Shenandoah’s Master RIP

There have been a couple of significant course corrections in my life. Each popped up, out of the blue, and each posed a question. It was a fork in the road with a choice to make – to plunge, or not to plunge. How I answered the question set me off, happily as it turned out, along an unanticipated but enormously rewarding tack.

In the early spring of 1968, done with graduate school for the summer, I worked in a shipyard in Fairhaven, Massachusetts where I grew up. It was grunt work, scraping, sanding, and repainting the bottoms of offshore draggers and scallopers. One morning, I clocked in at seven as required and was poleaxed at the sight of Captain Robert S. Douglas’s gleaming white topsail schooner Shenandoah, hauled out on the railway, her spars towering over everything else on the waterfront. She was there fitting out for her summer cruising season. She was nothing like the hard working, beaten up fishing vessels whose filthy bottoms I had seen so much of. She was a vision, some sort of royalty. I hadn’t imagined such creations existed.

I climbed up the ladder, from the earth to the deck. The first person I met was Tony Higgins, Shenandoah’s mate. I asked for a job. Tony told me to see Bob. Dressed in old paint stained khaki pants and a sun-faded blue work shirt, Bob told me that his crew was complete. Then, for some unfathomable reason, he wrote my name and phone number in a book he kept in his pocket, and in August of that year he called me and asked, would I join the crew because one of his hands was leaving early to get back to college. I said yes. 

I never got back to graduate school. I ultimately moved to the Vineyard and worked for Bob as a deckhand and carpenter for the next two years. Bob and the matchless topsail schooner, which he conceived, built, and sailed from Vineyard Haven for nearly seventy years, shifted the course of my life.

Such moments as these leave lifelong marks, but not just for me. Countless others fell into the Bob/Shenandoah ambit, where something was permanently implanted in the young people who signed up.

Over the years, I and my two sons, like so many others, went aboard as deckhands, dishwashers, cooks, boatswains, and mates, and all of us were transformed by the experience – in large and small ways – from teenagers, college smarty-pantses, landlubbers, and timid, weedy know-nothings into sailors – in service to the vessel, her demands, and her master. 

It may be that only a few of us kids ultimately led their adult lives going to sea for a living, but for sure it was a rare few who left the schooner unaffected. The hallmark of Bob’s natural, quiet leadership was his unmistakable commitment to the value of the complicated, engineless  sailing experience because of its obvious exigency and demanding discipline. He infiltrated a bit of his focused, undiluted vision in each of us.

Now, his watch on deck ended,  I am reminded of the hours I spent talking with Bob, who then was approaching ninety, about himself and Shenandoah, his life’s obsession, as I wrote my story of his life.

“My Shenandoah: The Story of Captain Robert S. Douglas and His Schooner” (Tilbury House Publishers, 2022, ISBN: 978-0-88448-981-8). 

Among so much else, I discovered that Bob had an enormous worldwide correspondence with the grownups, women and men, who had been his crew, with sailors of all ages and nationalities, with sailboat designers and builders, tugboat designers, marine historians, and engineers, and with countless members of the Maine windjammer fleet. It was all about boats, sailboats, sailing ships, ocean passages, and long gone sailing ships.

And there were the jet pilots with whom he had served in the Air Force, and the parents and their children who had sailed, for a week or two every year with him as passengers,  and later with his up-and-at-’em, dynamic wife Charlene and their four boys, all steeped in the freedom loving but exacting Shenandoah world. Then, over Christmas, as Bob and I talked, photographs and holiday wishes stacked up daily. The phone was rarely silent. 

That warm hubbub was the same in 2022, as I remember it had been in the kitchen of his large, ancient house overlooking Vineyard Haven harbor in 1970, when his rooms were filled with sails, sailing gear, marine antiquities, priceless marine paintings, and schooner deckhands bunking wherever there was vacant floor space to unroll a sleeping bag. And it has been the same even today, in the tiny house on his West Tisbury farm where he died: Everyone was welcome, and everyone came.

Why?

Gary Maynard, a 16 year old when he joined Shenandoah’s crew, now a Vineyard home builder, explains it  as well as it can be in remarks he made at a 2020 event honoring Captain Douglas with a lifetime achievement award from Tall Ships America: “I…washed dishes, set tables, tended the coal stove, jumped through hoops for the mad cook, and set about learning the lines, the commands, the maneuvers, the routines, and the culture that would allow me to rise through the ranks to galley boy to deckhand to bosun and then mate. 

“I learned to line up the cut cobalt glasses when setting the 18-foot mahogany tables, to black the stove, to clean the skylight so the mate couldn’t wipe a finger around the lip and find coal dust. I learned to chamois varnish, to polish brass, to jump for a bucket and sponge should a footprint appear on the paintwork. I learned to roll a topsail bunt so tight it couldn’t be seen from the deck, to haul a brace with everything I could muster, to race aloft to handle sail, to pilot a yawl boat under the stern in a chop. I learned to sand and caulk and paint, with no curtains, no holidays, no splatter. I learned to herringbone a torn headsail, and to trim a lamp wick to perfection.

“There were no lessons, no instruction, no praise. Only the highest of expectations.

“We sailed on and off the hook, spreading all canvas in minutes, everything on the double. Later in the day we would roar into a familiar harbor all sail set, only to round-to, douse sail quickly and without a hitch, and flake her great white wings for the night, the miter seams running precisely up the center of the stowed headsails where they sat high and tight on the jibboom.

“The magnificent vessel herself was only part of the tapestry being rewoven by the forbidding, quiet man with the flaming sideburns who stood all day, every day, year after year, back at the wheel. It was the traditions that Bob Douglas saw disappearing in the sunset, those threads of knowledge passed down since the dawn, those standards, those hard earned rights of passage that made his working vessel so dynamic, so real, and so important.”

Doug Cabral is a former co-owner of The MV Times.