The First Look

The painting Title “The First Look” size 22’ x 18”,
oil on canvas (private collection)
Painting was created based on book written by Farley Mowat with title “The Serpent’s Coil”.The book remains, for me, the crème de la crème of sea tales, of which I’ve experienced some of it working on oceangoing rescue/salvage tugs. It’s the story of the Foundation Maritime company’s oceangoing rescue tugs Foundation Josephine and Foundation Lillian and their search for the crippled English Liberty ship Leicester, bound from London to New York but abandoned by its crew mid-Atlantic after an unintended encounter with a hurricane shifted its ballast irretrievably, and therefore open to salvage claim. This was a search without benefit of modern technology, it was 1948.Brave Canadian crews faced competition from Holland: a sea-rescue tug called the Zwarte Zee made a fair pitch to succor the million-dollar prize the Leicester represented in her salvage value, according to these pages. But the luck was with Foundation Maritime rescuers who found the abandoned Leicester and began to tow it to Bermuda in very difficult conditions. Awaiting them were two more hurricanes and not even a glimmer from a weather satellite, the first of which was still twelve years hence.
On Painting 27 of September, 1948, 2AM about, the first look on ghostly drifting S.S. Leicester in stream of searchlights from rescue tugboats.