Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1911 — HATES A STEAMSHIP [ARTICLE]

HATES A STEAMSHIP

Mariner Who Is 102 Despises Steam-Going Vessel. Captain Jackson TeHs of Bailing Ship Pays and of Pierce Storms That Swept Decks of Craft He Commanded. \ ' London.—Nearing the close of his one-hundred-and-second year, Capt. Daniel Jackson gazed mournfully across the rain-swept gardens of the Tooting home for the aged as he compared the gale then raging, with the hundreds he experienced In the days when men went to sea In ships of wood. Strangely enough it was the present storm that had brought him his sorrow.

“It’s only a little capful of wind,” he said, “just enough to make a good craft swing along like a war horse. But it’s brought me more trouble than any gale'that has blown since I made my first voyage to Archangel, more than ninety-three years ago. It’s only a.little capful, yet it stayed me frofn performing the last service my dear Bister Maria will ask of me. "She had sent me a message from the Wandsworth infirmary, Raying that she wanted to see me very, very soon, because she had something to tell me. So I buttoned up my coat on Wednesday afternoon and started to walk over there, but the little capful was too much for me and the rain swept into my eyes. ‘Never mind,’ I said, 1 shall see her tomorrow.’ Next morning they told me Maria was dead!”

Tears rolled from the tired old eyes as Captain Jackson s thin, twisted fingers beat upon the window pane, and it was many minutes before another word escaped him. He toM qf gales in many seas, fierce storms that had swept the decks of the ship which he had skippered when a boy of nineteen. “Well I remember my first day -of

command,” he said—and for the first time the droop of his lips lifted. “I was rigged in a ■ new suit cne of the owners had given me, with the pockets lined with S7O and a $75 watch ta my fob. We sailed in ballast from Lynn to Sunderland, and when Mr. Taylerson, another of the owners, came aboard he asked me to direct him to the captain. That was the best day of all, I think, for when I made him really believe that I was the captain he chuckled for hours. “Then he cracked me a hearty blow, on the back and told me I must skipper a ship for him round the Horn to California. Thirty-eight times I sailed Mr. Taylerson’s ships to California, but one day, when I was walking with him up the main street in Sunderland, he fell dead. “My connection with the service ended soon afterward, but by that time I’d saved close on $5,000, and with that I became an owner myself. It was a sad day I bought my ship, for at my wife’s desire I let her brother captain the vessel instead of looking after her myself. She Was lost on the first voyage, and-I hadn't a penny of insurance. “1 was a ruined man and getting on

in years; so I settled down to be a landlubber as best I could. I came to Clapham in 1863 and set to work as a blindmaker. All went well for some twenty years, but by the time I had come to be seventy-five, I commenced doing odd jobs. So I worked on till myuilnety-ninth birthday, when I came to live in this where every one is kind to me. By now the captain’s pipe wad filled, and, puffing vigorously at his beloved shag, he offered his opinions on the sailors of today. “Nice sailors they are to call thesd little squalls gales,” he said. “It’s thfl steamboats that have done it all. In my days a sailor was happiest when the seas swept the deck and his ship tore before the wind. I never could abide a steamer. I only once went to sea in one, and that was when I came home from Australia as a passenger.” A few weeks ago the delightful old captain met with an accident which would have proved fatal to most men many years his junior. Slipping, he fell backward against a piece of furniture and fractured two of his ribs. “It hurt a bit at the time,” he remarked, in the most casual fashion, "but I’m quite as strong as r again. My chief failing is my sight. Till ti few months ago the hours with a pipe and a paper were my happiest. Nowadays I must have the pipe only and let some one else have the paper.”