seemed imminent. There is one place in the world where pilots are in absolute charge of ships, and the place is not Cartagena. (Pilots are supreme in the Panama Canal.) There is always some insurance risk if a local pilot is ignored, and plenty of insurance risk if a local pilot is not aboard. Washburn has said, âYour worst enemy can be your own underwriter. If Iâm in Borneo and a guy comes on board with a spear in his hand and a bone in his nose and says heâs the pilot, heâs hired.â Now, however, this man in Cartagena had come on board with a pencil in his hand and a bone in his head, and misjudged the wind and misused a tug and called for full ahead within inches of the pier. Washburn literally stood him in a corner and took the ship away from him. The Colombian freighter was twenty feet away. In a tone that contained no panic, Washburn said to Andy, âGet a stern line to the pier with a small boat if you can.â Meanwhile, he maneuvered: sculling, in effect, to preserve his distanceâengineers running among the burners as Washburn gave them bells.
Ships are tied up with what the rest of the world would
call ropes. They look anachronisticâlike rope you would see in a seaport museum, but larger. A good mooring line costs eight thousand dollars. Made of Dacron for strength and polypropylene for flexibility, it is six hundred feet long. We carry eighteen. As a mooring line payed out over the side and reached like a suspension cable in the direction of the pier, the ship was so askew that the six hundred feet might not do. You marry one line to another if the need arises. In Genoa once, on the Almeria Lykes, Washburn married three lines and winched the ship more than a thousand feet. The one line spanned the distance here and was soon secured to the bollards. A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks. Very slowly against the windâcompleting what Washburn would later call âone of the poorest dockings in marine historyââStella reeled herself in.
Captain Washburnâs family name derives from Great Washburne, near Evesham, in the English Midlands. The McHenrys in his background of course were Scots. John Washburn of Evesham immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. The family were in coastal shipping in the Boston area before going into timber and allied enterprises in Maine. In lake-and-river country near New Hampshire, they had a hilltop farm called Norlandsâhundreds of acres and long deep viewsâthat might as well have been called a plantation. It looks today much as it did a century ago. As Norlands Living History Center, it attracts school buses and preserves its first demeanor. There is a widowâs walk on top of the house, for a widow with exceptional
eyes, Norlands being fifty miles from the sea. Samuel Washburn (1824-90) was a skipper of clipper ships, a captain in the United States Merchant Marine. Elihu Washburn (1816-87) was named Secretary of State and minister to France by Ulysses S. Grant, whose portrait is prominent in the freestanding Washburn Memorial Library (1883), with its spinning wheels, its Britannica IX, its rose and pale-blue windows. Washburns went west, founded the Minneapolis Mill Company, and made Gold Medal Flour. They were involved in the beginnings of General Mills. Washburn College, in Topeka, Kansas, is named for Ichabod Washburn. The father of our Captain Washburn was a Washington lawyer. (âHe had the trait of honesty. Hey, he didnât have a chance.â) As a schoolboy in the District of Columbia, aged thirteen, Paul McHenry Washburn was told to write an essay about an ancestor. He wrote about Chief Justice John Marshall. He turned in the essay, but he was not for school. He ran away from home.
The captain learned from Leadline Dunn, from Terrible Terry Harmon, from Dirty Shirt George Price. These are the old skippers with whom he sailed when he was young, and
Ships are tied up with what the rest of the world would
call ropes. They look anachronisticâlike rope you would see in a seaport museum, but larger. A good mooring line costs eight thousand dollars. Made of Dacron for strength and polypropylene for flexibility, it is six hundred feet long. We carry eighteen. As a mooring line payed out over the side and reached like a suspension cable in the direction of the pier, the ship was so askew that the six hundred feet might not do. You marry one line to another if the need arises. In Genoa once, on the Almeria Lykes, Washburn married three lines and winched the ship more than a thousand feet. The one line spanned the distance here and was soon secured to the bollards. A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks. Very slowly against the windâcompleting what Washburn would later call âone of the poorest dockings in marine historyââStella reeled herself in.
Captain Washburnâs family name derives from Great Washburne, near Evesham, in the English Midlands. The McHenrys in his background of course were Scots. John Washburn of Evesham immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. The family were in coastal shipping in the Boston area before going into timber and allied enterprises in Maine. In lake-and-river country near New Hampshire, they had a hilltop farm called Norlandsâhundreds of acres and long deep viewsâthat might as well have been called a plantation. It looks today much as it did a century ago. As Norlands Living History Center, it attracts school buses and preserves its first demeanor. There is a widowâs walk on top of the house, for a widow with exceptional
eyes, Norlands being fifty miles from the sea. Samuel Washburn (1824-90) was a skipper of clipper ships, a captain in the United States Merchant Marine. Elihu Washburn (1816-87) was named Secretary of State and minister to France by Ulysses S. Grant, whose portrait is prominent in the freestanding Washburn Memorial Library (1883), with its spinning wheels, its Britannica IX, its rose and pale-blue windows. Washburns went west, founded the Minneapolis Mill Company, and made Gold Medal Flour. They were involved in the beginnings of General Mills. Washburn College, in Topeka, Kansas, is named for Ichabod Washburn. The father of our Captain Washburn was a Washington lawyer. (âHe had the trait of honesty. Hey, he didnât have a chance.â) As a schoolboy in the District of Columbia, aged thirteen, Paul McHenry Washburn was told to write an essay about an ancestor. He wrote about Chief Justice John Marshall. He turned in the essay, but he was not for school. He ran away from home.
The captain learned from Leadline Dunn, from Terrible Terry Harmon, from Dirty Shirt George Price. These are the old skippers with whom he sailed when he was young, and
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