I’ve lately been exploring and experimenting with different directions in which to take Heron Dance. One area of particular interest are stories from memoirs, biographies and Heron Dance interviews of searchers and seekers. Admittedly the following is not short, so it can’t be accurately described as a “Pause,” but it does embody an interesting and unique Beauty.

For several years I traveled each February to Toronto, Canada for the Wilderness Canoe Symposium. Hundreds of paddlers from all over North America, and a few from far away countries, gather to talk about their trips, past and planned. In their day jobs they are physicists, university professors, farmers, doctors and schoolteachers. In the summers they head off into wilderness and paddle, often for weeks or months and often on trips that total a thousand or more miles. The subarctic and Canadian barrens are popular destinations.

            At these gatherings, a few books and authors are held in particularly high regard. Some were out-of-print and selling for a hundred or more dollars used on Amazon. I decided to reprint a few including Sleeping Island, A Death On The Barrens, and True North. True North, by Elliott Merrick, was the story of a young man who, disillusioned by life in the city, headed up to live in northern Labrador. It is a beautifully written, passionate book about life on the extreme edge of human existence. Merrick spoke at the Wilderness Canoe Symposium at least once, and there he met Herb Pohl. They became friends.

            Merrick also wrote a number of short stories, essays and profiles. One, Without Words, is a story of a trapper’s encounter with an indigenous Innu family on a Labrador winter trapline. It is a powerful exploration of ethics in the old north before skidoos and modern conveniences and I’ve reprinted it here. Another is Merrick’s profile of Frank Casper who traveled the world’s oceans in a small, underequipped sailboat, and became legendary in faraway ports for his stories, his humility and good humor. That’s the story that follows.

     Both Without Words and Sails Unfurled were sent to me by Herb Pohl whom I met at the Wilderness Canoe Symposium (see my interview of Herb in Issue 32, A Wild And Glorious Land). Herb was a renowned wilderness paddler who did many solo trips in Labrador and became a good friend and canoeing partner. Before he died (tragically paddling Lake Superior) he sent me a spiral bound book Elliott Merrick had sent him with the inscription “Between you and me, Stories by Elliot Merrick.” Inside were twenty-one pieces written during the forty or so years up to the mid-1980s. Some had never been published.

The last words were these by Merrick:

Some of our happiest times were sailing on the Chesapeake, that superb 200-mile estuary, where five major rivers run in, each with its villages and towns, its lonely coves and creeks where bobwhites call from a hayfield, or the wild Canada geese on their autumn migration from the Arctic to the southern bayous raft up by the thousands, feeding and gobbling all night long.

One evening, anchored in a quiet Maryland river, as we sat in the cockpit watching a full moon rise above the trees, Pat and I saw a pair of swans fly across that big, round, golden moon, silhouetted black against the light, as though this were an idealized picture too good to be true.

             That is the way the sailing years have been —
             almost too good to be true.

 The following was originally published by Cruising World in October 1983.

 Frank Casper: Sails Furled, The Recollection Of An Old Man And The Sea

By Elliot Merrick

We were tied up beside the wall at St. George, Bermuda, when a weather-beaten cutter came in. The thin old man who was singlehanding it from Puerto Rico asked if he could raft alongside. It was Frank Casper!

             He was a widower and retired engineer from New York City and Melbourne, Florida, who had circumnavigated the globe in the late 1950s and later became a familiar and romantic figure in ports of call around the world. Following the death of his wife, he had taken permanently to the sea in his 30-foot Elsie, named after his wife.

            His khakis were bleached almost white, the galvanized turnbuckles and fittings of his boat were starting to rust, and his cutter needed paint and a refit. Very tanned himself, he washed out a couple of cotton sheets in a bucket, rigged his sun-drenched awning over the boom, and settled down quietly to receive visitors, of whom there were many. They were mostly native Bermudian-- "Why, Frank, I haven't seen you for years."

 He told his visitors he had been sick in a hospital in Puerto Rico the preceding winter. Each alternate year since I960 — always during May — Casper called at Bermuda in his wanderings.

            When nobody else was there, I crossed over and had long talks with this remarkable man. He was so tall and thin he hardly looked strong enough for long ocean voyages. He said he had to take a pill every day and give himself an injection once a week.

            “The nurses in Puerto Rico were very kind to me," he said. "They showed me how to practice on an orange, and I'm pretty good at sticking myself now. I generally winter on the south coast of Puerto Rico these years. You know, when I first sailed to Bermuda very few yachts touched here. So lots of people came to see me, and I made many friends. I remember the first year, when I was ready to leave, a whole crowd came down to the dock. I asked them, "Are any of you sailors? Could you turn me around while I'm stowing supplies?

