Edgar Oliver Smith of Cape Sable Island at the southernmost extremity of Nova Scotia died of tuberculosis one January night in 1917, when the youngest of his six children was all of 14 years old. After dawn that youngest, who happens to have been my grandfather William Edgar "Bill" Smith, waded with his elder brother Harvey into the snow to cut firewood; they were the men of the house, as of their father's passing hours before, and the day was cold and the household without fuel. Captain Edgar was born the 2nd of January and he died on that date, he was born on Cape Island and he died there, but in his 56 years in the world he saw a great part of it, and he was in his way a maker of history.
Edgar looks to have gone to sea by 1876 and the age of 15, as "bowman in a dory with his cousin Edmund". From his cousin's dory Edgar graduated to the schooner Fearless, and thence to the brig S.N. Collimore, then from 1882 to '84 Edgar fished the Triton out of Gloucester in Massachusetts, about the time the Gloucester fleet was reported by the Boston Globe to be lousy with Nova Scotians. Edgar was formally Captain Edgar by 1891 when he was certified Master in the Coast Trade, being certified seven years thereafter for Foreign Service. But by 1886 Edgar was second mate on the Hector, crossing the Atlantic and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar to Valencia on the east coast of Spain and Sete in the South of France, and by 1890 Edgar had made captain, fishing the Grand Banks for Newfoundland concerns.
Sometime in his couple years on the Grand Banks a hook caught Captain Edgar in his left forefinger, which had the effect of fixing it in a rigid extension. For the balance of his days Edgar never could crook that finger, and the bum finger is conspicuous in the photography of him.
At the risk of reinforcing the stereotype of island folk, it must here be recorded that Captain Edgar married his first cousin, in a double-wedding wherein his sister-in-law married her first cousin. Edgar married Susan Cornelia, also a Smith, which saves on paperwork, in the December-est of December weddings, on the winter solstice of 1887, and biennially from 1892 through 1902 they begat four daughters and two sons, namely Felicia and Edith and Edna and Clare, and Harvey and William, in that order. Susie was daughter to the Captain William Black Smith, also a sea captain and a great man, and as deserving of a biography. And Susie survived Edgar by 31 years, living to see victory in the First World War and the Second, and then some.
It may've been 1892 that Edgar first served as an officer on a steamship, on the S.S. City of St. John running between Yarmouth and Halifax, as second mate under the family friend Captain Arthur McGray whose biographical sketch of Edgar is invaluable. The next year Edgar graduated to pilot of the City of St. John, and the year after to captain. Then two years thereafter Edgar was taken on by the Yarmouth Steamship Company, to captain their flagship the S.S. Yarmouth, with passenger and mail service between Yarmouth and Boston. The Yarmouth company fleet of half a dozen steamers were grand ships, each with capacious dining rooms. Bill Smith reported that his father's Yarmouth-to-Boston run departed Yarmouth about suppertime and arrived Boston about dawn, and that his mother packed sandwiches, to keep their strength up till they landed in the morning.
It was in the course of his service for the Yarmouth Steamship Co. that Captain Edgar was charged with the odd job in 1898 of crossing to England, taking receipt for the Yarmouth company of the "fast sidewheeler Express", and steaming those 428 tons home to Yarmouth, with a stop at St. John's for coal. Paddle-wheelers by then had been overtaken by "screw"- or propeller-driven steamships, but paddle-steamers were in service still, and it may be that a paddler was in this instance preferred, for the reason that it was meant for the shallower waters of coastal service, between Yarmouth and Halifax "via intermediate ports". And the Express was a new construction, with two paddle-wheels and as many enginerooms and smokestacks, making 15 1/4 knots and breaking "all records" for passage from Halifax to Yarmouth. Edgar manifestly had the trust of the Yarmouth Steamship Co., and on June 20 he landed their baby in one piece, at 4 in the morning.
But Edgar's Express job was for naught: not three months into its service, the Express was wrecked comprehensively on Outer Island, called in the newspaper account Bon Portage Island, five miles from Cape Sable Island. The Express had cost Yarmouth Steamship $80,000, but after Outer Island was through with it, its 202' steel hull went for $475, although the Yarmouth company evidently were prudent souls and had insured for $60,000. The captain at the time of the Outer Island misfortune was not Edgar.
