B A C K   T H E N

Confidence on the High Southern Seas

1899. Captain Lincoln A. Colcord, of Searsport, photographed by his eighteen-year-old daughter Joanna aboard the ship State of Maine, of Searsport, bound from New York to Hong Kong with “case oil.” The ship is south of Good Hope, running in the high latitudes of powerful westerly gales. Colcord’s expression conveys confidence in his ship–this was no place to be dismasted or to develop a bad leak. The power captured by the taut sails aloft is recorded by the mechanical log, mounted on the railcap. The whirling flywheel fitted to the log-line prevents overrunning and twisting; the mechanism was driven by a finned rotor. The boiling wake is but a momentary scar across the broad flank of a great Southern Ocean sea.

After “running her easting down,” the State of Maine will shape a course northeasterly, across the Indian Ocean. She will run down on Christmas Island to check her chronometers, then stand in for Anjer Roads, in the Sunda Straits. Here, Maine captains could get copies of home newspapers; a Bath Captain served as a pilot. Joanna Colcord recalled renewing ties with Sa-Lee, the Javanese compradore who brought out their mail in a tin canister, along with much-welcomed fruit.

Lincoln Colcord was born at Searsport in 1857. At age twenty-one he was master of the bark Charlotte A. Littlefield and two years later married Jane French Sweetser, also from a Searsport seafaring family. The newlyweds made a three-year voyage, returning with a daughter and a son, Joanna and Lincoln. Colcord next commanded the barkentine Clara E. McGilvery, primarily in the River Plate trade. In 1891, he became master of the little bark Harvard, which was lost on Turk’s Island in the West Indies in 1898. After a brief tenure as a schooner captain, Colcord bought into the State of Maine and returned to his first love, the China trade.

A China voyage took about one year, including several months spent lying in port collecting a cargo of teas, fans, fireworks, jute, and rattan furniture. Colcord had great respect for the Chinese and enjoyed a strong friendship with the Hong Kong merchant Ah-Min, who, resplendent in violet silk robes, long fingernails, and braids, often dined in the ship’s cabin. When the Bath ship Emma T. Crowell, Captain Andrew Pendleton of Searsport, was overdue, Ah-Min and three worried Searsport captains went looking for her in Ah-Min’s steam launch and towed her in, dismasted.

By the turn of the century, trading to China in an old, wooden sailing vessel was a bold act of defiance. After the State of Maine was sold to be barged in 1903, Colcord moved ashore, where former shipmasters could be found raising hens, conducting trolleys, and hanging wallpaper. Some fortunate Searsport shipmasters found employment in steam with the American and Hawaiian Steamship Co., an outgrowth of Flint & Co., of Thomaston origins. Among them, after 1907, was Captain Lincoln Colcord. Although the command of a steamship was a great plum, aboard a steamship Colcord surely never wore an expression like the one Joanna captured here. Captain Colcord died in 1913 aboard the S. S. Virginia, at Bremerhaven.

Colcord is not wearing his teeth; in a bold stroke he may well have had them all pulled. Note the artful camber of the turned rail stanchions and the handsome and substantial joinery of the ship’s taffrail. The State of Maine was built in 1878 by Ebenezer Haggett of Newcastle. Some 300 vessels–including several noted clippers–were launched into the Damariscotta River from the towns of Newcastle, Damariscotta, and Nobleboro during the nineteenth century.

Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 1, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, 12 Starr St., Thomaston, Maine. 800-582-1899.