An Eye for the Coast: The Maritime and Monhegan Island Photographs by Eric Hudson. - Review - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

Unless you reach for the Dramamine at the first mention of salt water, the maritime photographs of Elmer Forrest ("Eric") Hudson (1862-1932) will hit you like an onshore breeze on a summer shore. Hudson's twin passions were painting and the sea, and they fed each other. His paintings of ships and of Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, where he summered for years, were widely exhibited at all the right museums. However, his photographs, or rather his glass-plate negatives, remained in boxes in the care of his daughters Julie and Jacqueline Hudson. In 1993 Julie died and Jacqueline gave the plates to Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., one of the authors of this book, to present to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

Shettleworth enlisted William H. Bunting, a maritime and photographic historian, and he in turn sought out Paul T. Stubing, a boat-builder, fisherman, and artist, who lent his expertise. The dual challenge was to print the plates and to identify the many uncaptioned views of Monhegan and graceful workboats at sea and in harbor along the East Coast.

The result is a marvelous twofer. The prints are all velvety grays and blacks of a kind impossible to coax from thirty-five millimeter film, and the extensive captions comprise histories of Monhegan, the nineteenth-century seaborne trade in fish, salt, ice, lumber, and molasses, and finally, the great diversity of wooden boats involved. Hudson's photographs are the perfect marriage of artist and mariner in which each boat is frozen forever in at once the most revealing and most flattering angle. He took many of the pictures from his sloop Minstrel, which is shown beached on Monhegan. Despite its enormously long bowsprit and boom, the caption calls it "a salty little packet." The question remains how Hudson managed simultaneously to trim the sails, man the tiller, clamp his camera to its tripod, and expose the plate at just the right moment.

Here is a sample of what may be gleaned. A photograph of the whaling bark Swallow in dry dock in East Boston with one of its whaleboats suspended from the davits inspires the commentary: "Note also the sweet lines of the whaleboats, designed to move quickly backwards (as well as forward) so as to escape the fury of a harpooned whale." And of the bark: "Whalers of her model combined considerable deadrise with a relatively hard turn of bilge, resulting in a ship that heeled easily initially, aiding the heavy work of 'cutting in' a dead whale." These descriptions infer much from little with enviable acuity.

The hermaphrodite, or half-brig, Lucy W. Snow carried "missionary supplies" from Boston to the West Coast of Africa. These included "Kerosene, dear twelve-inch by twelve-foot pine boards for coffins for wealthy natives, a few boxes of Bibles, a great deal of rum, and even the occasional missionary." Off the African coast the ship would anchor beyond the surf line for offloading by native boatmen who insisted that the rum be discharged flint. Then "a puncheon was tapped and sampled before the first boat in had reached the beach, and the remainder of the unloading then proceeded with a certain spirit of abandon." The return cargo was often palm oil in one-ton casks rolled from the back country to the coast by crews of six or seven women.

The sharp, three-quarter view of the steam tug A. W. Chesterton of Boston inspired Bunting to write: "No marine artist could fail to be seduced by the jaunty, self-confident appearance, the sounds, and the sweet tug smells of soft coal, colza off, and simmering pots on the galley stove. Ostensibly but utilitarian tools of commerce, tugs...drew aboard the daydreams of every dockside idler." Exactly.

"Mackerel, fresh or salted, was [in the 1890s] a popular dish; today but few Americans would recognize a mackerel, much less cook one." Thus, tartly but precisely, Bunting begins a capsule history of the mackerel fishery that was operated chiefly by sleek and competitive schooners from Gloucester. The accompanying photograph of the Minerva in an oily calm could stand up to any Fitz Hugh Lane.

The mackerel seiners were abundantly crewed and more democratically run than most other fishing boats. Only the captain and the cook were slightly more equal than the others - the cook because he was responsible for simultaneously stirring his pots and single-handedly sailing the ship while all hands were in the dories working the seines.

Monhegan's harbor, sheltered by Manana and Smutty Nose Islands, was very much the focal point for Hudson's camera. The captions explore the wide range of boats that called the harbor homeport as well as the visitors who put in there. As fish and lobster were plentiful within easy reach of the island, the dory, first rowed, and then motorized, was very popular. Bunting, who is not shy with his opinions, writes opposite a view of the harbor: "Power dories... not only propelled fishermen into the motor age but attracted members of the general public who were led to believe that going boating was now like driving a floating automobile." Bingo. It is doubtful, however, whether the seagoing tourist would have thought to replace a broken gas line with a hollow stem of kelp, as one of the islanders did to get home.