At the point where the old pier runs from the sea wall there is a
hollowed groove the intention of which, an old salt explains, was to admit a
great gate of wooden booms whereby, in times of violent storm, the guardians
of the ancient port could shut out the angry force of the waters. The old men
who sat by the quayside, looking like so many Neptunes without their tridents
and who made it their duty to do service on the visiting ships - James
MacDonald, an old man-o'war's man; Tam Kennedy and others - have vanished from
their yarn-spinning perch under the shelter of the old storehouse. And what
yarns they loved to tell, great gales and great shipwrecks, of nautical
manoevres unprescribed in any rule of navigation, of things they had seen that
were never paralleled in the history of the sea. How those seadogs barked
delightedly in all the secure consciousness of the exclusive character of
their yarning and their incontrovertible nautical knowledge, which ll accepted
as unreservedly as Holy Writ. And of wrecks and storms theirs was an
inexhaustible budget. As concerning the "Lady Montgomerie", whose
crew were drowned eighty years ago just out there under the quay wall; also as
to the "Semiramis", which, in the year following the Corn Law
agitation, after her crew were dragged over the wall, settled down on the
rocks and left not a trace behind. The "Trelawney"! who is there
within a radius of a hundred miles of Saltcoats who cannot tell of this famous
wreck? "It was the year in which the late Queen Victoria was born",
begins the narrator of the familiar story. "She was a fine ship - four
fifty tons - belonging to Glasgow, bound for Jamaica. She went ashore out
there. You can see the spot along the Eastern Shore, between the Stevenston
Burn and the Irvine Bar. Four men, three of them shipmasters of Saltcoats,
lost ribs of the "Trelawney" cast their weird shadows on the wet
sand. These unofficial pilots - most of them old man-o'war men - had often to
load her with big stones lest during the night she might be driven from the
mooring posts. In the day when no royal mail steamship majestically ploughed
the way to Arran, the sloop did all the work, and was the bearer of the
packets.
The history of the ships of Saltcoats would require a
volume as long as Deuteronomy : if the number of its captains was three
hundred, what man shall atempt an account of their vessels? The first vessel
of any size to ever built in Saltcoats was the boat of that name, the
"Saltcoats", sacred to the memory of Captain Dunlop and launched in
1710. It was the "Stevenston", the captain of which, well on in that
century, was Alexander Cuthebertson.
There were also the "Big Industry" and the
"Wee Industry", the "Wee Industry", captained by John
Craig and the big boat, as was natural, by his brother, James. The "Big
Industry" ran on behalf of the Auchenharvie Coal Company. Then there was
"The Three Brothers", running from Saltcoats to Dublin with Captain
MacFee in charge, afterwards Captain Robert Waters, Daniel Coleman and others.
Then there were also "The Friend", which belonged to James Miller,
who lived in Manse Street; the "Farnham" at the head of which, was
Captain Archibald Stirling and latterly Captain Walter Little; the
"Nancy" , which had the supervision of Captain Colin Shearer; and
the "Eliza" guided by Captain Kennedy; and the "James",
under the gallant Captain Cowie, who afterwards sailed in the "Madjestic".
The "Jean and Grace" is memorable as built for one of the most
famous of Saltcoats merchants, Robert Stevenson of Coalhill. Her captain was
James Bolton and she had this special interest, that she was the last to come
into Saltcoats. All the captains belonged to Saltcoats except Daniel Coleman
and Robert Walters, who were natives of Waterford and came as runners in one
of the ships deserted by its crew. They became enamoured of the ladies of
Saltcoats, married and settled down. Of course that is more than eighty years
ago. One must not forget the wee schooner which used to came skimming over the
waves, bringing propwood for the pit and known as the "Lark". The
two packets remained a lively memory to most of the old inhabitants. The
captains were deservedly popular. One was named John MacDonald and he sailed
with letters from Saltcoats to Lamlash; the other was Charles Gray, running
from Saltcoats to Brodick. Captain Gray, who was a great favourite of his
time, lived many a day, after his memorable runs, in one of the little houses,
under the shadow of King's Bridge, in Ardrossan Road. When under Plimsoll's
order the old ships were condemned, the most interestin feature of the sailing
life of Saltcoats departed and the sea was bereft of a whole host of singular
sailing craft which has never been equalled since. Their purpose, at all
events, was over. They existed for the coal trade and on the coal they
thrived.
Most picturesque of all the memories of the Port in its
palmy days are those which bring back visions of the much-burdened and
important little coaler as she staggered out of Saltcoats under her black
load. The story tellers may be very particular as to the cut of her
"jib"; they may rend themselves in controversy over her stump
top-gallant mast, or boom foresail, but they all agree as to the impression
she created and the overpowering devotion of "the children of the
sea". Their close domestic attachment to their floating craft cannot be understood
by any on not born in the breezy latitude of the land of the salter.