            “‘Why, Frank,' they said, 'we're all sailors,' and warped Elsie around. When I sailed out of Town Cut, the cliffs were lined with people.”

            Subsequently it came to light that this friendly, modest, quiet man had been offered charter membership in the Slocum Society for a singlehanded voyage around the world, but he declined because a companion had joined him for a short stretch. In 1969, he was awarded the Blue Water Medal of the Cruising Club of America for his many voyages. He had been sailing in his beamy, wood Colin Archer-type cutter since 1959. She was 30 feet overall, jibheaded, mast amidships, short bowsprit, completely simple below, small engine, forecastle practically a carpenter shop with bench and vise. She was built in Germany in 1958.

            He seemed to sail just for the joy of it, quietly slipping away and reappearing months or years later without fuss.

            Casper did a great deal of his early cruising in a 16-foot sail canoe. His canoe weighed 75 pounds. He used a double paddle against the wind, and a 40-squarefoot sail otherwise, camping on the beach at night. In this craft, he made cruises from New York to places as far away as Nantucket and Florida. Following his retirement at age 55 and after acquiring Elsie, he headed offshore. The list of his voyages is impressive. Charles H. Vilas, author of The Saga of Direction, and editor of the Cruising Club News, printed a complete list or Frank's voyages before 1970 in the 1970 yearbook of the Cruising Club of America. These include: 1960—Miami, the Bahamas, Bermuda; 1961-62—Faial, Gibraltar, Los Palmas, and a cruise through the West Indies; 1963-1966— around the world via Jamaica, Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, New Zealand, New Guinea, Torres Straits, Cocos-Keeling, Mauritius, Durban, Cape Town, and a 46-day sail to Grenada; 1967—the Azores, Gibraltar, and a month of discouraging calms in the Mediterranean, then the Canary Islands and a 37-day passage to Grenada; 1969—the Antilles, Bermuda, a 38-day passage to Cornwall, then Madeira and the Canaries, ending with a 30-day crossing back to Grenada, arriving New Year's Eve having made 100 miles a day under trysail in a gale the first five days. Casper reported plenty of gales and problems but at no time did he appear to have been in serious trouble.

            At St. George, Casper didn't seem to need anything or want to rush ashore to buy goodies. He had a serenity quite in contrast to the rest of us who were laying in supplies, greasing eggs, badgering mechanics and electricians, seeing sailmakers, buying hardware and stove parts and getting ready for the next ocean hop to the Canaries or wherever. One day he took a bus down-island to the metropolis of Hamilton, and came back from his shopping with two books he had bought, nothing more.

            One of the tales he told involved the sail canoe. He used to sail weekends on the Hudson River up above Dykman Street. On one of these occasions, the river was sprinkled with ice pans. He capsized but got ashore at night, made a fire, dried out, and continued sailing. He was determined not to tell Elsie about it, because she worried, as wives do. But when he arrived home, she had a good look at him and said "Well, you capsized, I see.”

            “How did you know?"

            “Your brass belt buckle has turned green.”

            The two old auto tires lashed to Elsie's stern rail were intriguing. With holes cut in them to add to the pull, they were to serve as drogues in the ultimate storm. When asked whether they worked well, he said he had never been in a gale bad enough to require their use. With regard to a Walker Log rotor, he said that because the sharks kept taking them, he didn't bother anymore, having learned to look over the side and guess, quite accurately, his speed from bubbles and the bow wave and wake.

            I was half afraid of asking too many questions, but he didn't seem to mind "What about safety harnesses?"

            “Well," he answered, "my friends all told me I should wear a safety harness. So I got one, and every night when was about to go out on the boomkin to lash my lantern to the backstay, I buckled it on. It was three or four nights before I realized that I hadn't made the tether fast to anything. So after that I gave it up.”

            He was proud of his homemade self-steering vane, which worked very well on a trim tab to his outboard rudder. Its most prominent feature was a large, fiat, circular steel plate with square teeth cut all around its circumference.

            At the time we met, Frank was bound from Bermuda lo England. "Mashford's is a very good yard in Cornwall, where I like to go for haul-out," he said. He planned to sail non-stop, avoiding the Azores (where he had called many times' because he was convinced that a 200- mile belt of calms commonly surround' those islands.) "Thirty days alone at sea, does that set your adrenalin to pumping!”

            Subsequently, he wrote that when he arrived at Mashford's his Elsie needed extensive repairs. She had some cracked ribs that had to be sistered, a sprung bowsprit, rigging to be renewed and other critical ailments. Then he sailed on—to Spain this time. It was a slow, rough passage. Then he headed south to the Canaries, and back to the Caribbean.

            He was a superb navigator and, like Captain Slocum, could correct the time on his watch with lunar observations.