As the century turned, a year and a half after the Spanish-American War and assumption of the American protectorate over Cuba, Edgar captained the ship on "the first expedition to establish an American colony" in Cuba. He and his crew conveyed to Cuba 211 colonists from 30 states, two territories, and three Canadian provinces, "the vanguard of the first American colony planted in Cuba." Edgar's S.S. Yarmouth departed New York Harbor for Nuevitas on December 30 of 1899, recorded as "a stinging cold day" by James Meade Adams in his masterly account of that first American colony in Cuba, published 1901 and titled Pioneering in Cuba. Adams goes out of his way to commend Captain Edgar, as "a popular and efficient officer".
Adams: "[F]or thirty-six hours, in the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras, very rough water was encountered. But few on board had ever known such a sea, and sickness was universal." But Edgar's Yarmouth was "safe if not swift, [and] brought the colonists to this port without mishap." The Yarmouth also was "large and fine enough to have easily commanded the unbounded admiration and amazement of Christopher Columbus had he beheld her when he landed...near this point more than four centuries ago."
Edgar anchored at Nuevitas Harbor four and a half days after departing New York, on the fourth day of the new century. The colonists carried on to the settlement of La Gloria, and the Yarmouth carried on in the service of the Cuban Land and Steamship Company of 32 Broadway, undertaking second and third runs to Nuevitas through January and February, commanded presumably by Captain Edgar. (A couple years after Edgar's passing the Yarmouth would enter its last and least likely chapter, being sold to "noted social reformer, capitalist, and screwball" Marcus Garvey.)
And then came 1902 and the Mallory Line of New York. Edgar had of course captained the Yarmouth out of New York in 1900, but how it was that he came to be taken on by a considerable concern in Lower Manhattan is not now known to me; what is known is that Captain Edgar counted as a "staunch friend" one H. H. Raymond, President of the Mallory Line, and that he would be a Mallory man until his forced retirement in 1916. And an expedition of our family friend Otto Atkinson found Edgar's portrait hung prominently in the marble halls of the Mallory Line, three-quarters of a century after Edgar.
Captain Edgar was not at first captain, for the Mallory Line, but chief officer, on the S.S. Denver, graduating to captain on the Colorado, and captaining later the Lampasas. Edgar's service on the Mallory Line took him southward following the eastern seaboard to the southernmost extremity of the United States, at Key West off Florida, north again to Tampa on Florida's west coast, up and over to Mobile in Alabama, and across the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston off Houston in Texas, and to New York City where Edgar moved the family for half a decade. Edgar on his runs to the Gulf was three weeks at sea, per his daughter Clare very much later.
Captain Edgar's business now was in New York, and he moved the family to a house there in or about 1906, in what the baby of the family Bill Smith described nine decades later as a "countrified" quarter of Brooklyn. The family managed visits to Cape Island on holidays, but they were New Yorkers -- Bill's New York schooling accounted for the larger part of his formal education, even -- until 1911 or thereabouts. The full and true story of the family's quitting New York for Cape Island was not known to Edgar; that was a secret of Bill's and his brother Harvey's, until it was not so much a secret as a joke.
The heating in the New York house was central, and the ductwork was tin, and one fine day the boys Bill and Harvey had the idea of stuffing the vent in their room with rags. Bill explained that the tin of the ducts would turn "red hot", and after a time the rags combusted and the house burnt to sticks. The fire marshal pronounced the cause of the fire to be "accidental", and Bill and Harvey weren't minded to correct him. Bill suspected that his mother Susie suspected the boys might've had something to do with the fire, but that she was just as well pleased to quit New York for Cape Island. And so about 1911 Captain Edgar moved the family back to his house in Centreville, built incidentally by Ephraim Atkinson who along with William Kenny conceived the Cape Islander or "Novi" boat.
(As to how exactly Susie Smith and six smaller Smiths managed their sort-of commute between Brooklyn and Centreville in the first decade of the 20th Century, I can do no better than to guess, to wit: cab from house in Brooklyn to port in Manhattan, not improbably by way of the Brooklyn Bridge; steamer from New York to Boston; steamer again from Boston to Yarmouth; train from Yarmouth to Barrington, maybe connecting the port in Yarmouth and the ferry crossing in Barrington; ferry from Barrington to North East Point; and at last maybe a cab or hired cart from the ferry landing to the house in Centreville. Captain Edgar would've been counted among the wealthier Cape Islanders of his generation, and bills like those not-infrequent passages-for-seven-from-Brooklyn-to-Centreville may go some way to solving the mystery of whatever became of Edgar's fortune.)
