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Reviewed by Don Ross

At last a book has arrived about the amazing 81-year life of Captain Lou Kenedy, the last schoonerman. In the words of the author, Joe Russell, "He was the last captain to profit from hauling molasses, lumber, salt, and general cargo in pure sailing ships between frozen estuaries of New England and the Maritimes and rum-soaked ports in the Bahamas and Caribbean." Lou Kenedy stories are still being retold from Nova Scotia to Barbados, and the persons who knew about all of them were Lou's daughter, Patsy, and her husband, Bill Bolling, sailing friends of the author. One day Patsy called and asked Joe, "You interested in writing Daddy's story?" Russell "jumped at the chance." Boxes of photos, transcripts, magazine articles, log books, and family memorabilia soon arrived at Russell's Connecticut home and he spent the next two years sorting it all out.

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Lou Kenedy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, from an upper-middle-class family from Stanford, Connecticut, with a Buttersworth hanging in the parlor. Yet the only thing that he would ever use a silver spoon for was to eat a can of dog food from time to time over his remarkable life and actually like it. One semester at Georgetown was enough education to suit him, and in 1928 he shipped out aboard the Chesaspeake Bay schooner Amanda F. Lewis, with the captain and crew none the wiser about his being the scion of a well-to-do family, and had spent his youth racing yachts at his father's yacht club and had never lost a race.

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Kenedy learned much about the cargo business while serving as mate aboard the Lewis, and three months later moved on to a succession of miserable drogers that still ecked out a living in the dwindling lumber trade between the Canadian Maritimes and the northeastern U.S., where he endured wretched conditions, poor food, low pay, and no heat. He spent that winter freezing as a watchman on wintered-down schooners on the East River waterfront. The next summer he landed a job as a rigger at a City Island yacht club.

Then came Kenedy's true baptism at sea, when he signed aboard the last American , commercial, full-rigged ship, the 1,800-ton Tusitala, that loaded fertilizer in New York, and sailed to Honolulu around Cape Horn.

After the first voyage, the ship's fertilizer deal fell through and Kenedy, after working as a mainenance hand for a while, moved on to doing rigger's work at the local yacht clubs and came to the attention of some American Museum of History people who needed a research vessel. Soon, Kenedy was off to Maine and Nova Scotia in search of likely vessels in good condition, and fell in love with the Lunenberg-LaHave River area, where the tern schooner Abundance, with a rumrunner past catches his eye. The Museum deal fell through, but Kenedy would go on to purchase the Abundance later that year after a three-month stint in the Seaman's Institute of New York, where all he really needed was formal training in celestial navigation. He turned 21 years of age, and the next day he received his master's ticket.

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Discharging salt at Clark's Harbor

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Lou and ship's dog Thor riding in a dingy

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The sea is the backdrop for a lifetime of adventures to come aboard the 10 vessels Lou Kenedy owned and skippered, and the story follows the timeline chronology of his life. This incredibly interesting multi-dimentional man certainly lived in exciting times with a unique lifestyle of his own choosing, and made a profound impression on the people around him with his intriguing personality. Tempered by great humor and an unsinkable zest for life. The author has, indeed, woven together a tale that presents the life of this man as true to his amazing reality as possible.

Kenedy was a unique problem solver with the steadfast determination to turn any situation to his his way, When it came to money he was very keen on never letting anyone take advantage of him and he would always turn the tables on anyone that tried. The tales are hilarious.

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Lou Kenedy was considered a bit of a rogue, but was also a family man, dog lover, and a rum smuggler with his own Skunk Squirt private label. Above all, he was a sailor, but many of the adventures take place ashore, they follow him wherever he goes. The tales recounted here in this compelling narative are interesting and enjoyable leaving the reader to turn the pages in fascination wondering what will happen next.

Three passages are presented here.

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Sea Fox

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Chapter 6, City of New York, pages 129-130

The Newfoundlanders were inveterate lobstermen, and the harbor in Bonavista was dotted with close to 50 pots. One evening, Low summoned Brian and the mate, Pentz, to his cabin. They were both exhausted. Lou said, "Hey, you two go out there in a dory and pick up some pots so's we can have a lobster dinner." Pentz, not wanting to do anything but rest, said, "Jaysus, Skipper, you can't just go pull up a man's pots, we could get shot, for Christ's sake." Lou had an answer to every problem and replied, "Here's what you do. Every pot that you pull up that has lobsters, put a bottle of Rum in it" Pentz and Brian pulled five pots that contained 25 lobsters and put a bottle of Mount Gay in each pot. Brian recalled:

"The next morning when we got up, lo and behold, there were lobster buoys for as far as the eye could see. When we got ashore we were told that during the night some traps had caught bottles of rum and the whole village had set pots to try their luck."

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Directory

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Chapter 7, Vema, pages 146-147

Gotlik the husky was very fast. He was fascinated with birds and when ashore would catch seagulls and even snipes; he could grab them right out of the air and hold them in his big mouth. Prancing over to Lou, he always proudly displayed them as his contribution to the family. Lou would take the bird and say, "Good dog" and then let the bird go, none the worse for wear.

As part of the expedition, a zoologist aboard Atlantis was charged with capturing tropical birds and recording their physical characteristics. But he didn't have much luck catching them. As a matter of fact, he never caught a single bird. Gotlik, on the other hand, would spend his evenings-especially along the Mexican coast-catching an assortment of tropical birds that lit aboard Vema. He grabbed parrots and herons and other specimens-exactly what the Atlantis wanted to see. Virtually every morning, Lou would radio Atlantis and say, "We got a big bird here. Anyone interested?"

"So they's launch a boat and come over and get the bird so we were the retrievers of the birds. He wanted to buy the dog so he'd have a means of getting those rare tropical things. But of course, he wasn't for sale, at any price."

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Chapter 2, Adams, pages 37-38

The wind had risen to over 100 knots, and Lou was concentrating on guiding Adams between Turks and Caicos Islands, when he felt a sting on the back of his neck; then another; then another; then something hit him in the back of his hair. Abruptly, Adams was aswarm with moths. They were being blown by the storm and were so thick the windward side of the deckhouses and spars were carpeted with layers of fuzzy squashed insects.

Then the pigeons started-hundreds of them. They slammed into the deck, the rigging, and the crew. The poor crew, all but Lou, hunkered below or leeward of the deckhouse to avoid being pelted by them. There was no wheelhouse on Adams, so Lou stayed at the helm and got pummeled every so often by storm-blown fowl. A 100-knot pigeon felt like a fist hitting him, a fist that blew up into a cloud of fluff when it struck. Feathers blew everywhere. The captain had wrapped himself in a blanket when the moths started and that helped blunt the pigeon blows a bit. The epic seemed to be directed by both DeMille and Hitchcock. First the moths, a pestilence of Biblical proportions, followed by a scene from The Birds. Someone figured out later that the hurricane winds had picked up the moths and pigeons in Haiti or the Dominican Republic and simply dragged them northward to the sea.

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Bath time at sea for Patsy and Pat, in a puncheon.

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Title: The Last Schoonerman

Release date: December 2006 - January 2007

Publisher: Nautical Publishing Company

Author: Joe Russell

ISBN-10: 0-9789350-0-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-9789350-0-9

For more information go to:

www.The LastSchoonerman.com

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Vema

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