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Dickie Quick

Bonne Bay Historical Archive

From Poverty In The Bay To Fame In Maine - Captain Richard Quick


From Bonne Bay came one of the most famous American sailing captains of the early 20th century, Richard Quick. He was born in the Bay of Islands in February 1868, and moved two years later with his family to Major’s Corner, a tiny cove across the bottom of South Arm from Glenburnie.

It was normal in the mid-1800s for people to marry simply by swearing on the Bible, preferably in the presence of a lay reader, and then to wait for a minister to arrive to confirm the arrangement. As a visiting French officer commented, young people in love “cannot 2 be kept apart simply because there is not a living soul authorized to record their vows. . . After a few years, chance, fortune or heaven sends a stray missionary into the area, or the chaplain of a warship. Immediately the husband jumps into a boat and comes to beg the reverend father to have the goodness to marry him to his wife, and at the same time to baptize their four or five children.”


This was the situation with Dickie's parents, John and Elizabeth Quick. They had been “wedded” the year he was born by a local layman and formally married five years later in Bonne Bay by Rev Edward Botwood, a visiting cleric. As a youngster, Dickie Quick chummed around with Tom and Will Young and the Caines boys, John Thomas and Isaac, all from Silverton. They attended school down in The Bottom with Dickie Quick. The teachers were a married couple, he with a “vicious temper.” It was said that when he lost it, his wife would “drive her husband out and take the class herself. When the old man’s temper was gone, back he’d come and drive her out.” Many years later, John Thomas Caines, who died in Deer Lake in 1966, at nearly 100 years of age, told Mrs. Babs Green of Deer Lake the following story about his childhood friend.


Dickie Quick, Caines said, was “the poorest boy ever reared in Bonne Bay.” He lived in “a little hovel of a place, a hole dug in the ground with 4 feet of wood on one side. They had to crawl in and out like dogs, with brin bags for a door.” When Dickie was about 13 or 14, the schooner Halifax under a Captain Reitan sailed into the Bay to take on a load of herring, but it was late in the season, and the ship became trapped in the ice and was stuck there all winter. Dickie Quick 3 ran errands for the Captain, who became fond of the youngster. One day in early spring, Reitan asked Dickie “I wonder would your father let you come with me to Halifax and put you to school there? I’d treat you as if you were one of my own boys.” Dickie replied, “I don’t know if father’d let me go or not, but if you’ll take me I’m going.” The Captain then said “They tell me you hardly got enough to eat at home, so you go back and ask your father how much grub he wants in exchange for you.”


Dickie’s father was only too glad of the offer of food, so a deal was struck, and off the lad went to school in Halifax. Captain Reitan took him on his schooner for several summers so he could learn about sailing. According to Caines, Dickie soon found a job as bosun on the cable ship Minnie, which repaired the Atlantic cable. Dickie then headed for New England and joined the crew of a three-masted schooner, where he learned navigation, rose to First Mate, and married the Captain’s daughter. He soon worked his way up the ladder and at the end of 1893, he went to sea as the skipper of a three-masted schooner. Eight years later Quick was made Master of the steel ship, Edward Sewall.


She was 330 feet long by 45 feet wide, the “toughest vessel that ever squared a yard. . .one of the biggest barks of her day, a fourmaster, gleaming white from her main truck to the waterline, and making nine knots an hour under full canvas.” Many square-riggers carried their own sailmakers, but not the Edward Sewall, for Richard Quick did the job himself, and was good at it, using a manually pumped sewing machine.






Captain Richard Quick was described by a friend as “a small man, red moustache, small eyes and quick as his name implies . . .an awful curser… one of the ablest ship masters that ever commanded an American vessel and one of the finest characters that I ever sailed under or with.” Under his Quick’s command, the Edward Sewall sailed the oceans wide, rounding Cape Horn some 28 times, before the journey was greatly shortened by the opening in 1914 of the Panama Canal. One such voyage from Philadelphia to Seattle took 293 days, of which no less than 67 were required to round the Horn, as the ship was blown back and forth off the south end of Chile.


Years after Dickie Quick left home, another young man from Bonne Bay was walking one day along the wharves in Boston and got talking with the Captain of a full-rigged ship, who asked him where he 5 was from. “I’m a Newfoundlander,” he replied. The Captain said “I thought so by your voice and your speech. Where you from?” “I’m from Bonne Bay.” The Master then began to ask the young man about Will and Tommy Young and Isaac Caines and other people around the bay. He said “When you goes back, tell ‘em all you saw Dickie Quick aboard of his own ship. Tell them Dickie Quick could eat a good salt herring today, if he had one. Tell them to get me a box of fall herring, salt them down good, fill their bellies and ship them off to me. I’ll pay them the most money they ever got for them many herring.”







Today the name has completely disappeared from Bonne Bay, and no memory of Captain Richard Quick seems to remain here of one of the most prominent sailing captains ever to come out of Newfoundland.


By Tony Berger


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