There are ships that, like certain people, seem created for an unusual and distinguishing destiny, and are unable long to survive the destruction of those peculiar conditions that have given them their dominating qualities, animation and color. Mr. Francis Dickie of Vancouver, B. C., has described with a vivid pen the later adventures and slow foundering of the Casco.

This gentleman has kindly given me permission to reprint it here. Our sympathy goes out to the beautiful yacht in her lonely buffetings and chill decay, but though stricken and vanished, we know that she will live long in romance and in song as "The Silver Ship."

FATE OF THE CASCO

by

Francis Dickie

Forty miles from Nome, Alaska, breaking under the Arctic winter on the shores of bleak King Island, lies the skeleton of a wrecked top-mast schooner.

Early in June, 1919, a small crew of adventurous spirits had turned her nose out through the Behring Sea, headed for the Lena River and Anadyn—and gold. She was small and old, this yacht, but what are thirty-three years when a craft has the proper tradition for daring, hazardous adventure?

September storms swept upon the Casco, pounding her teak sides with unfamiliar Northern blasts. Fog, cold, night—and she lay shuddering on the rocks, snow-beaten, ice-broken, abandoned by her crew.

So ships pass and become smooth driftwood on scattered beaches. But sometimes the magic of long adventure will gather around an abandoned hull, and form a rich memory to tempt the eternal wanderlust of man. What is an old ship but a floating castle built upon the memories of the men who have helmed her? Sometimes she plies the same dull course throughout her existence. Sometimes she changes trade with surprising chances. So it was with the Casco—now a glittering pleasure yacht, whim of an old millionaire, now stripped of gaudy trappings and bent to the grim will of seal hunter and opium trader.

In the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "The Wrecker," with red ensign waving, sailing into the port of Tai-o-hae in the Marquesas, the Casco takes her place in fiction. But she is far more romantic as she has sailed in fact.

"Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell ... from close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang on the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and presently"—

Presently they sailed among the Isles of Varien, sunny and welcoming in the South Seas.

Stevenson wrote this in the cabin of the Casco, in the summer of '88. His always delicate health had broken completely under the San Francisco climate. Friends had urged a cruise to the South Seas, he had gladly acquiesced, and looked around for a ship. There was a subtle romantic call for the author of "Treasure Island" in a voyage on a ship of his own choosing and direction under the soft skies of the tropics.

The Casco had been built by an eccentric California millionaire, Dr. Merritt, for cruising along the coast, and no money had been spared in her fittings. She was a seventy-ton fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five feet long, with graceful lines, high masts, white sails and decks, shiny brasswork, and a gaudy silk-hung saloon. She was not perhaps too staunch a cruiser. "Her cockpit was none too safe, her one pump was inadequate in size and almost worthless; the sail plan forward was meant for racing and not for cruising; and even if the masts were still in good condition, they were quite unfitted for hurricane weather."

Nevertheless, negotiations were opened with Dr. Merritt. That gentleman had read of Stevenson. He had conceived him as an erratic, irresponsible soul who wrote poetry and let everything else go to the devil. He'd be blamed, he said, if he'd let any scatter-brained writer use his precious yacht. Finally, a meeting between the two was effected; and, speedily charmed by Stevenson's manner, he decided to let him have the Casco. Therefore, with Capt. Otis as skipper, four deck hands, "three Swedes and the inevitable Finn," and a Chinese cook, the Stevensons sailed June 28, 1888, for the Marquesas.

Stevenson's health rapidly improved in the first weeks of the voyage. He was charmed by the Southern islands and began making notes and gathering data from the natives for later books. He wrote parts of "The Master of Ballantrae" and of "The Wrong Box," and spent much of his time studying the intricate personality of his skipper, whose portrait afterward appeared in the pages of "The Wrecker."

After months of idle cruising, it was discovered that the Casco's masts were dangerously rotten. Repairs were immediately necessary. Meantime Stevenson became less and less well. When the ship was again in commission and took them to Hawaii, he realized the impossibility of his returning to America, and, sending the Casco back to San Francisco, started upon the exile that was to terminate in his death.

Thereafter, the Casco changed hands frequently, exploring the mysteries of seal-hunting, opium-smuggling, coast-trading and gold-adventure, among other things. In the early nineties, she was known, because of her swiftness, quickness and ease of handling at the wheel, to be the best of a hundred and twenty ships engaged in the extinction of the pelagic seal. But when, in 1898, the sealers found themselves impoverished by their own ruthlessness, the Casco, her decks disfigured with blood and her hold rotten from the drip of countless salty pelts, was discarded and left to rot on the mud flats of Victoria. Too much of the spirit of adventure, however, lurked in the tall masts of the Casco to let her waste away to such an ugly ending. When the smuggling of Chinese and opium was at its height, up and down the coast there were whisperings of the daring work of the smuggler Casco. The revenue officers knew positively that she was laden with illicit Oriental cargo, and with Chinese immigrants; but she escaped them again and again, her old speed and lightness returning. Once, however, the wind failed her, and the revenue launch hauled alongside. Search for contraband was instituted; but not a Chinaman appeared, not a trace of opium. Fooled!—and they climbed down sheepishly into their launch. Later it developed that while the revenue men were still far astern, the crew had weighted the sixty Chinamen and dumped them overboard along with the opium!