When Rogerson had completed his time as an apprentice and worked awhile with his uncle, “he felt”, to use his own words, “that he was repeating himself.” So he gathered up his tools and went off with them over his shoulder to Boston, much as any ambitious art-student, whatever his chosen medium, hies him to Paris. Boston, in those days, was the centre of the sailing-ship trade in America. “Out o’ Boston” sailed the “clippers” in the China trade. Rogerson tells how at evening, after his day’s work was done, he used to go along the docks from ship to ship studying “The Figure on the Bow.” And he tells, too, how he worked for first one leading firm and then another of the master figurehead carvers of old Boston till he himself presently stood in the first ranks, able to turn out any figure on demand in red-hot time. “Skippers couldn’t wait in those days”, he adds. And even as he talks you see that his memory has reverted to the time when “sails” must need _jump_ when winds and tide beckoned. Then having learned all that he could in Boston, he returned with high hopes and the skill and confidence of the “Master-Carver” in his fingers, to the business-opening he recognized in Saint John, with all the new ships a-building on Bay of Fundy “ways”, at Parrsboro, Windsor, Hantsport and, who knows how many more of the old bay’s outports.
And now he follows with such a list of Figureheads, as seems incredible, until one recalls Rogerson’s long span of life, and that he worked “in red-hot time.” Among those standing to the credit of this Saint John carver “The Highland Laddie”, “The British Lion”, “Ingomar”, “Governor Tilley”, “The Sailor Boy”, “Honolulu”, and “Lalla Rookh,” held high place. About each, Rogerson relates some interesting legend. Of his “Sailor Boy” he tells how a man came into his shop some years after it was carved and told him he had a rival carver somewhere--that “there was a ship out in the harbour with the finest figurehead on it he had ever seen!” This haunted him so, that next day he closed the shop, got a boat and rowed out to the vessel. On coming round her bow, there, above the waves and himself, stood his _own_ figurehead!
Of “The British Lion”, he says, “It was a rouser!”