.

I love this painting with all my heart. I love it foremost, I think, because I love the sea. I am carried by the sea. The sea protects me from what is out there in the world that is dangerous. Sometimes I feel best aboard a ship at sea in a storm. I spend so much of my time each day worrying about things that will never happen, or chafing over the past. A storm requires all of my attention.

Above the ship, written diagonally from the upper left to the lower right on the painting, Ed Ruscha added to Reeses image the words:

BRAVE MEN RUN IN MY FAMILY

With those six small words Ruscha transformed the painting from the kind of decorative art my parents collected into a pop-art commentary.

Yes, brave men run in my family. My ancestors and cousins fought in just about every war this country has ever waged. Brave men in my family also run for office. In my family, brave men also run away. My father disappeared when I was three-and-a-half years old. He had been shot and killed. I keenly felt his absence.

One of my favorite film characters is the minstrel in Monty Python and the Holy Grail . A minstrels job is to tell the truth, but subtly. In the film, the brave man, Sir Robin, runs away from a battle. The minstrel sings:

Whe n danger reared its ugly head,

He bravely turned his tail and fled.

Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.

For me, it is much easier to brave the sea than to face the challenges of staying at home and living what Warren Zevon called A Quiet Normal Life. For me, the truly brave thing is not holding the wheel of a schooner as she breaks up in a storm, but committing to the intimacy of marriage and being present in the lives of my children. My whole life I have sailed, but I had not, in the truest sense, recognized myself as a father and a husband. I had no idea at all how that was done. Vicki though, helped me figure it out.

I ran away on the schooner Valkyrien , for nearly a year. Sailed away, more accurately, though I was never actually gone for more than a few months at a time. I missed her too much.

Prologue

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,

by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I had come to San Francisco searching for a wooden schooner.

Barack Obama had just been elected president, and for most of the past year, Id volunteered for his campaign. That fall, I felt the world overflowing with the potential for progress and change, and understood for the first time why so many people remembered the election of 1960 and the extraordinary optimism of that earlier time. The transcendent importance of the election of the first black president did not mean the fight for equality was over, or won, but rather that it was more important than ever to educate people about our countrys past, and particularly our treatment of people of color.

I wanted to illuminate a part of this past by creating a memorial to the extraordinary bravery of the men and women who took part in the largest slave break in American history. The story of the packet schooner Pearl was one that had shocked and angered but also fascinated me ever since my friend Bob Nixon had first told me about it several years earlier.

Nixon is a gifted filmmaker and dedicated environmentalist. We have been friends for more than thirty-five years. Bob was obsessed by the Pearl . In 1848, seventy-seven African-American men, women, and children had risked their lives aboard the Pearl , trying to escape slavery by sailing secretly along the Potomac and Delaware rivers toward the free state of New Jersey. Tragically, wind and tide slowed the Pearl . An armed posse of white vigilantes riding fast in a steamboat caught up with and captured the slaves. The idealistic whites who had aided in the daring escape were arrested and jailed, while the slaves were sold south to Black Belt plantations.

Bob Nixon has an extraordinary sense of what is right and good and just in the world. He convinced me to join him on the board of the nonprofit organization, The Pearl Coalitiona group of grassroots volunteers, many of whom live or work in some of Washington DCs toughest neighborhoods. The Pearl Coalition is dedicated to memorializing the heroes of the Pearl and to building a full-size replica of the schooner, to be berthed in Washington, DC. The new Pearl will serve as a hands-on museum and vividly convey not only the story of escape, but also the importance of schooners in American history.

Schooners built this country. The fish American colonists ate were caught from schooners. Tobacco, timber, rum, sugar, wool, and slaves were all shipped aboard packet schooners. Packet vessels of various sizes were used to ship mail, trade goods, and transport passengers among the colonies and between America and its European masters. American roads remained primitive up through the Civil War, and railroads did not have the capacity to ship sufficient goods, especially to towns isolated off the rail grid. Much of the shipping that is now done by trucks, rail, and aircraft was accomplished via the efficiently rigged packet schooners. A part of this maritime heritage is preserved even today. When we order goods from Amazon.com, we receive an email notice saying Your package has been shipped, when of course they really mean trucked.

The first Americans to defy the King of England were the captains of packet schooners. Dedicated to independence and fond of their coin, schooner captains avoided taxation by unloading their cargo on small piers along farmland and in rivers, away from the larger towns and out of reach of His Majestys taxmen. They proved that colonists could disobey the King with impunity. Their defiance was one of the first great acts of American independence.