‘Between 1830 and 1897’, wrote the twentieth-century Gloucester historian Joseph Garland, ‘668 of Gloucester’s vessels never returned around Eastern Point, nor 3775 of her men’.77 Songs and poems (including verse by Whittier) commemorated heroism and losses beyond ‘the gray rocks of Cape Ann / And Gloucester’s harbor-bar’;78 and in the summers of 1894 and 1895 Rudyard Kipling resided in a hotel on Eastern Point Road, absorbing local lore for his story of Gloucester fishermen, Captains Courageous.

Serialised in 1896–7 and published immediately afterwards in book form, this was a tale young Tom Eliot read. Opening in North Atlantic fog and drawing to a close with a litany of drowned fishermen that forms part of late May Memorial Day commemorations in Gloucester, Kipling’s novel has as its hero a fifteen-year-old boy with a wealthy businessman father and ‘a strict Unitarian’ mother. Harvey Cheyne, Jr, is rescued from drowning and finds himself with the Gloucester fishing fleet, listening to traditional tales of ‘boats smashed to splinters’ and ‘ships that sailed in the fog’ to such locations as ‘Mount Desert’, Cape Breton, ‘the Maine ports’ and ‘the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island’. Mixing dialect and standard English, Kipling’s book was full of places Tom knew or had heard about: one character whistles a song about sailing past Eastern Point and nearby Thacher Island where in the seventeenth century twenty-one out of twenty-three members of a family had drowned. Early in the year of the publication of Captains Courageous, the real-life Gloucester schooner Yosemite was wrecked on a Newfoundland voyage, its crew either killed or marooned in a snowstorm; a few survived, swimming through icy waters, bodies of others were frozen into the rocks.79 Such stories were part of local life in Gloucester and surrounding ports; reminders of them were unavoidable. The most famous local sailor of Tom’s boyhood was Gloucesterman Howard Blackburn who had returned frostbitten and fingerless from the waters of Newfoundland after being separated from his ship, the Grace L. Fears, whilst fishing in a dory; Blackburn was a familiar sight on Gloucester Streets.80 On 20 August 1901, when Tom was almost thirteen, the Gloucester Daily Times published an item telling how a teenager had picked up a bottle on a local beach; inside was a message from a courageous captain whose vessel had gone down with all hands four years earlier: ‘We are sinking in the Grace L. Fears. Whoever finds this, hand it to my wife.’81

As a boy Tom was taught to swim and given sailing lessons by an old Gloucester sailor nicknamed the Skipper. Predictably, Tom’s mother and sisters kept a close eye on the proceedings. The ocean was beautiful, many-voiced and potentially deadly, but ‘I don’t regret all the sailing that you and I and father did together, I assure you!’ Tom wrote to his mother when he was in his late twenties.82 All his life the sea fascinated him. He relished ‘brilliant’ tales such as those of James B. Connolly in Out of Gloucester (1902) which recounted the adventures of Gloucester fishermen or ‘bankers’ who sailed in summer aboard schooners laden with ‘seines and dories’ to ‘the south Banks or “Georges”’ and in winter to ‘the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the codfish abound’, and even as far as ‘Reykyavik, Iceland’.83 Years afterwards, in his late teens and early twenties, Tom would voyage with friends up the New England coast towards the Canadian border, on at least one occasion risking death.

Such experiences, mixed with fact and fiction he had absorbed in successive childhood summers, fuel his later writing in The Waste Land manuscripts about an imagined trip from Cape Ann ‘to the eastern banks’ in search of ‘codfish’ which begins in fair weather, then moves into ‘gale’, loss of ‘dories’ and a voyage ‘Northward’ past ‘the farthest northern islands’ in deafening seas, heading eventually into a hallucinatory and lethal seascape far, far from ‘Home and mother’: a world of ‘cracked ice’, ‘bones’ in a ‘whirlpool’ and ‘Death by Water’.84 Eventually, most of that material was cut from the published poem, though alert readers will spot the word ‘dory’ in the poet’s published notes to it. From his most famous early poem, whose last words are ‘we drown’, through the storm-blasted seagull of ‘Gerontion’, the fogbound, granite-shored seascape of ‘Marina’ and the white sails of Ash-Wednesday to his extended meditation on fishermen, loss and sheer persistence in ‘The Dry Salvages’, Tom’s poetry is suffused with material which can be linked, however indirectly, to experiences and reading associated with the New England coast. From childhood onwards, Gloucester shaped him as a poet.

