Captain Sands, an old seafarer, is “a great hand for keeping things.” His wife doesn’t mind all his clutter — as long as it stays out of the house. So the captain has a “stow-away place,” an old warehouse down on the pier. That’s where he likes to be — among his treasures.
The captain strikes me as one of the great overlooked characters of American literature. He’s in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven, a book I admire.
The book, published in 1877, is a collection of sketches of the people of a small town in Maine.
Two young women, Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis, spend the summer there, keeping house in a family home after the death of Kate’s grandaunt. Helen, the narrator, tells how the young women went to examine one of the treasures of the captain’s collection, a sword-fish bill attached to a wooden handle.
Of course we went close to look at it, and we both felt a great sympathy for this friend of ours, because we have the same fashion of keeping worthless treasures, and we understand perfectly how dear such things may be.
I think some of the most interesting things that happen on this Earth happen in small towns. Some of those interesting things involve collections.
Collections are interesting because they involve questions about why one person becomes interested in one thing and not another, why Captain Sands includes one thing in his collection and not something else.
A collection is a reflection of an individual mind. I think writers should be especially interested, because collections are related to stories in roughly the same way rosary beads are related to prayers. The captain tells the young women some tales.
I’m interested in storage sheds, barns, curiosity cabinets and miscellaneous drawers. I loved spending a half hour in the captain’s warehouse.
• Sources and notes: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven was published in Boston by James S. Osgood and Company in 1877. Project Gutenberg published it in 2005 here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15985/15985-h/15985-h.htm.
I heard about it from Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art, https://mleddy.blogspot.com. Thanks, Michael.
Not too long ago, I didn’t know a single person who had read Sarah Orne Jewett. Now I know four (one of them is me).
ReplyDeleteMarshland is a novel of hers that I have on the horizon. It’s not in the Library of America volume. Here’s a sample.
Oops — A Marsh Island.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael. I love that passage on crows.
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