Free Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Page B

the next day via air mail, were there waiting, on either April 4 or April 5, in Max Perkins’s office, when the biggest horse in the Scribners stable went to visit his editor at 597 Fifth Avenue. And immediately afterward, a jubilant man, suppressing his demons, with dough in hand, spouse on arm, glorying in his life, in his luck, in the new possibilities of the physical world, taxied to Brooklyn, to buy his boat.
    Several weeks later, while
Pilar
was still being outfitted and altered to her owner’s wishes, some official documents were filled out and signed and sent to the Department of Commerce, in its Bureau of Navigation, in Washington, DC: the master carpenter’s certificate, the certificate of admeasurement, the application for registration. If you went to the right archive, you could pore over the originals of these papers, like this document, certificate No. 1261, dated April 23, 1934, with its unconscious poetry of form:
    I
, E. Lawrence Wheeler, master
carpenter
    of
Wheeler Shipyard, Inc.,
do certify that
    the
gas screw yacht
    called
the “Pilar”
    was built
by the Wheeler Shipyard, Inc.
    during the year
1934
    at
Brooklyn, N.Y.
    State of
New York
    of
wood
    for
Mr. Ernest Hemingway, P.O. Box 406, Key West, Florida
    Six days afterward, in its Sunday sports pages, in a roundup of boating news,
The New York Times
ran a twelve-line item: “Back from writing about picadors in Spain and ambulance drivers in Italy, Ernest Hemingway, who has gone to his home at Key West, has taken up motorboating and last week bought a 42-foot cruiser at the Wheeler shipyard in Brooklyn. Whitepaint is now being burned off to comply with Hemingway’s preference for a black hull and the boat will be shipped to a Southern port for delivery at Key West.” The twelve lines contained only four or five errors of fact, which, considering the oceans of misinformation already attending this coveted life, wasn’t half bad.

He’d dreamed of having his own seagoing boat for about as long as he’d been an ocean fisherman and had fished from other people’s boats—which is to say for about six years. Hemingway first saw Key West in the first week of April 1928, and in a sense this is a way of demarcating the beginning of his serious saltwater life, which eventually superseded all other kinds of fishing he’d ever done or would do again. From boyhood on, he’d been a passionate fisherman, and from infancy on—literally—he’d been around steamers and launches and rowboats and other small craft plying the summer waters of Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. When he was eleven, his mother had taken him on a nearly monthlong trip by rail and steamer to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where he experienced the ocean for the first time and where he fished for sea bass and mackerel. But up until the Key West years, roughly 1928 to 1939, his fishing obsessions had been primarily of a freshwater and landlocked kind. Wild trout taken in waded streams on delicate equipment, using worms or hand-tied flies—these had seized Hemingway’s angling imagination until his late twenties. Even after he owned
Pilar,
he still liked going for trout, in the big mountain streams of the West, but more and more that kind of fishing and those kinds of fish, no matter their wildness and fragile beauty, became too small for his imagination. He needed expanses of water where you couldn’t see the other side. He needed fish whose size was theoretically illimitable and which could be triumphed over and brought into shore and strung upside down for documenting with cameras. He needed an environment far less sheltered than a trout stream could afford, an environment where there was implicit danger. As for boats themselves: when you look through Hemingway’s letters in the half-dozen years before he got
Pilar,
it’s instructive to see how often the noun “boat” comes up. Boats and fishing and