‘Silas Crockett’ a slice of Maine history

My eldest uncle went on a many-masted ship to South America with a load of ice around the turn of the last century as the age of sail was coming to an end.

A quarter century later, his much younger brother, my father, left Maine to work for the U.S. Lighthouse Service and then the Coast Guard, because he couldn’t find remunerative work on the water east of Boston. He ended up watching over the lights and buoys on much of the Hudson River.

“I never worked on the land but once,” he used to say with a note of irony, “and that was digging a swimming pool for Henry Miles.”

The reason I write for a newspaper today is because 50 years later, when I returned to Maine during the Back-to-the-Earth movement, I felt remote and cut off from the seafaring traditions of my family. I had no clue how to make a living on the water, much as I was fascinated by the possibility. Fortunately, I was able to find a land-bound trade and raise a family here.

I learned the context for a lot of these events affecting my family history from reading Mary Ellen Chase’s classic novel “Silas Crockett,” first published in 1935 and newly released by Islandport Press of Yarmouth. The Smith College professor from Blue Hill reminded me how coastal Mainers have been buffeted about by the winds of fortune, or the global economy as we are accustomed to calling it today.

The recent talk about Two Maines and the growing divide between them makes the republication of this book all the more timely. While Chase was writing about the century between 1830 and 1930, her skill at analyzing events while telling an interesting story helps the reader understand why a visit to any small town north or east of Bangor and one southwest of, let’s say, Brunswick will make the visitor wonder if he is in the same country, or state at any rate.

Chase’s four-generation look at decline along the eastern Maine coast is often beautifully written, and ultimately heartbreaking. In the tradition of realistic determinists such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, she puts her characters under a microscope, watching them squirm about as they slowly descend into poverty and social obscurity because of the iron-clad rules of economics and genetics – and the factors of “time and chance,” to use her words – that stir this primal broth.

The first Silas is a dashing, headstrong fellow who cruises the globe on family ships getting rich. Unfortunately, he’s always looking over his shoulder, worshipping the past, unable to understand the forces that even then are threatening his descendants with ruin. The seeds of his family’s decline rest in his contempt for steam power and other technological and social developments.

Along comes his son, Nicholas, who can’t get a captaincy on a deep-water sailing ship as that industry constricts. Instead he meets catastrophe fishing on the Grand Banks, where considerable money is still to be made.

The hapless Reuben, Nicholas’ son, is reduced to running a stodgy coastal steamer and then a dirty ferry while his family inheritance slips through his fingers.

Finally there’s Silas II, who finds himself cutting up herring in a cannery after dropping out of college when the family money dries up. But there’s some hope for him. He is ignorant of his family’s glorious past and he seems to have an open mind to the future as he rises in cannery management.

Chase is relentless in her theme. We figure out early what she is up to: “… in 1830 the village of Saturday Cove [the imaginary Maine harbor where the novel is set] was neither well-nigh deserted in the winter nor in the summer dependent upon the bank accounts of New York and Middle Western millionaires. It was instead an integral part of the world at large, supplying ships for every ocean and men and boys who knew even the Ultima Thules of six continents far better than they knew the wharves of Portland.”

She never lets up as she describes a community becoming subservient to summer people, where the natives have to sell the family heirlooms and their inherited homes because they can’t produce anything much of their own. The end of the novel – 1933 – was around the time my father left home to seek work out of state along with dozens of the residents of his small coastal town – much of a generation of young men. He had no sea captain’s mansion to inherit. He was just part of the flotsam and jetsam of this economic upheaval that included the Depression.

The Civil War, the railroads and steamships, the opening of the West, competition from Europe and other factors had pounded the coastal economy by 1870 as the shipyards disappeared. By the 1890s, the off-shore fishing fleet had nearly gone out of existence.

“Trees and summer people own this coast now, and that’s a fact,” comments a perceptive character near the end of the book. Today one could argue little with such an assertion, except to add a lot of trees have been removed to make room for more and bigger summer homes. Fishermen have taken another beating, except for the lobstermen who still ride a wave of dubious fortune.

Some of this book is a bit misleading. Many Maine people did not get rich sailing the seven seas or fishing on the Banks. Most remained poor, but they were banged about just as badly as the aristocratic Crocketts, exiting the state in droves.

And while the clipper ships and the Grand Banks boats sound glorious today, they involved dirty, dangerous work at a level we would find intolerable. I think I would rather run a hot dog stand on Mount Desert Island than spend two years before the mast.

It’s good to see “Silas Crockett” made the Baxter Society’s list of the 100 best books about Maine. It should also be required reading for all students of Maine history in the state’s schools and colleges. Seldom has a novel about this state done such a fine job of connecting the actions of its characters with the sweeping forces of the past.

Wayne Reilly writes a history column each Monday in the Style section. During his 28 years at the Bangor Daily News, he worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor.