W.R. MacAskill: The Man and His Time by Harry Bruce In the 1920s and '30s, Wallace MacAskill was not only the world's best marine photographer, he was also an eccentric, hard-sailing, hard-drinking and death-defying lover of the sea. If "death-defying" sounds overwrought, consider his adventures at Peggy's Cove, N.S. People come from around the world to see this tiny, quintessential North Atlantic fishing village; to admire its lighthouse and shacks, which may well have appeared in 'more amateur paintings than the bridges of Paris; and, above all, to shudder at the clean, murdering ocean as, again and again, she rises in curling green mountains and slugs rock with a force that could break every bone in a man's body. And has. . Over the years, the Atlantic swept so many visitors to a horrible death that the government mounted on the lighthouse a grim warning for the foolhardy: "Savour the sea from a distance." But long before this sign, and before the tourists, MacAskill took the photographs that would help make Peggy's Cove famous; and, in order to capture on film the lethal, white explosions of surf that forever fascinated him, he'd clamber down the rocks, carrying his big square camera, while a friend paid out a safety line. "For 15 minutes or more," Phyllis R. Blakely wrote in The Atlantic Advocate (June 1960), "'Mac' would cling to his precarious perch, with the spray soaking his clothing, waiting for the right moment. Mter a successful shot, he scrambled back up the rocks with an infectious Scottish grin on his face." MacAskill took similar risks at sea. When he shot Starboard Lookout, he was aboard the Bluenose as she raced home from the Banks with a full load of fish. She was clawing off Sable Island in heavy seas. The photograph shows a lone crewman down at the leeward rail, beneath taut, curving sails. The schooner has a sharp heel to starboard, and the man stands well forward. His back is to the camera. He seems to be outfacing the foaming wall of whiteness that the schooner's charging bow hurls aft, and the photograph honours his loneliness. Indeed, it honours the loneliness of all seafaring men. It respects the ocean's awful power. It celebrates the beautiful gall of a great sailing vessel. Starboard Lookout is one reason why lovers of marine photography began to talk of "MacAskills," just as art collectors talk of, say, "Picassos." To get it, MacAskill persuaded the crew to lash him to the right spot on Bluenose's soaking, slanting, pitching deck. With the sea in his face, one hand protecting his lens from the spray, his lens opening set at f/11 and his shutter speed at a mere one hundredth of a second, he waited for what he wanted. He got it. Then they untied him and took him below. "You can learn portrait work in a school or studio so it gets to be routine and automatic," he once said. "But to get sea pictures, you have to wait until you get the light right, wait until you get the boat paused in her heaving. On slippery rocks you have to know the sea. Otherwise, it could be dangerous if you got caught in the backwash of a wave." How good was he? Well, in 1924, he first exhibited his Gray Dawn at the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and, after that, this one photograph -it shows an old schooner ghosting out of port in dark air on calm, shimmering water -earned him more than a hundred awards. In 1928, the Nova Scotia seascapes he entered in an international competition won him a medal embossed with the royal arms of Spain. (It was one of the last medals that King Alphonso issued before he fled the political turbulence in Spain.) In one year alone, no less than 74 MacAskills popped up in international exhibitions in 27 countries. In 1929, the Canadian government put one of his inimitable studies of Bluenose on a blue 50-cent stamp. The New Haven Philatelic Society declared this the world's most beautifully engraved stamp (and among Nova Scotian and New England schooner die-hards, it still is.) He was not yet 40 and, so far as international recognition went, merely warming up. In 1937, The Derrydale Press of New York published Out of Halifax, A Collection of Sea Pictures. This was a limited edition of 100 MacAskills. The price was $15, steep for the Depression years, but MacAskill was in such demand they sold out in a few weeks. That same year, Canada put another MacAskill Bluenose on its 10-cent piece. It's still there, 49 years later, and the coin remains the most beloved in Canadian history. In the early '50s he was, as Lyn Harrington put it in Saturday Night, "a giant among Canadian photographers and dean of marine portraitists." His work was so well known in Britain that no less a figure than John Masefield, the poet laureate, had urged him to shoot close-up photos of the rigging details aboard the last of the schooners. That way, Masefield figured, men of later times would be able to make accurate models and replicas. Masefield was "the poet of the sea," and Thomas Raddall, Bluenose novelist of the sea, defined MacAskill as "the poet of the lens." When Princess Elizabeth and her sailor- husband Prince Philip attended a state dinner in Halifax in 1951, the Nova Scotia government could think of no more impressive gift for them than a boxed, canvas-bound edition of MacAskill's latest book, Lure of the Sea. He was in his sixties. A heart attack had slowed him down, but the honours kept right on coming. In 1952, Starboard Lookout won the coveted Thunderbird Crest for marine photography. In 1953, a show of 50 MacAskills toured the United States. In 1954, he became one of the few Canadians elected as a Fellow of the Photographic Society of America. But two years later, this gentle romantic, this sea-obsessed Cape Breton Scot was gone. He had called his beloved sloop Highlander, and each spring when he launched her from the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, he would invite high-school bagpipe players to serenade her. Then he would take the youngsters out to sea to play some more. A dubious treat for the gulls and perhaps an unnerving experience for the crew of whatever fogbound vessels were nearby, those concerts may have been as close as MacAskill ever came to knowing heaven on earth. Sometimes he wore the kilt himself. He drank only Drambuie and the finest Scotch. He named his ocean-front house "Brigadoon," and every New Year's Eve he asked his dinner guests to rise, put one foot up on a bench, and drink a toast to Bonnie Prince Charlie. Wallace R. MacAskill, 66, died on January 25, 1956, which happened to be the 197th anniversary of Robbie Burns' birthday.

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