Pleasant it was in those days to watch the heavily charged wagons as they
crawled along the curve at the pier end, were then urged over the hurries and
their contents "coupit" into the darksome hold. The little vessel,
loaded up to the "coomins", was safely guided out past the pierhead
and then set off with as affectionate a farewell as if she were bound for the
West Indies. With what solicitude the people of the port looked for her return
: they could tell by the most wonderful calculation when she was due and,
reckoning the chances of a breeze, the time when she would appear gliding up
the Firth in a drenching sea.
Little wonder that the collier became a nursery for the
Clyde captains. Her crews had the instinct of seamanship and the spirit of marvelous
endurance. Strong work required strong men; they had to shovel the
coal. The business of the coaler was to get to her destination the best way
she could and take all the chances. She had to keep riding through the billows
whether in a calm sea or weathering a fierce squall. Weather beaten were her
crews actually and metaphorically. The coal trade made sailors "worth
their salt" and the skippers no mere "catpet captain".
"Our was the best of schools", says a survivor, "and don't
forget that Captain Cook first went to sea aboard a coal boat". Not a few
of the great ones of our own day commenced their careet behind the
apple-shaped bows of a Saltcoats coaler, whether it was a handy brigantine or
a trig schooner is no matter.
Of the "Clitus", the ship which will ever be
associated with the name of the redoubtable Betsy Miller, one who sailed with
her says that it carried 200 tons. Her chief mission was to take coal to the
Irish ports and bring back limestone to Ardrossan. "As every square inch
of room was wanted to stow cargo, life in the fo'castle", he says,
"made you feel like a giant in Lilliput". There was room enough when
you got there; 'twas like sleeping in a travelling mine, sometime in a bunk,
sometimes in hammock, but always with all pervading consciousness of being in a
world of coal, in coal black depths, with coal sometimes forcing its gritty
powder into your hair or choicest articles of food, eaten sometimes by the
light of a candle. The glare of day was only admitted by a hatch like the lid
of a box, which was lifted to let the water off. As a rule, when you got out
of your bunk you had to dress on the scuttle. Betsy's house on deck was really
a house, for it was a poop, the only poop of the time in that class of brig. A
little window to the right enabled her to sight the operations on the deck
level. At night or at early morn you were never sure as to what orifice she
would shoot the becapped head out of, with the regulation question : "Hoo's
she dae'n noo lads"?
"She was a sonsy woman, weel favor't, neither wee nor
tall, an'wi' as much sense o'humour as made life aboard gang pleasantly".
"Captain" Betsy was by no means inconsiderate of the creature
comforts of men who had worked wheir way amongst the ironbound coasts in
temptuous weather and had faced dangers which would have made the crew of a
big merchantman of today tremble. A hint given to her that a drop of grog
would restore the faded animation of the men, was ever promptly acted upon. A
royal grant right royally appreciated. This queen of the water highways never
misjudged her crew. She needed no pilot to acquaint her with her way about.
She knew the run of the tides and was familiar with the ways of men, money and
boats. She was purser more ways than one. When "Captain" Betsy
Miller withdrew from the sevice of the sea, there passed out of the maritime
life of old Saltcoats the most striking of its unique personalities. For a
time her sister Hannah guided the responsibilities of the ship, but eventually
the "Clitus" was left on the rocks near the North Pans to be torn to
pieces by the angry sea. Some parts of its battered timbers are still visible
under the water just outside the bathing basin.
Around the Braes, on the onetime fashionable crescent of
the bay of Saltcoats, rest the gardens of the early settlers; here and there a
deserted courtyards, with a blighted tree forming the only mark of an earlier
civilisation, cleft by backways and closes, into which a man might readily
dive and emerge from some far off hole. Even yet after nightfall, when black
beams of shadow shoot across these alleys and impart an inky gloom to the
corners of the Braes, a stranger hesitates to pass through; but the days when
they were dangerous have long since passed. No townsman today pays his
shilling to "The Protection Society of Saltcoats", as he had to do
in 1793 when foreign vessels brought strange visitors. No longer does the
swinging lantern of a friendly seaman illumine those eerie passages, crying
the state of the wind for anxious mariners and waking skippers from their airy
dreams. The long dyke at the rear of Orr's is a reminder of the sailorman who,
two hundred years ago, set up his little kingdom behind it, little dreaming
that a busy thoroughfare would rise beside his place of habitation and that in
front of that boundary wall the restless sea would bring to Saltcoats shore
all the glory of a busy port, destined to flourish for a time; then to fall for
ever into a condition of decline from which it would never rise. Truly the
tide of that older life have ebbed.
