The Penobscot River was very important to Hampden during the 18th and 19th centuries providing resources and jobs. The schooner Dispatch, built in 1793, is recorded as the first ship built in one of Hampden's four shipyards. There are records of many ships built between 1793 and 1872, when the completion of the schooner Isabel marked the end of Hampden's shipbuilding days except for a brief period at the beginning of the First World War when Hampden's shipbuilders were pressed into service to build the four mast schooner Katherine May. – Karyn Field, "Maine Memory Network" website.

At the end of January, 2010, a lady of Devonshire sailed into her next century, having survived the vicissitudes of a hundred years of life on Earth, most of it spent in the sometime paradise of Bermuda. Her seaman's Certificate of Discharge papers of 1931 gives her Rank/Rating as "Assistant Navigator", an unusual occupation for a woman of pre-Second World War times. It may have been as much those mariner's skills that allowed Clarice Lindley to navigate a century of human existence with such aplomb, as did her self-professed belief in lots of exercise of the body and also of the mind, the latter through the intricacies of the card game of Bridge. One of the salient events in that long life was her association with the last great schooner to be built on the Penobscot River in Maine by the Bangor Ship Building Company, the Katherine May.

Like many Bermudians in the two decades before the First World War, Miss Clarice Reynolds was created overseas, but in her case shipped to Bermuda soon after birth. This was also the period when some now prominent families emigrated from the West Indies for employment at the Dockyard, staying on to become Bermudians. All came on ships in those days, for it was not until the late 1930s that travel by aeroplane "clippers" was possible from some destinations to Bermuda. Thus it was that in 1927 shipping entered the Lindley family circle when O.G. Lindley, an antiques dealer in Hamilton, purchased the Katherine May, after the ship's adverse encounter with a local reef.

Launched in 1919 and hence missing intended war freightage, Katherine May was built to the order of its owner and skipper, Captain Louis Vatcher. The ship carried 12 sails, most on its four 90-foot masts with 50-foot topmasts and had a length of 192 feet with a registered 820 tons net. For the next eight years, Vatcher sailed the western Atlantic, moving cargoes as mundane as seed potatoes from Prince Edward Island to Long Island, or deal timbers from Richibucto in New Brunswick to ports on the eastern coast of the United States. As Elizabeth Downing wrote some years ago: "In 1927, on a voyage to Bermuda loaded down with coal, the Katherine May, like so many sailing ships before her, ran foul of Bermuda's reefs and came to rest on Long Bar off Somerset." Fortunately, local tugs cleared the vessel from the rocks and brought her into St. George's Harbour, where it attracted the interest of O.G. Lindley.

Lindley's son, Ronald, had aspirations to be the captain of a sailing vessel and perhaps with that ambition in mind, the Katherine May was purchased, but Captain Vatcher was retained as master to the ship and also to the junior Lindley. With all pumps in action and lead patches covering the damage from the reefs, the vessel sailed for Halifax and major repairs, Ronald Lindley being aboard. Thereafter, the ship made way for South American ports for fertiliser, to Florida and elsewhere for timber, and to Virginia for the product of its coalmines. On one inbound trip to the island, the ship carried some seven million feet of timber for the lumberyard of Ingham & Wilkinson of the City of Hamilton; no doubt some of that wood can be yet found in the roofs and floors of some Bermuda homes built in the late 1920s.

After several years, Captain Vatcher retired and Captain Ronald Lindley became the master of the Katherine May, continuing freighting in and out of Bermuda. On one such trip, Captain Lindley encountered a romantic gale, which he weathered by proposing to Miss Clarice Reynolds, "an accomplished violinist, offering her a life on the ocean wave". The couple was married on New Year's Eve 1930, immediately boarding the ship for a rapid departure with a cargo of scrap iron, probably destined for American steel factories.

It is possible that such ironwork unfortunately included historic cannon and carriages from some of the Bermuda forts, certainly known later to have been sold to scrap merchants for a short-term profit at the expense of long-term heritage loss.

The departure (and honeymoon voyage) was much delayed and included several weeks under the 80-ton crane at Dockyard, probably taking on scrap from the Royal Navy. After several months, the Katherine May made way for the Narrows and the open sea, loaded perhaps to the gunnels with old ironwork. On board was the bride and her Captain, his father the owner of the ship, a number of Bermudian crew, "Katherine" the cat, several goats and "May", a dog. During the trip of 15 days to Baltimore, "Mother Carrey's Chickens" (the smallest of all sea birds) followed the vessel, which also encountered porpoises and whales: in all a delightful first voyage for Navigator Clarice, the first of an intended many which proved in fact to be the last for the Katherine May.

The Great Depression continued to bite in the United States and no cargo could be found for the foreign-registered Katherine May, which languished at Baltimore for several years. Eventually, the ship came to an ignoble end in a graveyard of vessels on Curtis Creek, mentioned now as a shipwreck site in tourism notes on Baltimore.

Deprived of a life on the ocean seas, Clarice and Captain Lindley returned to Bermuda to undertake different voyages as landlubbers and the Katherine May was seen no more in these waters.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.