CHAPTER II A SCOTS SEAPORT IN THE THIRTIES You should have seen, man cannot tell to you As once, long since, when docks were filled With that sea-beauty man has ceased to build. Yet though their splendour may have ceased to be, JOHN MASEFIELD, Ships (1912). THE estuary of the Tay affords a fair anchorage, and thus there grew at an early period a flourishing shipping in Dundee. In the Burgh Laws of Dundee for the year 1550 it is enacted "that no ship be fraughted be privat persons but openly in presce of Prouest or Bailles or than befor the Dean of Gild to pas in merchandice. In France, Flanders, Denmark, Danskine [Dantzig], or any free port without this realme," etc. Thus in the sixteenth century there was already an active trade between Dundee and the Continent. The timber trade brought the port into relations with Bergen and Quebec, and the trade in tar with the Swedish and Finnish ports in the Gulf of Bothnia and with Archangel in the White Sea. In the thirties of the nineteenth century Dundee had become the seat of the linen trade. The industry had passed from the domestic to the factory stage. There were then more than fifty factories producing the staple. This trade brought the port into close relations with the Baltic and especially with Russia, and when the trade in jute began, with India. When China was opened to British trade, Dundee ships went to Hong Kong and Canton. 1 Warden, Alex. J., Burgh Laws of Dundee... (London, 1872), p. 13. Dundee ships engaged in whaling and sealing both in the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. So long as the sperm-whale fisheries lasted, Dundee whalers took an important if not even the leading place. Every year the whaling fleet departed on its adventurous voyage for the hunting grounds in Davis Straits or the Southern Seas. By common custom, everyone was interested in these voyages. The people of Dundee have from time immemorial been sailors and shipowners. The ownership of each vessel, before the days of shipping companies and great "combines," was divided into sixty-four shares. The captain invariably owned one or more sixty-fourths, sometimes the mate owned one also, and their family connections held the bulk of the remainder. When the whaling fleet returned, the "catch" was the universal topic of interest and conversation. The amount of it was signalled from the first available point, and by the time the ships were sailing up the Tay, everyone knew how many barrels of whaleand seal-oil and how many sealskins each ship brought. Already projects for the spending or investment of the profits of the voyage were being formulated. When a ship was too old or too unseaworthy for any other service, she was sent to Quebec for timber; because with such a cargo she could not sink. Under the conditions of ownership which have been mentioned, it was naturally common for the shipmaster who was leaving for a long voyage to take his wife and even other members of his family with him. The Dundee folk of this time were thus much-travelled. My mother's name was Mary Ann Taylor Bridie. Her family had been for several generations sailors and partners in the ownership of vessels sailing from Dundee.1 Her father, Captain John Bridie, had been in all the branches of the Dundee trade-in the Baltic, in Archangel, in India, in China, and in the Quebec timber trade. He retired from active seafaring about 1840, and up till that time had made eight voyages round the world, some of these extending over two or three years. Thus of Dundee days in the thirties I learned from my mother. She was born in Dundee in 1828. She told me of frequent voyages as a girl with her father, of going by coach to Newcastle-on-Tyne and other ports to meet him after long absences, of the presents he always brought her from foreign countries-furs from Russia, eiderdown compressed 1 It was customary for captains to have paintings by marine artists of their ships when new. A reproduction of a painting executed at Riga about 1820, of the schooner Ann, built for my grandfather and called after my grandmother, is given by way of example. THE SCHOONER "ANN" IN THE HARBOUR OF RIGA From a painting in oil (executed at Riga c. 1830) in the possession of Mr. Sam Mavor in bladders of sheep from Copenhagen, a monkey from the tropics, quaint ornaments from Canton, an ostrich from the Cape, or the skin and feathers of an albatross or a polar bear's skin from Davis Straits. An ostrich excited the household by swallowing my mother's crochet needles and bobbins; a monkey committed havoc with plates, upon which he swooped at unexpected moments and scampered off to enjoy the clatter they made as he smashed them by throwing them on the floor. The animals accumulated to such an extent that from time to time they had to be packed off to Wombwell's menagerie. My mother's only brother, John Bridie, became a captain at twenty-one, and soon afterwards master of an East Indiaman.1 2 Life in those days was a mixture of exciting moments and intervals of waiting for the return of the ship from long voyages. Of the friends of the family at that time I know little. I remember, however, that Michael Scott, the author of The Cruise of the "Midge" and Tom Cringle's Log, was a friend of my grandfather and an occasional visitor, and that my mother used to go on more or less prolonged visits to the Miss Websters of Balruddery. Mr. Webster was a keen palæontologist. He had found in the Den of Balruddery, in the immediate neighbourhood of his house, fossils which about this time (1840) began to attract attention. The Den had been known locally for its extreme picturesqueness, but it became widely famous for its fossils. Hugh Miller visited Balruddery frequently, and took with him at least on one occasion Sir Roderick Murchison and Dr. Buckland. When Agassiz visited Scotland, Miller took him also. In his Old Red Sandstone,3 Miller gives an account of that visit and of the identification by Agassiz of a huge fossil lobster previously unknown. In 1839, when my mother was eleven years of age and at a boarding school, her father was sailing his ships in the Baltic trade. In the autumn of that year, while on a Baltic voyage, his vessel was pursued by a pirate. At that time the Baltic was infested by pirates, none of the maritime nations bordering upon the sea having a sufficiently powerful navy to hunt them down. Captain Bridie ran his ship into shoal waters near Narva, where she escaped her pursuer but grounded. He determined to purchase his stranded ship and cargo from the underwriters and to attend to the salvage himself, but the lateness of the season and the closing of the harbour of Narva by ice compelled 1 He was killed in a railway accident at Kirtlebridge in 1863. This estate is now in possession of my friend J. Martin White, formerly M.P. for Forfarshire. 3 Miller, Hugh, The Old Red Sandstone (Edinburgh, 1874), p. 158. |