WOMEN: D’Arcy and Fannie

Many an office worker wastes the boss’s time dreaming about romance and the whispering sea. One hot day last summer D’Arcy Grant brooded so long and so obviously that her boss up and fired her. D’Arcy Grant, well trained for a seafaring career by her experience as a newspaper and advertising writer, thereupon decided that she would go to sea.

Twentysix, redheaded, pretty, weighing 90 lbs., she obviously could not ship before the mast. Besides, she wanted to sail as captain. She plucked $1,100 from the bank and headed for Baltimore. There the schooner Fannie Insley, dirty, spectral, gaunt, was tied to a city wharf. The Fannie Insley took her eye. She planked down $800 for her (“her bottom was sound”), spent the rest of her fortune fitting her out, by virtue of her ownership became Captain Grant, hired a couple of hands, cast off into the business of hauling freight up & down Chesapeake Bay.

After her first year of adventure, the Saturday Evening Post few weeks ago published the exultant story she found time to write. “No alarm clocks, no boss, no schedules . . . plenty of time just to relax and feel the ship under you. Time to stroll along the white sand, hunting wild asparagus. You can dawdle as long as you wish, watching the sou’easter that holds you in harbor. . . .”

Captain Grant was held in harbor last week with a vengeance. The Fannie Insley, carrying a load of empty oyster shells across the bay to a fertilizer factory in Crisfield, Md., had sailed without her. Captain Grant did not mind sea smells, but she drew the line at the stink of empty oyster shells. A sudden bay squall caught the Fannie off dangerous Windmill Point, in the Rappahannock River. The foremast snapped, then the mainmast crashed over the side. The Fannie’s seams opened, the sea poured in. Captain Wilbur Willey, the mate and the cook got a small boat over, abandoned ship just in time. Down sank the Fannie with scarcely a gurgle.

The Fannie had not been insured; she was a total loss. Said heartbroken Captain Grant, who had made little money shipping things in Fannie, but had made a little more writing about her: “She’s my first boat, but she won’t be my last.”