Read Online Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson - Free Book Online Page A

name? One pictures—I do, anyway—a hunter seated by a campfire in a canvas-back chair, a million stars out, wide-brimmed Stetson safari hat pushed back, bush trousers hiked up, sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt rolled past his thick forearms. The fire gives his unshaven face a kind of orangy glow. His wife is sleeping under mosquito netting on a canvas cot in a tent a few feet away. He sips tin cups of whiskey and soda. Earlier, he’d dined on roast guinea hen. He’s not bent on dominating man or animal. Somewhere in his mind is the greater kudu he might get to steal up on tomorrow at the salt lick. With his weak eyesight, the big-game hunter, who is even more of a big-game fisherman, is poring over fine print in a thumbed catalog for a twin-cabin cruiser, thirty-eight feet in length, offered by a manufacturer in Brooklyn. He’s studying all the specs, calculating the various price arrangements. “If you are looking for a fine roomy cruiser with lots of comforts, and ability for long offshore cruising and fishing trips, we suggest that you look this boat over very carefully.” In the price column: “Afloat at the plant. For rail or steamer deliveries add $175 for cradle and cover.”

THAT BOAT

    Pilar
and master, before her flying bridge was built, circa 1935
    IT’S VERY LIKELY that somewhere in Hemingway’s dozen suitcases were catalogs and circulars and fold-over mailings from Wheeler Shipyard, Inc., whose listed address was “Foot of Cropsey Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y.” If Hemingway did have this clutch of boating literature with him, then it had traveled through Spain and France and Africa, through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through Babati and Kiunga and the Ngorongoro Crater.
    A small, fold-over pamphlet had been mailed to him the previous summer from the Wheeler firm. It was postmarked July 14, 1933, which suggests Hemingway would have received it about three weeks before he left the States on his long journey, first to Europe, then to Africa. He may have had literature from other boat makers, too, since buying a motorized fishing cruiser had so long and lately preoccupied his thinking. (The brochure, with its still readable postmark, is among Hemingway’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.) The founder of the company, Howard E. Wheeler, had Palmer-perfecthandwriting, pork-chop sideburns, wild eyebrows, a walrus mustache, and five grown sons working by his side in the family enterprise in Brooklyn. Howard had addressed the mail-out himself to “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, Box 406, Key West, Florida.” There was a one-and-a-half-cent stamp affixed to the document, which described in typical inflated advertising rhetoric the company’s wares. It was a flyer for the 1933 model year, since catalogs for 1934 boats hadn’t yet come off the presses.
    The Wheeler firm designed and built cabin cruisers, sea skiffs, yachts, and motor sailers (a boat combining the features of both a motorboat and a sailboat). The company’s signature model, known throughout the boating industry, was the Playmate, which came in many lengths and sleeping configurations and price arrangements—twin screw, single screw, diesel power, gasoline engine, sedan, twin cabin, stateroom cabin, enclosed bridge. For several years Hemingway had been studying such vessels in the cabin-cruiser style, and by the time he arrived back in America on the
Paris
, he seems to have known exactly the size of boat he wanted, and he wanted it from Wheeler.
    As in the automotive business, the so-called new models from a boatbuilder, along with their advertising wares, began to appear in the fall of the previous model year. That is, boats for the 1934 season were being readied by the major shipyards in the late summer and all through the autumn of 1933, and this is also when the new catalogs were mailed out to prospective customers and when