"Only a moment, a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour - of youth! A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore; the time to remember, the time for a sigh. Good-bye, night; Goodbye." Joseph Conrad, Youth.
The true and remarkable life of Richard Willis (Will) Jackson, an intrepid seaman from one of the leading shipbuilding families in 19th century Maine, whose exploits and adventures in the oceans of the world, would rival characters straight out of the lives and imaginations of Joseph Conrad and Jack London.
Will Jackson survived a harrowing shipwreck in the Marshall Islands, being washed overboard rounding Cape Horn and running down Alaskan glaciers over a tragically shortened life that ended in a most bizarre and pedestrian incident on the eve of realizing his life's ambition: appointment as master of a ship.
After nine months of sometimes perilous life among natives in the South Sea islands in 1884, captured in chapters of a book he helped write, Jackson served on a series of large ships and coastal schooners - all based in the post-Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco - that took him up and down the west coast from Alaska to Mexico and to the four corners of the earth. His faithful letters to his family in Maine and a diary offer a compelling portrait of an extraordinary young man of character and independent spirit, intellect and curiosity, no small ambition and that most admirable of traits, an abiding sense of humor.
The original correspondence, owned by the writers, direct descendants of Mr. Jackson's brother, document the experiences and anecdotes of a genuine American in love with the sea. More or less forced to go before the mast after his grandfather had bankrupted one of America's most successful shipyards, Jackson's story reveals a great deal about himself, deep loyalty to his family, his ideals and longings, the international role of a small but dynamic city of ships in Maine and the wide-open spirit and conditions of a still young country at the end of the 19th century. That Jackson died a tragic death in San Francisco, at age 27, knocked down by a runaway horse on a day he was to be named captain of a ship and just weeks before he was to be married, is the most striking of ironies and obstacles of the kind he himself once recognized as "the ways and means of the world."
Jackson also served as an officer on several schooners built by Matthew Turner, one of the leading shipbuilders on the west coast, and then on two ships owned by George S. Hinsdale, a wealthy Oregon entrepreneur with whom he was crossing California and Drumm Streets in the center of San Francisco, in the early afternoon of March 9, 1889 when they were struck by the runaway horse. Hinsdale survived; Jackson died in hospital a day later.
His bizarre fate suggests the scores of unfulfilled and untold lives of those genuinely talented and heroic individuals who die an early, and unjust, death.
