Captain Pattman took charge of _Loch Torridon_ in December, 1882, giving up the command of the four-mast ship _County of Selkirk_ in order to take the Loch liner. As a sailing ship commander of the first rank, it may perhaps be of interest to give a short outline of Captain Pattman’s previous career.
From this record it will be seen that Captain Pattman had won his way to command by the time-honoured means of the hawse-hole.
In the barque _Advice_ he had an experience which would have sickened most boys of the sea, and he bore the scars to his dying day. The officers of the ship were actually prosecuted by his father for their brutality, the result being that Pattman’s indentures were cancelled, the captain had his certificate cancelled and was sentenced to 18 months’ hard labour, whilst the mate was given three years’ hard labour. Both were hard drinkers and uneducated men.
The brig _Hubertus_, which Pattman joined as an ordinary seaman, was a real old-fashioned Geordie collier brig. Her skipper could neither read nor write, and Pattman acted as his clerk and did all his correspondence. But the old man knew his way about the North Sea by smell: he only had to sniff the arming of the lead and was never wrong in naming the ship’s position. These old collier skippers always wore sleeved vests and stove-pipe hats at sea, and in the summer the Thames was often a wonderful sight when these colliers sailed up to London before a fair wind. There were often a hundred and more, brigs, schooners, and barques, all crowding up the river so closely, that these old Geordie skippers, all smoking long church-wardens, would be leaning over their respective taffrails exchanging greetings and gossip. Truly 60 years have changed the London River. Yet many a man living to-day can remember the year 1866, when Pattman sailed up to London in his Geordie brig. It was the year in which the three famous tea clippers _Ariel_, _Taeping_, and _Serica_ arrived in the river on the same tide. Seafaring then was far more like that of the days of Drake and the Elizabethans than it is like the seafaring of the present day.
_Lauderdale_ was a well-known ship in the China trade, and the _Christiana Thompson_ was, of course, the Aberdeen White Star liner.