Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/215

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Capt. John McClintock.
193

ture, the last time in 1835. He held a commission in the custom house under Collectors Farley and McCobb. Capt. McClintock was a man of deep religious feeling. It was his custom to have daily prayers on board his vessel, and to discourage profanity and every form of irreligion and vice. A man of temperate life and regular habits, he enjoyed vigorous health almost to his latest days, and his mental faculties' were strong and clear to the last. To such a man death could have neither terrors nor pangs. In calmness he awaited the hour of dissolution. He died March 18, 1875, in his ninety-seventh year. [The above account of Capt. William McClintock is condensed from an article in the Republican Journal, of Belfast, Me.]

He was very much interested in historical subjects, and his retentive memory was stored with facts and traditions. A delegation of the Maine Historical Society visited him after he was eighty years of age and gained many important facts from oblivion. With his young grandson he would start off for a week's cruise over the winding roads of the old town of Bristol, and would make every moment interesting by stories and legends. Old Pemaquid was a source of never failing interest to him, and all the inlets and points about the bay were crowded with memories. He always maintained that the settlement founded at the old fort before Jamestown was settled was permanent and therefore first in the thirteen colonies. Many historians and antiquarians now believe as he did. The old tombstone at the fort dated 1694 is of one of his ancestors.

IV. John McClintock, born in Bristol, Maine, April 9, 1807, died in Chelsea, September 8, 1886. He was the second son of William and Francis (Young) McClintock, and on his mother's side a direct descendant of John Rogers, the martyr. His boyhood was passed on his father's farm and on the adjacent ocean, and he was at home on either. His education was received at the district schoolhouse, and so well did he improve his opportunities that he taught school seven winters while a young man. His natural bent was to follow the sea, and soon after he was twenty-one he was in command of a coaster. In 1833 he bought an interest in the Eliza, the first of a long list of vessels of which he owned a part. There was the Increase, the Mary and Susan, Araxene, Briganza, Genesee, Narcoochee, Roderick Dhu, Medallion, Dashaway, Harry Hammond, Clara and Hattie—making his last voyage in the latter vessel in 1880,—an almost continuous sea service of fifty-three years. During those years he had several times circumnavigated the globe and has been into nearly every foreign and domestic port. He was a very fortunate ship master, never having lost a vessel.

He was a skilful navigator and appreciated the science of taking advantage of winds and currents to help him on his way. He was popular with his brother sea captains and generous to all in distress. He was a very modest man, shunning evil, honorable in all his dealings, scrupulously honest in all his business relations. He was fond of music, a game of whist, a good story, and good company generally. He was deferential in his treatment of ladies, his manner being courtly, if a little old-fashioned. He reveled in good books. The standard authors, from Herodotus to Dickens, were familiar to him. He found delight in the conceptions of the poets, and had such a retentive mem-