Christina Jacobsen deVilliers
Christina (Tina) Jacobsen deVilliers is the daughter and granddaughter of fishermen who emigrated from Karmøy, Norway. Her father, Leif Jacobsen was a highliner (very successful fisherman) in New Bedford during the 1960s-70s. She attended art school and worked as a professional scrimshander in the 1970s. Much of her artwork depicts wooden boats, mermaids, and people from the fishing community.
“The ocean is the highway to everywhere. I think if sometimes the ocean that laps New Bedford…it may end up that those particles may end up lapping the ocean in New Zealand and Tonga, you know? It’s just…something eternal about it.”
“But it’s funny, being peaceful at sea. We went to Bermuda and then we had five days of just being at sea. When you’re at sea, you can’t worry about anything else because you have no control over it. All you can worry about is that boat, and you, and the boat, and the other people on that boat.”
“My father was never home. My father was never at a school play. He was… never stepped foot in school for anything that ever happened to me or my sisters. It was a woman’s world to take care of everything, and it started from day one. So, it wasn’t like you even knew it could be different. You know, other people’s fathers were at events with school or sporting events… But it didn’t happen at all, not once. They were gone.”
“One of the things that influenced me to go yachting was that, when I was 10 years old, I was looking at a book. There was a renowned sailor that went around the world on the Yankee. His name was Irving Johnson, and he wrote a book called Sailing to See, S-E-E. He would take people, and they sail all around the world and went to New Guinea. This black and white book was before color photography. I used to sit there in the snowstorms, I remember, just looking at the pictures of the sky and people living aboard a boat and getting haircuts on a boat and sleeping on deck.”
“I can remember my father being home. You could tell he was home because he smelled like diesel fuel. One winter, he didn’t go out for a week or so, because the weather was so bad. We had a blizzard, and I was young. I was 10-12 years old. And he started making a net, because he didn’t have any hobbies or anything. So, he started making a net. He tied the line to a doorknob in the kitchen. And he just made this net.”
“When he came in from fishing that one day, that full day they had home, he was always down in the boat working on the engines himself. I think because the men respected him, that he had a dedicated gang of guys that were really good guys, and they want to do a good job, and they benefited that by having a decent paycheck. And when I was growing up in the 50s, I can’t say my father probably made a good living, but it was only when I got to be in junior high, in the 60s, you could see that he was expanding by building several boats. So, he had more income than a lot of people who were only managing with one boat and just kind of struggling along.”
