Today’s Poem: The Alarmed Skipper

Every group needs the fun-to-be-with guy

James E. Buttersworth, American Ships in a Storm, c. 1860 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Alarmed Skipper

by James Thomas Fields

Many a long, long year ago,   
Nantucket skippers had a plan            
Of finding out, though “lying low,”   
How near New York their schooners ran.      

They greased the lead before it fell,
And then, by sounding through the night,      
Knowing the soil that stuck, so well,  
They always guessed their reckoning right    

A skipper gray, whose eyes were dim,           
Could tell, by tasting, just the spot,
And so below he’d “dowse the glim” —        
After, of course, his “something hot.”            

Snug in his berth, at eight o’clock,     
This ancient skipper might be found; 
No matter how his craft would rock,
He slept — for skippers’ naps are sound!      

The watch on deck would now and then        
Run down and wake him, with the lead;        
He’d up, and taste, and tell the men   
How many miles they went ahead.

One night, ’twas Jotham Marden’s watch,     
A curious wag — the peddler’s son —          
And so he mused (the wanton wretch),          
“To-night I’ll have a grain of fun.      

“We’re all a set of stupid fools
To think the skipper knows by tasting            
What ground he’s on — Nantucket schools   
Don’t teach such stuff, with all their basting!”          

And so he took the well-greased lead 
And rubbed it o’er a box of earth
That stood on deck — a parsnip-bed —         
And then he sought the skipper’s berth.         

“Where are we now, sir? Please to taste.”      
The skipper yawned, put out his tongue,        
Then ope’d his eyes in wondrous haste,
And then upon the floor he sprung!    

The skipper stormed and tore his hair,           
Thrust on his boots, and roared to Marden,    
“Nantucket’s sunk, and here we are  
Right over old Marm Hackett’s garden!”

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When I wrote about James Thomas Fields (1817–1881) in the New York Sun two years ago, I remarked on a pattern that sometimes emerges in successful groups — the phenomenon of the person who is fun to be with. Oh, the figure has to be good enough to join the group, but once that hurdle has been cleared, what may matter more than pure talent is the ability to crack a joke, defuse a confrontation, and liven up a party. In group dynamics, fun-to-be-with counts for a lot.

If you’ve ever looked at successful rock groups or sports teams or even group endeavors in business and science, you know the phenomenon. Among writers, however, there may be no clearer example than James Thomas Fields. This was a man in touch with nearly everything in the 19th-century Bostonian world of American literature.

He was a pallbearer at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral in 1864, for example. He bought the Atlantic Monthly and gave the editorship to 1865 to William Dean Howells (1837–1920), whom he had met only ten days earlier at a party. Editing endless anthologies and book series for his publishing company, he knew nearly every writer in New England — and most of them thought of him as a good and enjoyable friend.

James T Fields, c. 1875 (Wikimedia Commons)

Predictably for a man with a twinkle in his eye, Fields was a popular public lecturer. And he also wrote verse. Much of it was light and comic, in the mode of Today’s Poem, “The Alarmed Skipper,” one of our lighter Wednesday offerings. In easy squared-off quatrains — four-foot lines in four-line stanzas, rhymed abab — he tells the story of a Nantucket sea-captain who isn’t fooled by a sailor skeptical of his navigational talent.

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