It’s a long-lost tale of a life at sea. “Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail & Steam” is a first-person account by Daniel Killman, a ship captain from Maine. He spent a half-century on ocean voyages and died in 1936.
The book is packed with Killman’s toughness and derring-do as the seafaring world was transformed from sailing ships to steam power. A hurricane in the South Pacific broke masts and sent “balls of fire” up and down the wire rigging. The captain, called “Crazy” Killman by some, got in fights and was once accused of murder.
With a typewriter and sometimes in penciled longhand, Killman wrote of ship owners, money, crew troubles, and what it took to deliver cargo all over the world.
Having a book published is hardly a life-or-death endeavor. But for the Everett woman whose name is also on the book’s cover — “Compiled by Rebecca Huycke Ellison,” it says — the task of publishing Killman’s manuscript took perseverance and years of work.
For Ellison, it was a tribute to her late father, Harold Huycke Jr.
Huycke, who lived in Edmonds, had a lifelong passion for maritime history. A graduate of the California Maritime Academy, he earned a captain’s license and went to sea on merchant ships. In Seattle, he worked for a tug and barge company, and later owned a marine surveyor business.
“That’s what he did for pay. What he did for fun was Pacific maritime history,” Ellison said Wednesday at her home in Everett’s View Ridge neighborhood. “Dad had a massive collection of books, interviews on tape, written interviews, photos, and artifacts off ships. He loved history and old sailing ships.”
Ellison’s father told her that as a boy in Los Angeles, he had a chance to go out on a fishing boat. From that first whiff of salt water, the docks and boats, he was hooked for life. He read maritime magazines, and for 70 years corresponded with people all over the world who were interested in seafaring.
Huycke was 84 when he died in 2007. Ellison, now 59, was determined to finish a task her dad started in the 1970s — the publication of Killman’s “Forty Years Master.” It starts simply: “I was born the 22nd day of June, 1860, in the State of Maine on the banks of the Penobscot River.”
Ellison found the manuscript’s yellowed pages after her father died. She had known of its existence for years.
Her father knew Karl Kortum, the late founder of the San Francisco Maritime Museum that’s now part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Ellison believes Killman’s daughter, Sydney Killman Pierce, may have found Huycke through a network of maritime history enthusiasts.
In September 1975, Huycke met with the sea captain’s daughter. Killman had lived his later years in Tacoma. Ellison said Killman’s daughter gave her dad the manuscript.
For help with the project, Huycke reached out to John Lyman, an East Coast friend and research associate of the San Francisco Maritime Museum. They became co-editors, but Lyman “did the bulk of the work,” Ellison said.
“John Lyman did the footnotes and Dad found photographs,” she said. They had a publisher, but the book was held up when written permission was needed from Killman’s daughter.
In 1977, Lyman died of cancer and Huycke got the manuscript back. His daughter said he set it aside, hoping to finish it someday.
After her dad died, Ellison said she was determined that “I was going to finish it.” She was inspired by a poster in her father’s office for the Karl Kortum Award for Maritime History, given by Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library. It was a prize she would go on to win in 2013 for her work in bringing the manuscript to light.
In 2012, Ellison tracked down and met with Killman’s grandson-in-law, Frederick Hokanson. He had married the sea captain’s granddaughter, Sally Pierce, and was living near Tacoma. Killman’s daughter Sydney had died in 2001. Ellison remembers going to Kinko’s with Hokanson, then in his 80s, to make copies of Killman family photos.
With a master’s degree in librarianship from the University of Washington, Ellison worked online to find Killman’s family and research publishers. She acquired more photos and paintings of sailing ships through the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts. She also added historical newspaper clippings to the book.
It all came together when “Forty Years Master” was published this year by Texas A&M University Press.
Ellison keeps the manuscript in a bright pink folder, something the old sea captain surely never had. After years spent working with his words, “I am fond of him,” Ellison said of Killman, who chronicled the end of the sailing ship era.
“He was hard. You could go so far as to call him brutal,” Ellison said. “But he was responsible. According to my dad and others, he was pretty remarkable on the business side of it. He represented the owners. He could be tough, but he had a tender spot. His wife Minnie was beloved.”
Ellison’s father wrote another book, “To Santa Rosalia: Further and Back,” about German square-rigged ships stuck in Baja California during World War I. Ellison doesn’t know how “Forty Years Master” would have turned out had her father finished it. She knows that without his example, the captain’s story would have been lost.
“It was my dad, and watching how he operated. You have to be accurate in the details. He had so many connections,” Ellison said. “He had a personal Christmas card list and a maritime Christmas card list. I had a lot of help.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Book event
Rebecca Huycke Ellison, who compiled “Forty Years Master: A Life in Sail & Steam” from a sea captain’s manuscript that was in her late father’s possession, will sign copies of the book 5-8 p.m. July 21 at the Edmonds Bookshop, 111 Fifth Ave. S., Edmonds.
The book is available from Texas A&M University Press, www.tamupress.com, or Amazon.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
