July 2012 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 21. JOHN TOFT'S TALE By William Bunting
A year or so ago the Maine Coastal News printed a pleasant little story concerning the old Eastern Steamship Company’s 1903 steamer Calvin Austin, a handsome coastal packet, 298 feet long, painted white, with a towering black stack and two lofty, raked masts. Prior to World War I, she ran on the International Line from Boston to Portland, Lubec, Eastport, and Saint John, New Brunswick.
Running across Publisher Johansen not long after the article appeared, I told him that I, too, knew a good story about the Calvin Austin, and that I would send it along after I had consulted my notes from a conversation I had had with John Toft, the teller of the tale, in the mid- 1970s. We had met at the R.J. Peacock sardine factory on Brown’s Wharf in Portland where Toft, then in his late eighties, was vice president and superintendent. I have since looked high and low for that notebook but have not found it, and thus the rendition of John Toft’s tale that follows is drawn entirely from memory. However, I believe it to be reasonably accurate.
At the time of our meeting I was at work on a project which, many years later, resulted in the two volumes of A Day’s Work ; A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs 1860-1920. Traveling about the state with a 4x5 camera, I sought out historic photos of Mainers at work to copy, and old-timers who could help me understand what the images depicted. I was privileged to be able to talk with a number of sharp-minded, dry-witted folks hailing from the late 1800s who were eager to talk about the old days one more time. I treasure the memories of those meetings, including the hour or so that I was privileged to chat with John Toft. John Toft had, for many decades, been a leading figure in the Maine sardine industry, although one would never have known that from his baggy khakis and equally casual manner. Sitting outside on the wharf, under the sun and the seagulls, we talked about his early experiences working in a sardine factory at Lubec. He died not long afterwards, in 1977, at age 90. It was only from his obituary that I learned that he had invented or introduced many important innovations to the industry, including the first can washer, high-speed conveyors, refrigeration and brine systems, and the method he patented for pumping herring into, and out of, the carrier boats. The carriers serving John Toft’s factory were the first to be outfitted with ship-to-shore radio, radar, and fathometers
Incidentally, a Maine fisherman once told me that when some Gloucester seiners, having heard about the pumping of fish from a flooded hold, tried to copy this technique, at first they didn’t realize the necessity of having a tight fish hold, Perhaps that was a libelous fable…
An unlikely but evidently true story concerning John Toft appeared in the November 13, 1970 issue of the Kennebec Journal . Groups of school children were reported to be visiting Brown’s Wharf to see the dugong – a genuine Pacific or Indian Ocean dugong, as identified by its dolphin- like tail, and not an Atlantic manatee – which had for some time appeared at the wharf at high tide when herring were being landed. Although primarily a herbivore, this dugong would eat herring thrown to it, provided that they were undamaged in appearance. The visits of both the dugong and the kids obviously delighted Superintendent Toft. I don’t believe that the Brown’s Wharf sardine factory lasted very long after Toft’s death. Indeed, his lifetime – he was born in Trescott in 1887 – nearly matched the rise
and fall of this once great Maine industry John first went to work in a Lubec sardine factory in 1904, and one year later was made foreman of the Seacoast sardine factory at Lubec, then the largest in the United States. As the largest in Lubec as well, we may suppose that the Seacoast factory was fitted with the loudest whistle in town for alerting employees of the arrival of fish and of work. In any event, it was customary, on foggy mornings, for John to blow that whistle to answer the whistle of the approaching Portland steamer so as to help her captain find his way in through the channel. As it happened, John was especially good friends with Captain Lowell Ingalls of the Calvin Austin. Ingalls was from the nearby Canadian island of Grand Manan and became a naturalized American citizen so that he could serve as an officer aboard International Line steamers.
By the turn of the century, coastwise steam packet lines – those based at Boston had been combined by the notorious Charlie Morse of Bath, Maine under the flag of the Eastern Steamship Company – were significant carriers of passengers and also freight, much of it express. Steamers delivered tin, solder, and cotton seed oil to Down East sardine factories, and carried away millions of cans of sardines. Coastal waters were then very crowded, and without the benefit of any electronic aids to navigation the piloting of these scheduled steamers was a very demanding, high- pressure job with great responsibilities, requiring much skill, experience, and a very level-head in moments of stress. Navigation in fog was based on running established compass courses at known rates of speed for prescribed lengths of time.
Since slower speeds gave the wind and currents greater opportunity to put the steamer off her course, and since late arrivals were very bad for business, maintaining normal or near-normal speed in fog was the general rule. Granting every schooner that was met along the way a comfortably wide berth when passing was a good way for a steamer’s navigator to “lose his place” on his course. Frequent close shaves made few friends among sitting-duck schooner sailors. An old Cape Cod fisherman once told me that even in a thick of fog at Monomoy Point you could set your watch by the sound of the waves from the speeding Boston to New York steamers Harvard and Yale breaking on the beach.
While the New York to Portland run was said to be the most demanding on the coast, Boston to Saint John was no milk run, thanks especially to the strong tidal currents and frequent fog at the eastern end. Not surprisingly, a number of the International Line’s officers, as with Lowell Ingalls, were natives of the Passamaquoddy region and very familiar with their perilous home waters. On coastwise steamers the rankings beneath captain were first pilot, second pilot, first mate, second mate and so on, in that order. When underway one of the two pilots was always in the pilot house, attending to navigation. (The captain and the first mate, at least, would also have had pilotage endorsements on their tickets, but had other responsibilities beyond navigation. About now you are probably now wondering whatever happened to John Toft’s tale, so here goes.
One foggy morning at Lubec the expected sound of the whistle from the usually prompt Portland steamer was not heard. The factory crew finished up processing the morning’s herring and went home, but John remained standing by, listening. And in the late morning he finally heard the distant wail of the approaching
Maritime History
The steamer CALVIN AUSTIN.
Calvin Austin, and answered in kind. As soon as the big steamer was warped alongside the wharf John hopped aboard and headed up to the captain’s cabin on the hurricane deck, just aft of the pilothouse, to find out what had happened. When he arrived the exhausted Ingalls was already in bed, his eyes – as described by John so many years later — looking like “two holes burned in a blanket.” Ingalls explained what has happened.
The Calvin Austin had departed Portland on schedule at 5 PM in a thick fog with a light easterly wind. After running out her time so as to put Seal Island abeam, the course was changed for the long, uninterrupted Down East leg. In the darkened pilothouse the pilot on watch sat on a stool by a partially opened window, peering into the dark fog, and occasionally
passing a remark to the ”wheelsman,” as quartermasters on these steamers were called. Everything being as it should be, Ingalls decided to cat-nap on the settee at the back of the pilothouse. Some time later, while half asleep, he overheard the pilot remark to the wheelsman that the wind had backed towards the west. Good, thought Ingalls, the fog was lifting, and he snoozed some more. Then suddenly he sat up as his half- conscious brain tumbled to the realization that if the wind had indeed backed to the west he shouldn’t still be hearing the deep reverberating voice of the fog signal! Leaping to the compass he saw, to his alarm, that the big steamer was headed at right angle to its proper course, straight out into the North Atlantic!
Continued on Page 22.
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