A Blog of Flashbacks

Capt. Tom and the Pickle Barrel

October 2026

Today is 15 October 2026. I sit in a cousin’s house in Nova Scotia enjoying the province and the company of relatives. Here is a story of one of my great-grandfathers, Capt. Tom Acker.

As was custom in the days of the schooner, the captain’s family had sometimes gone to sea with him. Captain Thomas Acker’s wife, Rebecca, two sons, George and Will, and his daughter, Mary Isabella, accompanied him.  On his trip in the early spring of 1873, Capt. Tom, as he was affectionately known on board and around the town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia headed out to sea on his way to Barbados, taking along his older son, 12-year-old George. Young George spent his nights in the captain’s quarters and no doubt dreamed of someday captaining his own ship. The G. W. Pousland’s cargo was usually sugar cane and casks of rum, sometimes with a partial delivery to Boston and the remainder to the town of Lunenburg and the province of Nova Scotia. The stops along the way also ensured enough wood to fuel the stoves to warm the men and cook the meals.

One day, while walking Batts Beach, George found a candle, never lit, probably the flotsam from a sunken ship or perhaps just lost overboard. He picked it up and carved lengthwise on this four-inch candle that he turned round as he wrote:

“FOUND
April 5th 1873.
Geo. Acker  
on Batts Beach 
off St. Atlantic”          [Notes: South]

Perhaps George gave the candle as a present to his seven-year-old sister, Mary Isabella, who became my grandmother. Perhaps she took it from his possessions when he died. She gave the candle to her only surviving child, my father. He gave the talisman of the sea to me, the youngest of four, when I was ten years old. It now rests in a glass box in my study in my husband’s childhood home in the Oregon desert. Soon, the candle and I will be on our way to our Alaska home by the sea.

Here is a letter from my great-grandfather, Capt. Tom Acker, a Nova Scotia sea captain and Master Mariner from a family of them. It takes two to three days to sail from Lunenburg to Yarmouth.

Yarmouth  Jan 9th 1877

My Dear Rebecca

I again take the pleasure to tell you that I have arrived at this port after a hard time on the coast for twelve days. Such gales I never experienced in all my born days. The vessel’s rigging and sails were somewhat torn to pieces. I have to get a new jib here and after tomorrow will be ready to proceed for Boston first chance. I was out twenty-six days from PR and finally had to beam up for this port. Was glad to get in somewhere. Firewood was getting short. Provisions hold out well. I arrived here yesterday.

I received a telegram from L. today that is about the nearest I have heard or can hear from home. It did not contain anything of importance. I hope you are enjoying good health—and spent a merry Christmas. As for myself Sunday and Christmas Day I was repairing sails.

Dear Rebecca, when you receive this write to Boston.  I hope I shall be there.

I should very much like to see you all, especially yourself my dear girl and little Mary.  O how I should like to be at home tonight.  ‘Tis very lonely on board here, all alone you may say. Give my love to Granny and that Mary and your dear self.

I remain your loving,

Thomas, ‘tis true

I wrote a few lines from P.R.

Died: Captain Thomas Jeffrey Acker, Master Mariner, on November 30, 1877, age 46 years, aboard the schooner G. W. Pousland on return voyage to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia from the West Indies. "Captain Tom,” as he was known about town, came from a family of sea captains, all Master Mariners, and young seamen who dreamed of being like their fathers and grandfathers. Because he was the captain, well-liked and respected by his crew and town, my great-grandfather was preserved in a cask of pickles for the remainder of the journey. The Pousland sailed into Lunenburg Harbour with her flag at half-mast, signaling to families and those on dock alike, that at least one family’s life, probably the captain’s, had changed forever. Not knowing exactly who was gone, how many, nor how, Captain Tom’s wife, Rebecca, knew the loss of a soul on board her husband’s ship would impact her life. She gathered her children around her—George 16, Will 14, and Mary Isabella 11—and waited in the parlor, sitting on the horsehair furniture staring at the ferns on the wallpaper. No, Rebecca thought, we must walk to the wharf.

If the crew had looked up from their work as they entered Lunenburg Harbor, they would have seen the familiar low-lying hills rolling up from the west. Glad to be home, they worked with necessity and the weight of the loss of their captain, almost intentionally avoiding looking at their port.  They were all too familiar with the sadness that was about to fill the Acker homes.  The ship approached the northern coast where the streets and houses crept up the hill and spread below the spires of Lutheran, Catholic, and Anglican churches.  The larger homes belonged to the captains and merchants and had a two-storey jut in the middle of the front called “the Lunenburg bump.”  Above the entryway was a small, windowed room, all the better for the wives to see the family ship in harbor without going up to the widow’s walk in winter.

This is the moment any seafaring family should be prepared for, hopes never will come, and collapses in their heart and knees when it does.   How do those on dock or on deck deal with a body that’s been committed to the deep or, in Capt. Tom’s case, soaked in pickle brine for two weeks?  Were his father, brothers, and brothers-in-law in port or still out at sea?  The funeral, on Tuesday, December 11, was soon after the ship came in and Captain Tom lies in Hillcrest Cemetery, by the old school and above the town. 

As I walked the streets of Lunenburg in 2003 with my brother and cousin Ingrid, I wondered how a community deals with so much death across the years and centuries.  I tried to be delicate when I asked her, “Is there a lot of alcoholism and depression here?”  “Oh my! Yes!” she blurted.  She was luckier than I; her great-grandfather, Captain William Fitzstephen Acker, died of old age.  She has a painting of his ship.  I have the stories of death.