Yet in the 1890s the place was changing. Tom could still explore Whittier’s ‘depths of Gloucester woods, / Full of plants that love the summer’ and thronged with birdlife.85 The boy from St Louis loved the ‘fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea’.86 Also, situated on Cape Ann where glaciation had left great outcrops of granite, Gloucester boasted nearby quarries which had supplied the stone for Brooklyn Bridge; at Eastern Point between 1894 when Tom was six and 1905 when he was seventeen, the monumental Dog Bar Breakwater, by far the most striking man-made feature of East Gloucester, was being constructed out of locally quarried grey granite. A bell was placed at its seaward end, adding its sound to the whistling buoy southwards. Named after an Eastern Point rock formation, this buoy was called Mother Ann’s Cow. Gloucester was on the Boston–Maine railroad, but when Tom was very little the town still had horse-drawn trams – horsecars; the early 1890s saw these replaced by ‘electrics’, though they did not run as far as Eastern Point. You could take a short ferry ride across the harbour from Gloucester itself to the East Gloucester landing, and if, like Tom, you knew about boats, you could see that schooners were evolving in subtle ways: the Rob Roy with its spoon bow, short foremast and minimal bowsprit, was different from most earlier Gloucester vessels: supposedly a safer design. ‘Since the introduction of the “knockabout rig” – the schooner with a long bow and no bowsprit – there are fewer losses at sea’, Tom wrote later, ‘but Gloucester has many widows, and no trip is without anxiety for those at home’.87

Even if he knew it was a port familiar with danger, Gloucester for him was a family refuge. Aged six or seven and clad in his sailor suit – that customary outfit – he had a fine toy sailboat. Enthusiastic about pirates, sometimes he played at sword fights using sticks, but in all his early childhood photographs at Gloucester he is, like his cousins, decorously attired. Every inch a well-cared-for small Eliot, digging in the sand with his spade, he wears dark long trousers; sitting on a verandah in his neat sailor suit holding his model boat he looks kempt, correct and engrossed.

Spending part of his summer working in St Louis, Tom’s prosperous father loved Gloucester too. Built in 1896 on land which he had purchased in 1890, Henry Ware Eliot’s substantial summer residence at Eastern Point, called the Downs, was very close to the shore: a three-storey detached dwelling with a verandah overlooking the sea, a very spacious family room with a great brick fireplace, and a garden path leading down to the beach. Indoors, above the upper-storey bedrooms, the Downs had plenty of attic space where the boys in the family could indulge their taste for play; a painted skull and crossbones with the word ‘Blood’ and the initials ‘HWE’ can still be seen there. Henry, Tom’s brother, liked to take family photographs. Some show 1890s visits to nearby places connected to the extended Eliot family, past as well as present: to the large, well-appointed house of Thomas Heywood Blood at Sterling, Massachusetts, and to the house and gravestones of Blood’s parents, Samuel (d. 1834) and Lucretia (d. 1827); to the Cushing family home at Lunenburg in the same state – Tom’s sister Marion had the middle name Cushing from her ancestor Colonel Charles Cushing (1744–1809); to the house of Tom’s grandfather, Thomas Stearns, at North Lexington where his parents had married.88 This sort of delving into the New England past quickened in Tom’s brother a taste for American history – in 1897 his Paul Revere essay won second prize in a competition; but such excursions also reinforced a strong sense in Tom of his extensive New England ancestry.