Captain Edgar turns up in the March 1909 issue of a fraternal association periodical called The American Marine Engineer, in a moving obituary which digresses into an extraordinary commendation of Edgar. The deceased was a "Bro. G. Youmans, late second assistant engineer officer of the steamship Lampasas" of New York, on "his untimely demise at sea from injuries accidentally received while in the performance of duty." The obituarist was a "C. W. Read, Chief Engineer, S. S. Lampasas", who remarks on Edgar, "I also extend to Capt. E. O. Smith, of S. S. Lampasas, the heartfelt thanks of myself, and officers of my department, for his manliness and untiring efforts to relieve sufferings of the deceased from the instant of the accident to the end; burial disposition at port. Which goes to prove that he is the possessor in a large degree of that 'fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind.'"
(I take it "manliness" there is Edwardian euphemism, to the effect that the scene was not for the faint of heart, and the Annual Report of the Supervising Inspector-General, Steamship Inspection for 1909 elaborates that George Youmans was "burned about the arms and the entire upper part of his body" by steam from an engineroom explosion, and that he passed after about eleven hours.) Edgar's and the deceased's are the only names to appear in the obituary, and Edgar's part in the obituary amounts to a quarter of it.
Captain Edgar in New York was a lay-preacher at the East Side Mission, and a friend to the unfortunate of the slums. A newspaper notice headlined "A Sailor-Preacher", turned up at the home of the great friend of the family Effie Atkinson, unattributed and undated but from the time of Edgar's service on the Lampasas, is unimprovable as an account of Edgar's lay-preaching, with the exception of the unrecognizable mangling of its subject's name, and so it's reproduced herewith: "Captain O. L. [sic] Smith, commander of the Mallory Liner Lampasas, regularly in service between Mobile and New York, is not only a speaker of note, but is regarded as one of the ablest sailor-preachers on the Atlantic-Gulf service. While at Tampa, Fla., recently Captain Smith delivered a sermon on evangelism at the Y.M.C.A., and has since received invitation to preach in Tampa churches when there."
Bill Smith observed of his father that he "never had a spare minute", and among Captain Edgar's extracurriculars were his membership as a Master Mason in the Philadelphia Lodge No. 47 of Barrington; his membership in the Sons of Temperance, Lifeboat Division, #158, where he was elevated for a year to Worthy Patriarch among other offices, and where he was party to great debates such as "Which have been the greater element for good in the world -- men or women?" (the formulation presumably is Edgar's) with its Victorian finding in favor of the latter; and his contributions to publications wherein "he could commend and condemn with equal facility," in the words of Arthur McGray, including letters-to-the-editor in The Coast Guard of Shelburne and The New York Times Saturday Review of Books.
The address Captain Edgar claims in his letters-to-the-editor from New York turns out to be his professional address, in Lower Manhattan, maybe half a mile from the World Trade Center and practically in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge which looks today precisely as it would've done in Edgar's time.
Captain Edgar's formal education might've amounted to a couple boyhood years, but Captain Arthur McGray in his biographical sketch of Edgar remarks on Edgar's "retentive memory which enabled him to recite long passages from the works of outstanding authors". Oceanic steam navigation did leave a captain time to pursue his reading, and that Edgar was a prodigious reader is attested by his immense oak-and-glass library -- built by his onetime ship's carpenter Ezra Atkinson -- and by Edgar's margin-notes, in pencil. Edgar's library includes among many other volumes The World's Greatest Orations, in ten volumes; Homer's Odyssey, as translated by Alexander Pope; Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, the 1827 first edition published twelve years after Napoleon's Waterloo; a History of England, by the Scots philosopher David Hume; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is a very English book with a very French title.
Also Captain Edgar did not a little writing, and to judge by what survives to us of it, he might almost have quit captaining and taken up writing professionally, with his mastery of his subjects, and his force of argument, and his grand and baroque British-English prose, and his wit.* Which is not to say that Edgar's was not a head also for figures; he was after all a sea captain in an age of charts and sextants, and his felicity for math was what struck his nephew Arthur Newell who had served under Captain Edgar. Bill Smith -- whose form of address for his father was not "Dad" or "Daddy" but "Father" -- recalled Edgar's putting to the children a demanding arithmetic riddle, involving a puncheon of molasses. Bill solved the riddle and nine decades thence he recalled every convoluted particular of it, but he evidently was too shy of his father to present his solution to the great man.
