Seaman gets Down East farewell

A unique Down East figure is gone, but he leaves long-lasting memories. Friends and relatives of Capt. Ted Spurling Sr. of Little Cranberry Island, who died Jan. 27, will be telling stories about this capable and quirky lobsterman, merchant seaman, genealogist, historian and diarist at a memorial service on Islesford this weekend.

Ted Spurling certainly was one of a kind. I happened to meet another merchant seaman in the Ellsworth post office some years back and asked him if he knew Ted. He sure did.

Looking for a new berth on a ship, he was told to check in with the Islesford native, who was in New York between ships at the time. Ted would be eating lunch at the Seaman’s Church Institute in lower Manhattan.

My informant went to the restaurant at noon and saw a huge crowd of men eating at tables in the big room. He spotted one man who was wearing a navy blue watch cap and was preparing to eat his chowder. The fellow took a stack of crackers between his two hands and crumbled them into the soup. “You must be Ted Spurling.” He was, indeed.

Ted had his master’s license but usually sailed as a second mate, unwilling to take on the responsibilities and paperwork of a skipper. He sailed all over the world, including the submarine-infested waters of World War II and the hazardous run up the twisting Saigon River during the Vietnam War.

After he successfully wooed his wife, Cara, a Connecticut girl, and brought her to Islesford, he settled into lobstering. But he still followed the merchant-marine practice of sounding his horn whenever he left the harbor. His horn, which went “ayoogah,” must have been off of an old automobile. And he rigged a rope swing in his boat’s cabin for use on any long runs. He was the first in Islesford to build wire lobster traps.

The others kidded him, but soon they all abandoned the old wooden traps and went to wire.

Ted was an accomplished astronomer and navigator. He adjusted compasses for lobster boats and yachts, using a system of existing marks and red posts he mounted on shore to line up the eight major points of the compass. (He could name all 16 points in “boxing the compass.” As a columnist for the Rockland-based Working Waterfront newspaper, he wrote about such events as the “Big Freeze of 1923.” Since he was only 2 years old at the time, he relied on older friends to tell him how the ocean froze around the Cranberry Isles enabling people to walk on the ice from Islesford to Southwest Harbor and back. In the Cranberry Report, he quoted from his great aunt Cindy Fernald, who recalled how she had walked to the mainland in an earlier freeze-up in 1879.

When he retired from lobstering, Ted kept up his love of rope work. His little black survival ladders hang over the rails of many a Maine lobster boat and pleasure sloop. Using his worn fid and a ball of cotton line, he was always making Turk’s-head napkin rings and rope mats for sale in gift shops.

Ted sometimes may have looked dour, but he loved a good joke. Seeing him on the town dock, a summer visitor would ask if he had ever left the island. Ted would reply that he didn’t leave often but he went up to Ellsworth once. And his designated successor in the Cranberry Report, Barbara Fernald, recounted how Ted once surprised guests on the Islesford Ferry, which swung past his lobster boat so the tourists could see a Maine lobsterman at work. Suddenly, Ted’s face arose from below the rail, with a red bandana tied around his head and a bait knife between his teeth.

Ted held a meticulous respect for language, as shown by his comments on the pronunciation of “northeast.” He wrote that when he was a boy, old timers and young ones alike would speak of a “no’theast” wind. He reported that his father and his Uncle Archie called a storm from that direction a “no’theaster.” So did the old Cape Cod stories by Joseph C. Lincoln and Ruth Moore’s Maine novels. So, when people began saying “nor’east,” he said, “it didn’t fit the tongue just right” the way “nor’west” does when the wind comes from another direction. But this tolerant man wound up that item by concluding, But each to his own – I suppose it could be ‘either’ or ‘eyether.’

Richard Dudman can be reached at rdudman@acadia.net.