Subject+Object

The Owen Morris. Photograph: Nigel Hughes

From my upstairs windows in Llanystumdwy, near Cricieth in Gwynedd, I can look out on Cardigan Bay, and the sea runs through our house – not literally, of course, but metaphorically, or perhaps emotionally.

The house is infested with ship models old and new – sailing ships, plastic French trawlers, fishing craft from Greece, Venice and Sri Lanka, a New York tug, a Hong Kong ferry, a tall-funnelled steamer from old Danzig, an ancient Hong Kong junk appositely named Fair Wind, Great Profit. Of all this motley fleet, the undoubted flagship is the three-masted top-sail schooner Owen Morris, because so much sentiment is invested in her.

There is a touch of pathos, for a start. The model was built for me by the late Mr Bertie Japheth, who came from a seafaring family of Trefor, a few miles from here, but who could not himself go to sea because of physical disability. In recompense he devoted himself to the meticulous making of models, and so the Owen Morris carries for me a cargo of affectionate and admiring regret.

Then there is patriotic pride. The model is so totally Welsh, and so totally local an artefact. The ship itself carried my family name of course, a name very common in these parts. She was built, in 1891, just along the coast at Porthmadog. She was jointly owned by several citizens of that town, including the eponymous Owen and two other Morrises, and her crew of six were all local men. Everyone knew everyone else in the small Welsh sea towns of those days, and when I look out from my window at the now silent and empty sea, I feel I can still see her sailing by, waved on her way by friends and relatives, deep-loaded with slate from the Snowdon mountains, manned by cousins, uncles and schoolmates.

She was so small a ship – only 167 tons – and yet so proud, so heroic of meaning, and it tugs at my heart to see her in fancy out at sea, in wood and copper miniature at home. She was only one of the many little schooners which once sailed from Porthmadog past my house to the far reaches of the oceans – Welsh-built ships, Welsh-owned ships, Welsh-speaking ships, in the days long gone when so much of Wales was, at least in romantic fancy, a kind of family.

I don’t suppose there is another model of her anywhere, so in a way I am the final Morris owner of the schooner Owen Morris, and besides those feelings of pride and sympathy that she conveys, as it happens she carries too an echo of another sea that has meant much to me. Years ago I noticed that in a rather obscure painting by Vittore Carpaccio, above a cavalcade of holy persons in some ceremonial chamber, a model of a Venetian galleon was mounted on a beam – not suspended from it, but standing grandly on top. In emulation that’s how my Owen Morris stands today, and among the lesser models of her command, up there on subsidiary beams, there sail in tribute two red-sailed fishing craft direct from that other haven of my emotions, the Venetian lagoon.

In the end epic attended my little ship of ships. On December 9, 1907 she sailed past my house on the very last lap of a long voyage home. She had taken slates to Hamburg, then sailed on to Newfoundland with a cargo of salt, back across the Atlantic with salt cod for Genoa, finally scudding homeward through rough seas in ballast towards Porthmadog. Almost within sight of my window a squall ran her aground on the promontory called Craig Ddu, Black Rock, only a mile or two from harbour.

The Cricieth lifeboat was alerted, and hundreds of people crowded to the shore to help with its launch – after chapel, for it was a Sunday morning. The Owen Morris was fast breaking up in a raging sea. Greatly daring the lifeboat pulled alongside, under a reefed lugsail, and in brief moments of contact all the crew leaped to safety. Within minutes the remains of the shattered vessel were swept into a cave in the flank of the promontory, and the ship’s bell, so eyewitnesses said, was left tolling there ‘in melancholy notes’.

I hear it tolling still, when I am in the mood, but I am happy to think that all the crew of the Owen Morris were saved in such a neighbourly way, and touched to know that to this day one last timber of the real Owen Morris hangs on a wall of the Prince of Wales pub down the road in Cricieth. Her loss cost the Portmadog Mutual Insurance Company £1,600, but her reincarnation earned dear Bertie Japheth a bob or two, and I have to admit that all in all her replica does stand there rather smugly on its beam of Welsh oak.