Captain Edgar developed tuberculosis and in 1916 retired to Cape Island, where he passed January 2 of the new year, his 56th birthday. Edgar was "possessed of a driving energy [and] rare judgement", in the words of Arthur McGray, and possessed also "of that fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind"; a great man, as good as he was great.
(Acknowledgements: This biographical sketch would be sketchy biography, absent the research and compilation of my elder brother Stephen J. Smith. Also the summary biographical sketch of Edgar by Captain Arthur McGray, per my brother's compilation, was invaluable, the balance of the material being drawn from latter-day online research, interviews recorded in the 1990s of my grandfather late in his life, and family remembrances. And the notion of a biography of Captain Edgar was the doing of my uncle Laurie T. Smith.)
* - Herewith is excerpted and transcribed verbatim a tour-de-force letter-to-the-editor published 1894 in the long-shuttered Yarmouth Times, by a certain "Fair Play", namely Edgar O. Smith, depressing in the familiarity a century-and-a-quarter since of its indictments, but stirring as ever in its lion's roar for greatness:
An Earnest Protest Against Humbug.
... I wish to make a plain statement of facts which must recommend themselves to the intelligence of every voter in Shelburne County.
Almost two years ago the scheme of building a narrow guage [typographical hiccup] railroad from Yarmouth to Lockeport began first to be agitated in this county. ... We were plainly told that a narrow gauge road was the best that we could hope for, and that as a railroad it was all that Shelburne county required. This was a falsehood. ...
Narrow gauge roads have long since become almost a thing of the past. ... Comparing the miles of standard railroad with the other in the United States ends all discussion upon that point. If one is as good as the other why is not the cheaper road adopted? ...
Now I ask any intelligent voter in Shelburne to tell me what definite end has been obtained in regard to the proposed road. After two years of agitation through the press and from the platform; two years of false representations, unfulfilled promises, silly trumped up tales of capitalists interested in the project and fabulous sums granted by governments on its behalf; two years with nearly every month promises that ere its end we would see the road take upon itself tangible form. After all this we are no nearer a road than at first.
... The narrow gauge scheme in itself was an insult to our intelligence as a county; in event of its success it simply made us hewers of wood and drawers of water to a neighboring county. ... We were not far enough advanced in civilization to merit the standard railroad of the civilized world.
... Must this county with its industrious, enterprising and intelligent population; with its unsurpassed harbor and natural advantages be ever made the football of office boys and the prey of the non-supportable element within its limits? I think it is high time to call a halt and let our declaration of independence be signed once and forever at the polls on the 15th.
... Fair Play.
Centerville, Cape Island,
March 10th, 1894.
Edgar looks to have gone to sea by 1876 and the age of 15, as "bowman in a dory with his cousin Edmund". From his cousin's dory Edgar graduated to the schooner Fearless, and thence to the brig S.N. Collimore, then from 1882 to '84 Edgar fished the Triton out of Gloucester in Massachusetts, about the time the Gloucester fleet was reported by the Boston Globe to be lousy with Nova Scotians. Edgar was formally Captain Edgar by 1891 when he was certified Master in the Coast Trade, being certified seven years thereafter for Foreign Service. But by 1886 Edgar was second mate on the Hector, crossing the Atlantic and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar to Valencia on the east coast of Spain and Sete in the South of France, and by 1890 Edgar had made captain, fishing the Grand Banks for Newfoundland concerns.
Sometime in his couple years on the Grand Banks a hook caught Captain Edgar in his left forefinger, which had the effect of fixing it in a rigid extension. For the balance of his days Edgar never could crook that finger, and the bum finger is conspicuous in the photography of him.
At the risk of reinforcing the stereotype of island folk, it must here be recorded that Captain Edgar married his first cousin, in a double-wedding wherein his sister-in-law married her first cousin. Edgar married Susan Cornelia, also a Smith, which saves on paperwork, in the December-est of December weddings, on the winter solstice of 1887, and biennially from 1892 through 1902 they begat four daughters and two sons, namely Felicia and Edith and Edna and Clare, and Harvey and William, in that order. Susie was daughter to the Captain William Black Smith, also a sea captain and a great man, and as deserving of a biography. And Susie survived Edgar by 31 years, living to see victory in the First World War and the Second, and then some.
