 |
|
|
||||
|
HARRY PIDGEON Harry Pidgeon was born in Henry County, Iowa, and until he was twenty-seven he was a farmer. Then he got tired of the life, boarded a spring wagon, and went out to Alaska collecting specimens for American museums. "Up in Alaska," he said, "among the frozen snows, I used to dream of the South Sea Islands and the sunshine. And I made up my mind I would go there someday." One summer in Alaska he and a friend built a boat. Pidgeon had never had an oar in his hand, but he had seen pictures of men rowing, and he rock to the water like a duck and shot the rapids of a dangerous river the next day. Later he returned to the States and went to Minneapolis, where he constructed a small flat-boat and floated down the Mississippi to Port Eads. Returning to the West, he settled down as a photographer in Los Angeles. It was in Los Angeles harbour that he built with his own hands the "Islander," the yawl in which he circumnavigated the globe, as told in his book "Around the World Single-Handed." There never was a sailor quite like him; probaby never will be another. It wasn't just that he was the second man to circumnavigate the globe single-handed, and for a long time the only man ever to do so twice; or that he did so after beginning his seagoing when he was past 50. It was the way he did things, and the kind of man he was.
The beginning of the great adventure Harry Pidgeon started building his boat in I9I7 on the shore of Los Angeles Harbor. The design he choosed was a 34-foot yawl, designed by C. D. Mower for the sailing magazine "Rudder", which would be easy for an amateur to build because she was V-bottomed, and whose seaworthiness had been demonstrated. She had a rather lightly sparred gaff yawl rig, easily handled and thoroughly practical for seagoing. Though she was Harry's home for three decades he never seemed to mind that her cabin didn't have full headroom, even for him. She never did have an engine in her. The "can't-do-without" school of modern yachtsmen might contemplate those two facts. Harry figured Islander cost him "a thousand dollars and a year and a half of work."
Harry didn't rush into things. When Islander was ready, he set about making himself ready. "Navigation is easy to learn"; he wrote, "seamanship : the ability to care for and handle a vessel under all conditions is acquired only by practice." When Harry was ready to sail on a longer voyage, in mid-November of 1921, he went alone. He was no misanthropic, but a quietly friendly man who attracted friends in every port. Occasionally in his voyagings he took a passenger or two from one port to another, but sailing alone was what he wanted to do. "There is a great satisfaction in accomplishing something by one's own effort," he once wrote. When he sailed, it wasn't with any declared intention of going around the world. He was going to the South Seas to cruise among islands he had read and dreamed about. It wasn't until he had reached Samoa, halfway across the South Pacific, that he decided to keep Islander's bowsprit pointed West. There were so many interesting islands farther along in that direction. This is no place to review the Islander's four-years voyage through the South Pacific, Torres Strait, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape, up the South Atlantic and through the Panama Canal back to Los Angeles. Those who have read Pidgeon's book "Around the World Single-Handed," have had a delightful and enlightening account of a remarkable voyage. Harry took it easy at sea, and when he got into a port where he liked the scenery and the people, and they liked him, he stayed around until the wanderlust struck again. And he found friends everywhere. Islander dropped her hook in Los Angeles Harbor on October 31, 1925, 85 days out from Panama and two weeks short of four years after she had sailed. Harry was amazed to be greeted with great acclaim. Everyone wanted to see his photographs and hear him tell of bis adventures; not just once but, off and on, for the next 30 years. Harry's yarns delighted those who heard them, whether at a formal gathering or in the lamp-lit cabin of Islander or some other craft where Harry might be gamming, and his pictures were equally good. A lecture bureau figured it had struck pay dirt, and offered the wanderer a 50-lecture tour with a minimum guarantee of $10,000 and expenses. He was quite flattered, but when it developed that much of this tour would be in the mid-West, this man who had rarely seen a tenth of that many dollars at one time declined for the adequate (to him) reason that such a trip would keep him too long away from bis boat. Harry never had much use for money-he once said that if he were sure of a dollar a day income he would be set for life. (That was pre-New Deal dollars, of course.) His life on Islander was frugal and simple in the extreme. A wood-burning stove supplied heat and cooking, and he stoked it with driftwood he cut up along the beaches. He drank nothing but water, and never smoked.
On the seatrack again Once Harry went ocean racing, it was in the 1928 for the New London-Bermuda Race. But Los Angeles was Islander's home port and what relatives her skipper had lived there. She sailed in June of 1932 from Block Island, bound for the West coast. "More than a year since I sailed into the home port," he wrote to one of his friend in january 1934," I am overhauling the Islander to be ready for a long cruise when I feel like going again. The exchange is not so good in foreign ports, but I never make them rich with what I buy, and by selling a few books I can get by. I will drop you a line from some sunny island." He did, from Hawaii in December. His niece and another girl had sailed as far as Hawaï with him. This second cruise seems to have been in the nature of a sentimental journey on which Pidgeon called at ports he had made a dozen years previous. In the fall of 1936 he was in Cape Town, South Africa, and a year later Islander sailed into Price's Bend, Long Island, becoming the only man to have circled the world twice. He was 69. The war "interned" the Islander in Los Angeles Harbor, where Harry chafed mildly at not being able to sail outside, and worried the war not be won until he was too old for another cruise. But the 75-year-old bachelor still had a surprise for his friends, for in May 1944, he married Margaret Gardner, whom he had known in Connecticut ! On July1947, Islander sailed from Los Angeles with Mrs. Harry aboard, and another woman who hoped later to make a single-handed world voyage herself. Unfortunately, the boat was wrecked in New Hebrides, smashed on the reefs by a hurricane. Last days still afloat ! Harry's host of friends went into action. They raised a fond to supplement Harry's meager savings, acquired for him the partially-completed hull of a boat similar to but smaller than Islander, a 27-foot yawl which was launched on August I95I and christened Lakemba. With her, Harry and Margaret did a good bit of sailing, mainly cruises out to their beloved Catalina Island. Taken seriously ill in February 1954, and was unwillingly removed from the boat to the hospital some weeks later, where he died of various infirmities of his 86 years, hastened by pneumonia.
Contributed by |
|
||||||
