Introduction - WoodenBoat Store

Introduction
“They say we never die as long as one thinks of us—reveres us.”
—Mary Schoettle (1867–1933) writing in 1930 when Silent Maid was in her ninth year1
T
his is a book about an old catboat, a traditional type with one mast and one
sail. There were hundreds of catboats on Barnegat Bay in the early 20th century,
but none quite like Silent Maid. She was built in 1924 at Bay Head, New Jersey, for a
Philadelphia businessman, Edwin J. Schoettle. This book traces Silent Maid’s progress
through her eighty-odd years of sailing.
The history of this ship is as much about the people who sailed her and where they
came from as it is about the wood, iron, bronze, cordage, and canvas that fleshed out
her frames. This has been the one unique opportunity to write such a detailed history of
Silent Maid, and I have tried to make the account complete. I have presented as much
detail as is available from and about the seven principal families who owned her. It was
through their lives she moved, and I seek to recount how they came to shape, nurture,
and, ultimately, preserve her. It is also about how she influenced their lives in return.
Two thousand days were spent researching and writing this book. It has been an
interesting time, but often puzzling, where memories and opinions contradict and
written records fail to fill the voids. Most of the complicated people who took Silent
Maid through her halcyon years are long dead, and I will never know their true inner
thoughts. Survivors, descendants, and scores of allied sources have been clawed and
pestered for their stories, opinions, and disagreements. Each has viewed time with the
Maid through different prisms of experience, sometimes with dark or contradictory
recollections, sometimes through varying lenses of happy or nostalgic colors.
Introduction
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Cutlery and a Spode ‘Camilla’ Copeland English dinner plate made in December 1939,
one of eight aboard Silent Maid in 1953 and believed to be from the Schoettles’ use
1924–1944. A single plate in 2013 sold for $50.
I’ve tried to remain true to the stories as people recounted them to me. Many tales
writ simply here have taken half a dozen revisions, submitted to the participants before
clarity—even humor—emerged. If I failed in this endeavor, then the fault, of course,
is mine. All authors of nonfiction are supposed to say this, but I have done my best to
make the caveat unnecessary, and the hundreds of references inserted at the ends of my
chapters document what I have found and what I have been told. Many of these notes
are worth close attention because they explain or amplify the text. There will always be
enough spaces amongst my lines for the reader to insert interpretations, as their own
lights dictate.
I expect few users of this volume will read the book in toto so I have endeavored to
make each chapter intelligible as a stand-alone. This means you will find some events
and anecdotes appearing more than once, with a particular slant tailored to each of
the Maid’s “family” chronologies. I beg forgiveness from those who take note of this
repetition.
Text boxes are pulled out to highlight items and stories that would interrupt the
flow of the main narrative. This book is also full of pictures, which help interpret the
Maid’s life and times and the personalities that came aboard. Most of these images,
from family archives or arcane sources, would never be seen by more than a few people
without this book.
xii |
Silent Maid
Since my family was among those fortunate enough to own Silent Maid, my personal logbooks provide extraordinary detail. The Maid was also the platform from which
I launched my timid childhood nautical adventures, now stretching well beyond 50,000
nautical miles. Aboard the Maid, I learned about the marine life, marshes, winds, and
tide of Barnegat Bay. This long coastal lagoon slowly revealed to me its history and led
eventually to my first published book Closed Sea. In a real sense, by holding me close
to the water all those years, Silent Maid cradled and shaped my half-century career as
scientist, sailor, historian, and writer.
I have shared more of my environmental perspective than some readers may wish,
because Silent Maid is inseparable from Barnegat Bay upon which she sailed. This book
will tell you something about this bay and its history, and how this natural and human
environment laid the groundwork for the time in which this famous old catboat was
built and sailed.
—Kent Mountford, PhD
ENDNOTE
1. Mary Schoettle, 1930. Account of Ferdinand Ehrhardt Schoettle. Courtesy of Phillip A.
Schoettle, 2009.
Silent Maid’s Battle Flag. By the end of this volume you will
find Silent Maid has been born anew to be sailed and raced
for generations to follow. Graphic designer Bev Vienckowski
designed this flag for owner Peter R. Kellogg.
Introduction
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FIGURE 1-1. A catboat and sloop grace this 1917 painting by E.B. Rowaski.
Roy Pedersen collection, with permission
xiv |
Silent Maid
1
Silent Maid’s
Barnegat Bay
T
o understand Silent Maid’s history I want to introduce geology, history, aquatic
conditions, and meteorology to show how people came to harvest, enjoy, and,
more recently, abuse Barnegat Bay. This background will set the conditions under
which an eager sailing community built and raced those first specialized catboats from
the mid-19th century to the 1920s.
From conception and as a sailing vessel, Silent Maid spanned a significant fraction
of recent Barnegat history, from a time when the region was still a mostly rural,
undeveloped chain of sand dunes, seacoast farming settlements, and pine-woods
fishing camps.
In 1928, Edwin Schoettle, Silent Maid’s first owner, wrote about his own earliest
times on Barnegat Bay, which embraced the last two decades of the 1800s. He
reminisced that during his youth “. . . workboats of small size were entirely propelled
by sail or steam. The gasoline engine was not known, and the necessity of sails with the
corresponding ability to handle them produced a picturesque and interesting type of
waterman. . . . Up to the end of the [19th century] one of the greatest pleasures [for
boaters] consisted of seeking the haunts of professional fisherman and sailors, listening
to their interesting yarns and discussing the various problems of sailing.”1
Barnegat Bay was also part of a complex natural system that enabled and, in some
ways, controlled the life-ways and industries, which eventually flourished around
its shorelines. Schoettle, we shall see, appreciated this environment, but he had no
clue about how the natural ecosystem worked to support the human endeavors that
surrounded him.
The bay was backed by vast pine woods, towering white cedar (Chamecyparis
thyoides) swamps, and underlying deposits of bog iron ore—all of which proved to
be the source of materials for naval stores and artisanal boatbuilding. Felling these tall
Silent Maid’s Barnegat Bay
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