EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY LEVEL # 12
Saturday, September 12, 1998
5'8" above SEA LEVEL
Francis Bowker in his room
THE HORIZON IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE LIMIT OF OUR SIGHT
Sea Level, N.C., July 29, 1998
...when I was just a boy, we used to go out on Cape Cod, and we went to a place called Monomoy Point...it was an eleven mile stretch of sand and outside was the channel around Cape Cod.....from where we had our camp, I went across to the Coast Guard station over the other side of this big point of land...when a ship is, say, twelve or fourteen miles off, and she's not a tremendously high ship, then the curviture of the earth will take the hull and only show the masts, that's what happens and that's what hull-down means...I used to use it often:....'I see a ship hull-down over there, Captain'....during my work at Mystic Seaport, sailing the training schooner "Brilliant", I used to amaze the kids...sometimes I'd see a vessel in the distance, and she had a certain rig, you know, different than somebody else...and I'd say 'oh, there goes the 'Shenandoah'....'the WHAT?'...'You see that schooner over there?'....'WHERE?' ...they wouldn't even see the ship, and I'd say, 'well, just wait a little while and you see it come' ....and we would be coming up on this vessel, and she'd have a certain rig...she might be a top-sail schooner, or she might have had a sail that got torn recently and they'd patched it, and there would be a big white patch on the gray of the old canvas ..... anyway: 'hull down', that's what popped into my head as a title for my poem, and then I wrote it:
HULL-DOWN
Hull-down, the small boy watched them pass
Gray topsails etched against the sky
And dreamed that someday he might stand
Upon a tall ship sailing by.
Upon a ship with billowed sails,
Bound off to some far distant land,
Beyond the place where sails turned gray,
To eyes that viewed them from the strand.
He little knew, in years ahead,
Such wooden decks his feet would tread;
Such sails he'd learn to reef and stow
In tropic heat and winter snow.
And yet, the day of sail was done;
He'd see them vanish one by one.
Some died in unused creeks and bays
And some in far more violent ways.
The rocks and reefs and winter gales
Have cleared the sea of tall gray sails,
And boys today can never see
Those ships, hull down, that called to me.
(Francis E. "Biff" Bowker)
REFLECTING A LIFE UNDER SAIL
Captain Francis E. "Biff" Bowker (81) is a resident of Sailors' Snug Harbor since 1997. He made his first trip in 1934, on the Nova Scotia three-masted schooner "Peaceland". In 1935, he sailed aboard the five-masted schooner "Edna Hoyt". He has documented his career diligently: on the walls of his room, there are 18 framed photographs of ships he sailed on during his life. He has written three books about his experiences at sea. For 25 years, he passed along his experiences while working as Captain of the training schooner "Brilliant" at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. Captain Bowker has published an index of all the U.S. East Coast three-masted schooners carrying cargo (approximately 2.300 names, including re-names). He is also working for the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort N.C., where he tells visitors about the display of the four-masted schooner "Anna R. Heidritter". She was wrecked on the North Carolina shore, March 2, 1942, while trying to avoid German submarines. Captain Bowker was sailing as a bosun aboard another four-master, the "Herbert L. Rawding", which was a few days behind the "Heidritter". Luckily, a thick fog allowed her to pass a surfaced sub unseen and unheard at night off Cape Hatteras. Two years before, he was shipwrecked aboard a four-master off Cuba.
VIRTUAL VESSEL
The image you see in a plane mirror is called a virtual image, that is, one which cannot be caught on a screen. A virtual image appears to be in a place where it is really not (behind the mirror). If you look at an object - yourself for example- in a plane mirror, the image is the same size as the object. The image, however, always appears to be smaller than the object. That is because the image is so far away. For example: if you are 20 ft. in front of a mirror, the image appears to be 20 ft. behind the mirror. Thus, the image is 40 ft. away from your eyes. Water surfaces act as good reflectors.