It may've been 1892 that Edgar first served as an officer on a steamship, on the S.S. City of St. John running between Yarmouth and Halifax, as second mate under the family friend Captain Arthur McGray whose biographical sketch of Edgar is invaluable. The next year Edgar graduated to pilot of the City of St. John, and the year after to captain. Then two years thereafter Edgar was taken on by the Yarmouth Steamship Company, to captain their flagship the S.S. Yarmouth, with passenger and mail service between Yarmouth and Boston. The Yarmouth company fleet of half a dozen steamers were grand ships, each with capacious dining rooms. Bill Smith reported that his father's Yarmouth-to-Boston run departed Yarmouth about suppertime and arrived Boston about dawn, and that his mother packed sandwiches, to keep their strength up till they landed in the morning.
It was in the course of his service for the Yarmouth Steamship Co. that Captain Edgar was charged with the odd job in 1898 of crossing to England, taking receipt for the Yarmouth company of the "fast sidewheeler Express", and steaming those 428 tons home to Yarmouth, with a stop at St. John's for coal. Paddle-wheelers by then had been overtaken by "screw"- or propeller-driven steamships, but paddle-steamers were in service still, and it may be that a paddler was in this instance preferred, for the reason that it was meant for the shallower waters of coastal service, between Yarmouth and Halifax "via intermediate ports". And the Express was a new construction, with two paddle-wheels and as many enginerooms and smokestacks, making 15 1/4 knots and breaking "all records" for passage from Halifax to Yarmouth. Edgar manifestly had the trust of the Yarmouth Steamship Co., and on June 20 he landed their baby in one piece, at 4 in the morning.
But Edgar's Express job was for naught: not three months into its service, the Express was wrecked comprehensively on Outer Island, called in the newspaper account Bon Portage Island, five miles from Cape Sable Island. The Express had cost Yarmouth Steamship $80,000, but after Outer Island was through with it, its 202' steel hull went for $475, although the Yarmouth company evidently were prudent souls and had insured for $60,000. The captain at the time of the Outer Island misfortune was not Edgar.
Adams: "[F]or thirty-six hours, in the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras, very rough water was encountered. But few on board had ever known such a sea, and sickness was universal." But Edgar's Yarmouth was "safe if not swift, [and] brought the colonists to this port without mishap." The Yarmouth also was "large and fine enough to have easily commanded the unbounded admiration and amazement of Christopher Columbus had he beheld her when he landed...near this point more than four centuries ago."
Edgar anchored at Nuevitas Harbor four and a half days after departing New York, on the fourth day of the new century. The colonists carried on to the settlement of La Gloria, and the Yarmouth carried on in the service of the Cuban Land and Steamship Company of 32 Broadway, undertaking second and third runs to Nuevitas through January and February, commanded presumably by Captain Edgar. (A couple years after Edgar's passing the Yarmouth would enter its last and least likely chapter, being sold to "noted social reformer, capitalist, and screwball" Marcus Garvey.)
And then came 1902 and the Mallory Line of New York. Edgar had of course captained the Yarmouth out of New York in 1900, but how it was that he came to be taken on by a considerable concern in Lower Manhattan is not now known to me; what is known is that Captain Edgar counted as a "staunch friend" one H. H. Raymond, President of the Mallory Line, and that he would be a Mallory man until his forced retirement in 1916. And an expedition of our family friend Otto Atkinson found Edgar's portrait hung prominently in the marble halls of the Mallory Line, three-quarters of a century after Edgar.
Captain Edgar was not at first captain, for the Mallory Line, but chief officer, on the S.S. Denver, graduating to captain on the Colorado, and captaining later the Lampasas. Edgar's service on the Mallory Line took him southward following the eastern seaboard to the southernmost extremity of the United States, at Key West off Florida, north again to Tampa on Florida's west coast, up and over to Mobile in Alabama, and across the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston off Houston in Texas, and to New York City where Edgar moved the family for half a decade. Edgar on his runs to the Gulf was three weeks at sea, per his daughter Clare very much later.
Captain Edgar's business now was in New York, and he moved the family to a house there in or about 1906, in what the baby of the family Bill Smith described nine decades later as a "countrified" quarter of Brooklyn. The family managed visits to Cape Island on holidays, but they were New Yorkers -- Bill's New York schooling accounted for the larger part of his formal education, even -- until 1911 or thereabouts. The full and true story of the family's quitting New York for Cape Island was not known to Edgar; that was a secret of Bill's and his brother Harvey's, until it was not so much a secret as a joke.
