Boats of Mount Desert Island

Antioch Review, The, Summer, 2008 by Luther Magnussen

The September Dunn

This magnificent gaff-rigged topsail schooner was built by Jonas Porter in 1956, not long before his shop burned in the now famous Northeast Harbor Fire of 1957. I sailed on it during its first year of operation, when John O ' Hara and I traveled to Maine to spend a week at a summer cottage that John ' s sister owned. John was friends with the owner of The September Dunn

, and managed to arrange an overnight trip on the boat, although the circumstances of the trip were not ideal. The owner--a man named Buddy Caldwell--had begun to suffer from the early stages of some kind of neurological disease and he couldn ' t do much more than sit at the wheel and yell at people. It was a fairly tragic scene, really, although when night fell on the first day of our journey, Buddy became more lively. We all drank rum, told filthy stories, and sang several Irish peasant songs that O ' Hara had learned from his nanny. The night ended strangely, however. Buddy drank too much, and, in a sort of disease-induced fit, urinated all over himself while singing the last lines of Farewell O ' Tender Maiden

. We were all men of some experience, so Buddy hardly had reason to feel embarrassed. But he quickly stood up, told us all that he was about ready to die now that he couldn ' t " keep control of his dick, " and then went below, where he locked himself in the forward cabin. Needless to say, the songs quickly stopped, and the rest of us retired. The next morning, we were all dropped off at Seal Harbor with a very depressed and unceremonious farewell, Buddy barely able to look us in the eye as he told us goodbye.

It is worth noting that Buddy lived for twelve years subsequent to that night, and I often saw him at parties in New York--keeping his disease in check, one way or another. It is also worth noting that it was during this trip that I slept with John O ' Hara ' s sister for the first time, although it did not spark the kind of romantic bond that we would discover together later in our lives.

Tamerlane

In the year that I discovered opium, I attended a cocktail party at a house called Elsinore, which was a twenty-room baroque monstrosity built high on a hill overlooking Bear Island. The property included a large swath of land that led down to a long dock and a deepwater mooring, where the owner, George Feltham, docked an old Portuguese spice ship called, of all things, Tamerlane

. The ship was in full working order--although not what you would call fully restored--and Feltham took it out for a two-week tour every year to the islands of Nova Scotia with a crew of twelve, consisting mostly of the teenage sons of local lobstermen. Other than that tour, the boat spent the year moored at Elsinore and served as exotic guest quarters, a venue for dinner parties, and a place to drink and shoot the many antique guns that Feltham collected. One of the most appealing things about the boat was that in its more than two hundred years of service, its wood had acquired the smells of the spices it carried. Feltham claimed that at various points in its operation the boat transported cloves, allspice, cinnamon, black pepper, vanilla beans, saffron, and nutmeg. I ' d say that the clove smell was strongest, although after smoking opium that night in the captain ' s quarters, no one fragrance seemed to predominate, and the moment each was recognizable, it gently slipped away. Feltham was not with us when we smoked the opium, and was extremely angry when he found out what we had done. In fact, he chased me and the two women I was with off his property, calling us " filthy drug addicts " and " dirty drug-addicted filth-mongers. " Needless to say, I was never invited back to Elsinore, although on several occasions that summer I again stole aboard Tamerlane

to smoke opium and smell the scent-permeated hardwoods.

Tamerlane

finally met its end many years later during an early fall gale. The storm was powerful, and there had been plenty of warning, but Feltham had been suffering from numerous financial setbacks for several years and hadn ' t been able to afford the upkeep of Elsinore. When the storm arrived, Tamerlane

broke free of its rusted mooring, drifted toward Bear Island, and was smashed to pieces on the island ' s rocky shore. Parts of the boat were salvaged--it was, after all, a sort of historical artifact--but the boat itself would never float again. Today its remains are scattered across a small lot in the Hellman Boat Yard, not far from Sienna, Maine.

Kittyhawk

In July of 1952 a boat called Kittyhawk

docked in Bar Harbor, where it remained for five weeks. It was a sixty-two-foot soft-top Orson Cruiser, and the owner, James Thompson, had on board with him five whores from Miami, whom he was paying top-dollar to keep him amused for the summer. I developed something of a romance with one of the women after having dinner on the boat with Mr. Thompson, although I didn ' t see her on a professional basis, as they say. I bumped into her several days after our dinner at the town ' s main fish market, and after talking to her for several minutes, invited her to dinner at a restaurant called La Croix-Faubin, which was a fairly popular place to eat at the time. She was hesitant at first, and then said she would meet me, but wasn ' t sure when she could get away. She asked if she could just come by my house one night, when she managed to get off the boat. I agreed, gave her my address, and in four days, she came by to say that she was free for the evening.