            One of Frank's few machines was a typewriter he had taught himself to operate so that he could take down shortwave, Morse code weather broadcasts from Washington, DC.

            On this machine, in 1979, he wrote me, discounting my admiration for his voyages:

             "I'm not a salty character but just a skinny old man who is damn glad to reach port. By luck I bought a boat that turned out to be appropriate for ocean passages. Once around the world and 14 Atlantic crossings are no measure at personal accomplishment but merely indicate that I enjoy the sea and stars, the company of other sailors I meet in harbors, and the chance of trying to understand the cultures of foreign countries. In 1961 about 15 small boats crossed from Europe to the West Indies; in 1978 some 750 boats crossed.

            “I had a dandy cruise for the last 11 months, taking in Bermuda, Azores. Canaries, Barbados, Antigua …

             “Let's hear from you...”

            He wrote again from Puerto Rico, March 17, 1980. That must have been just before his fateful last voyage. I had asked, "What does it all add up to, the black nights, gales, calms, the lonely sunsets and far places. Can you say, can anyone?”

             He replied, "Could I say what all this ocean sailing adds up to? No. I feel at peace when looking at the stars but why go a thousand miles out in the ocean to see the stars? I have read books by small-boat sailors stating that ocean sailing demanded resourcefulness, courage and similar self-laudatory bunk. My ego would there upon be momentarily inflated." In an impersonal way, he went on to say that some solo voyagers have been influenced by prolonged illness as children; attendance at schools that are for boys only, with distinct separation from the opposite sex; extreme dedication to studies and profession after graduation; perhaps a girl and a broken love.

            Enigmatic, but that seemed his intention.

            Throughout the world, Frank encountered sailor friends by happy chance, and it was a joy for him to have a gam again after long years, with the Peter Pyes, the Smeetons, the Hal Roths, the Tilmans, the Humphrey Bartons, and many other famous and obscure ocean wanderers. Eric Hiscock wrote in his book, Come Aboard, of meeting Frank again, this time in the Grenadines, noting that Frank always had a shell, a rock, a book, a gift, a tale, as he rowed over in his funny little square ended dinghy. He did not emphasize his own adventures; instead he wanted to know where you had been, and what kind of winds the gods had let out of the bag this time to buffet you or send you soaring.

For many of his later years, Frank's mail drop and only address was in care of friends in Puerto Rico. Shortly after Frank's death in 1980, I wrote to these friends, the McEwens, and had the following reply from Marjorie (Mrs. R.J.) McEwen:

            “As for anecdotes about Frank, we have very little. As you say, he was such a modest and unassuming man, he was loathe to talk about himself. He has come to Parguara (the fishing harbor adjacent to Lajas) every year for the last eight or ten years and would stay two or three months. He left his dinghy at our house when he went off to shop and would come back and spend about an hour with us, then take off until the next week. His stories were mainly about the people he met and re-met on his travels. In fact, when we went to the British Isles two years ago, he urged us to call on Vera and Les Mashford in Cornwall. Les and his brothers run the boatyard where Frank always hauled Elsie. These people were devoted to Frank and wanted him to give up the sea and come live with them. "I expect he told you about his canoe trips out on Long Island Sound as far as Block Island, and up and down the Hudson. Also, he took a six-month jaunt up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal and Great Lakes, down the Mississippi and across Florida. He had a small outboard on his canoe, but said he used it very seldom because it frightened away the wildlife and spoiled the peace and quiet of the trip.

            “He was very much interested in geology and would bring back rock samples from various places he had been to have identified by my geologist husband. In fact, his interests were legion and he was always happy to read any scientific magazines we might have on hand.

            “We were amazed when we first went on Frank's boat and saw how spartan it was. No head, no sink in the galley, a modest kerosene stove, and only a receiving radio. Whenever anything goes wrong with our plumbing or modern appliances, we now say: If we would only 'Casperize,' we wouldn't have these problems. "We will truly miss this wonderful man, as will all his friends."

             On May 21, 1980, Frank was found wrecked and drowned on a beach in Bermuda. He and his boat were washed ashore by the tide. It is supposed he was in his cabin asleep, sails set, vessel guided by vane-steering, when she struck Bermuda's south barrier coral reef. Seven days before that, a yachtsman at sea had spoken to Frank and found him in good spirits. One could easily say his exit was as he wished it. But he was 76, and who wouldn't wish for another year of sailing? In better times, there is no doubt Frank Casper had made his peace with the sea, the sunrises and the storms. He lived the cruising life for many years, and intended to go on as long as he could. It seems certain that he knew the ocean would take him finally.

Over an advertisement in the Cruising World article, Elliott Merrick had pasted:

John Masefield was thinking of a man like Frank Casper when he wrote:

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.