The heating in the New York house was central, and the ductwork was tin, and one fine day the boys Bill and Harvey had the idea of stuffing the vent in their room with rags. Bill explained that the tin of the ducts would turn "red hot", and after a time the rags combusted and the house burnt to sticks. The fire marshal pronounced the cause of the fire to be "accidental", and Bill and Harvey weren't minded to correct him. Bill suspected that his mother Susie suspected the boys might've had something to do with the fire, but that she was just as well pleased to quit New York for Cape Island. And so about 1911 Captain Edgar moved the family back to his house in Centreville, built incidentally by Ephraim Atkinson who along with William Kenny conceived the Cape Islander or "Novi" boat.
(As to how exactly Susie Smith and six smaller Smiths managed their sort-of commute between Brooklyn and Centreville in the first decade of the 20th Century, I can do no better than to guess, to wit: cab from house in Brooklyn to port in Manhattan, not improbably by way of the Brooklyn Bridge; steamer from New York to Boston; steamer again from Boston to Yarmouth; train from Yarmouth to Barrington, maybe connecting the port in Yarmouth and the ferry crossing in Barrington; ferry from Barrington to North East Point; and at last maybe a cab or hired cart from the ferry landing to the house in Centreville. Captain Edgar would've been counted among the wealthier Cape Islanders of his generation, and bills like those not-infrequent passages-for-seven-from-Brooklyn-to-Centreville may go some way to solving the mystery of whatever became of Edgar's fortune.)
Captain Edgar turns up in the March 1909 issue of a fraternal association periodical called The American Marine Engineer, in a moving obituary which digresses into an extraordinary commendation of Edgar. The deceased was a "Bro. G. Youmans, late second assistant engineer officer of the steamship Lampasas" of New York, on "his untimely demise at sea from injuries accidentally received while in the performance of duty." The obituarist was a "C. W. Read, Chief Engineer, S. S. Lampasas", who remarks on Edgar, "I also extend to Capt. E. O. Smith, of S. S. Lampasas, the heartfelt thanks of myself, and officers of my department, for his manliness and untiring efforts to relieve sufferings of the deceased from the instant of the accident to the end; burial disposition at port. Which goes to prove that he is the possessor in a large degree of that 'fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind.'"
(I take it "manliness" there is Edwardian euphemism, to the effect that the scene was not for the faint of heart, and the Annual Report of the Supervising Inspector-General, Steamship Inspection for 1909 elaborates that George Youmans was "burned about the arms and the entire upper part of his body" by steam from an engineroom explosion, and that he passed after about eleven hours.) Edgar's and the deceased's are the only names to appear in the obituary, and Edgar's part in the obituary amounts to a quarter of it.
Captain Edgar in New York was a lay-preacher at the East Side Mission, and a friend to the unfortunate of the slums. A newspaper notice headlined "A Sailor-Preacher", turned up at the home of the great friend of the family Effie Atkinson, unattributed and undated but from the time of Edgar's service on the Lampasas, is unimprovable as an account of Edgar's lay-preaching, with the exception of the unrecognizable mangling of its subject's name, and so it's reproduced herewith: "Captain O. L. [sic] Smith, commander of the Mallory Liner Lampasas, regularly in service between Mobile and New York, is not only a speaker of note, but is regarded as one of the ablest sailor-preachers on the Atlantic-Gulf service. While at Tampa, Fla., recently Captain Smith delivered a sermon on evangelism at the Y.M.C.A., and has since received invitation to preach in Tampa churches when there."
Bill Smith observed of his father that he "never had a spare minute", and among Captain Edgar's extracurriculars were his membership as a Master Mason in the Philadelphia Lodge No. 47 of Barrington; his membership in the Sons of Temperance, Lifeboat Division, #158, where he was elevated for a year to Worthy Patriarch among other offices, and where he was party to great debates such as "Which have been the greater element for good in the world -- men or women?" (the formulation presumably is Edgar's) with its Victorian finding in favor of the latter; and his contributions to publications wherein "he could commend and condemn with equal facility," in the words of Arthur McGray, including letters-to-the-editor in The Coast Guard of Shelburne and The New York Times Saturday Review of Books.
