Those of us, whose boating background is limited to paddling a canoe on a placid pond, or, even more fortunate persons who have enjoyed the lavish adventure of a luxury liner cruise, inevitably will marvel at the fortitude of sailors who went to sea in days gone by, aboard sturdy but ill-equipped sailing ships.

    So, as we read about the seaman upon whose life this story is based, we cannot help but wonder how anyone survived the bitter conditions that took so many lives in the days of the ill-fated three masters.

    This is the setting for this unusual tale, which actually is a story within a story.

    The time for the basic tale is the late 1800s and the place the luxurious offices of the New York Stock Exchange, occupied by the wealthy president, Alfrederick Smith Hatch, the same A.S. Hatch who, as a frail teen-ager, was sent to sea by his physician father in a desperate "kill or cure" effort.

    The "prescription" evidently was effective because the once-sickly A.S. Hatch is now the rotund stock exchange head whose philanthropic tendencies had enabled the Union forces to conquer the South in the Civil War.

    So when an ill-dressed, bewhiskered sailor entered the Stock Exchange office, Hatch was sure it was another seaman seeking a handout. It wasn't. It was Jack Corbett, hero, if you will, of this remarkable story, the sailor who 30 years prior to his unheralded entrance, had befriended young Hatch.

    The stock exchange head reminisced with the redoubtable seaman, recalling the adventures they had shared, the narrow escapes they had endured. It reads like fiction but it wasn't.

    Hatch pointed to a fortunate occurrence. He had been scheduled for a berth aboard a three-master, the "Brewster," but it sailed without him. The ship disappeared without a trace.

    Instead he signed with the New World bound for Liverpool. "Our work was now hard, unremitting and perilous," he remembers, "alternations of snow and hail and rain, freezing as it fell, were almost constant. Our wet clothes would be frozen stiff. Sometimes we would be frozen fast to the yard."

    One terrible night, the two disparate men recalled as they reminisced, they had to risk their lives to rescue a sailor frozen high to a yard. There were many more such dangerous incidents.

    Hatch realized that despite Corbett's poor background, he was indeed a man of heroic portions and he was determined that the world would remember him. So despite a 30-year interval, he wrote the story, paying deserved tribute to the man who had been his mentor and who in later years, would help others in need.

    That brings us to the present.

    Denny Hatch, a great grandson of A.S. Hatch, found the 130-year-old manuscript and that is the story within the story, an epoch of heroism that belies some of the disparaging descriptions of the old time seamen.

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    It's a story you'll enjoy.

Zel Levin
Retired city editor of the Woonsocket Call newspaper and radio personality.

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From THE NAUTICAL MAGAZINE (UK)
March 2003.
Jack Corbett, Mariner, by A. S. HATCH, New York, Published by THE QUANTUCK LANE PRESS. US$24.95, CND$35.99, £19.95.
    THIS IS THE TRUE STORY of a relationship between an important American financier and the Irish sailor, Corbett, who changed his life. In 1949 Alfrederick Hatch, a delicate and slightly asthmatic youth, was sent to sea by his physician father to "either cure him or kill him." He signed on as an apprentice seaman in a Liverpool packet involved in the transport of Irish refugees fleeing the hard times of the potato famine and in the company of the "roughest, dirtiest, swearingest, drinkingest men alive." Hatch probably would not have survived had he not been befriended by an illiterate, bewhiskered Jack Tar named Jack Corbett who became his guardian and mentor, his sea daddy, and in the words of the dedications, " . . .[a] rough but tender guardian and mentor amid the hardships and perils?."
    Thirty years later, just before Hatch became President of the New York Stock Exchange, Jack Corbett appeared again and became a member of the Hatch household where he acted as guardian to Hatch's eleven children and remained with the family until the end of his life.
    Jack Corbett, Mariner, contains many fascinating descriptions of mid-19th century life aboard square-rigged sailing vessels from the bizarre and arduous duties of a ship's boy and the harsh realities of life as a steerage passenger. The New World, the ship in which Hatch learned the ropes, was said to have been one of the most reputable of her kind although on the steerage deck conditions were far from perfect. The Swallow Tail Line owned the New World which had been built in Boston by Donald McKay noted by the writer as the greatest naval architect and master shipbuilder in the history of America. She was launched in 1846 and was 1407 tons, 187 feet in length, with a 40-foot beam and a draft of 28 feet. At that time she was the first three deck merchant ship built in an American yard and the largest sailing ship in the US.
    To indicate the extent of trading across the Atlantic during the currency of the tales herein, at the time of Hatch's voyage in 1850, no fewer than 219,450 emigrant left the UK for the US and the publisher has performed a welcome service in bringing to us, a century and a half later, a contemporaneous record of life afloat on the Atlantic in the hardiest of trades. The book is in two parts, Aboard Ship and Ashore and the second part is something of a social history of family life with jack Corbett. Eight pages of pictures are provided showing embarkation in Liverpool. The Hatch family, their home The Castle at Tarrytown, New York and their yacht, Resolute, built in 1871.
    All royalties after out-of-pocket expenses from the sale of the book will be donated by the Hatch family to the New York City Rescue Mission founded by Jerry McAuley and A. S. Hatch in 1872. Hatch was a pivotal figure in establishing hostels and havens for seafarers down on their luck.
    To the manuscript is an Afterword by Denny Hatch, great-grandson of the author, A. S. (Alfrederick) Hatch. He tells us that the catalyst for his great-grandfather's voyage in New World was likely to have been Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840 and doubtless read by AS's father, Horace, who was determined that his sickly son should undertake a sea voyage that would either kill or cure him. He goes on to ell us something of about the Hatch family, their philanthropic skills, the yachts they owned, family and high finance. The Mission played a part in providing relief for those who suffered in the aftermath of the horror of the events in New York City on 11th September 2001.
    More about the Hatch family and 19th century American history can be found on the Website at: www.jackcorbett.com.
    To close there is a bibliography of sources, a list of relative Websites and glossary of nautical terms.
    Jack Corbett, Mariner, is distributed in the UK by W. W. Norton and Company of London.

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