The address Captain Edgar claims in his letters-to-the-editor from New York turns out to be his professional address, in Lower Manhattan, maybe half a mile from the World Trade Center and practically in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge which looks today precisely as it would've done in Edgar's time.
Captain Edgar's formal education might've amounted to a couple boyhood years, but Captain Arthur McGray in his biographical sketch of Edgar remarks on Edgar's "retentive memory which enabled him to recite long passages from the works of outstanding authors". Oceanic steam navigation did leave a captain time to pursue his reading, and that Edgar was a prodigious reader is attested by his immense oak-and-glass library -- built by his onetime ship's carpenter Ezra Atkinson -- and by Edgar's margin-notes, in pencil. Edgar's library includes among many other volumes The World's Greatest Orations, in ten volumes; Homer's Odyssey, as translated by Alexander Pope; Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, the 1827 first edition published twelve years after Napoleon's Waterloo; a History of England, by the Scots philosopher David Hume; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is a very English book with a very French title.
Also Captain Edgar did not a little writing, and to judge by what survives to us of it, he might almost have quit captaining and taken up writing professionally, with his mastery of his subjects, and his force of argument, and his grand and baroque British-English prose, and his wit.* Which is not to say that Edgar's was not a head also for figures; he was after all a sea captain in an age of charts and sextants, and his felicity for math was what struck his nephew Arthur Newell who had served under Captain Edgar. Bill Smith -- whose form of address for his father was not "Dad" or "Daddy" but "Father" -- recalled Edgar's putting to the children a demanding arithmetic riddle, involving a puncheon of molasses. Bill solved the riddle and nine decades thence he recalled every convoluted particular of it, but he evidently was too shy of his father to present his solution to the great man.
Captain Edgar developed tuberculosis and in 1916 retired to Cape Island, where he passed January 2 of the new year, his 56th birthday. Edgar was "possessed of a driving energy [and] rare judgement", in the words of Arthur McGray, and possessed also "of that fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind"; a great man, as good as he was great.
(Acknowledgements: This biographical sketch would be sketchy biography, absent the research and compilation of my elder brother Stephen J. Smith. Also the summary biographical sketch of Edgar by Captain Arthur McGray, per my brother's compilation, was invaluable, the balance of the material being drawn from latter-day online research, interviews recorded in the 1990s of my grandfather late in his life, and family remembrances. And the notion of a biography of Captain Edgar was the doing of my uncle Laurie T. Smith.)
* - Herewith is excerpted and transcribed verbatim a tour-de-force letter-to-the-editor published 1894 in the long-shuttered Yarmouth Times, by a certain "Fair Play", namely Edgar O. Smith, depressing in the familiarity a century-and-a-quarter since of its indictments, but stirring as ever in its lion's roar for greatness:
An Earnest Protest Against Humbug.
... I wish to make a plain statement of facts which must recommend themselves to the intelligence of every voter in Shelburne County.
Almost two years ago the scheme of building a narrow guage [typographical hiccup] railroad from Yarmouth to Lockeport began first to be agitated in this county. ... We were plainly told that a narrow gauge road was the best that we could hope for, and that as a railroad it was all that Shelburne county required. This was a falsehood. ...
Narrow gauge roads have long since become almost a thing of the past. ... Comparing the miles of standard railroad with the other in the United States ends all discussion upon that point. If one is as good as the other why is not the cheaper road adopted? ...
Now I ask any intelligent voter in Shelburne to tell me what definite end has been obtained in regard to the proposed road. After two years of agitation through the press and from the platform; two years of false representations, unfulfilled promises, silly trumped up tales of capitalists interested in the project and fabulous sums granted by governments on its behalf; two years with nearly every month promises that ere its end we would see the road take upon itself tangible form. After all this we are no nearer a road than at first.
... The narrow gauge scheme in itself was an insult to our intelligence as a county; in event of its success it simply made us hewers of wood and drawers of water to a neighboring county. ... We were not far enough advanced in civilization to merit the standard railroad of the civilized world.
... Must this county with its industrious, enterprising and intelligent population; with its unsurpassed harbor and natural advantages be ever made the football of office boys and the prey of the non-supportable element within its limits? I think it is high time to call a halt and let our declaration of independence be signed once and forever at the polls on the 15th.
... Fair Play.
Centerville, Cape Island,
March 10th, 1894.
