A STICKLER for detail and discipline, Captain Turner called himself “an old-fashioned sailorman.” He had been born in 1856, in the age of sail and empire. His father had been a sea captain but had hoped his son would choose a different path and enter the church. Turner refused to become a “devil-dodger,” his term, and at the age of eight somehow managed to win his parents’ permission to go to sea. He wanted adventure and found it in abundance. He first served as a cabin boy on a sailing ship, the Grasmere, which ran aground off northern Ireland on a clear, moonlit night. Turner swam for shore. All the other crew and all passengers aboard were rescued, though one infant died of bronchitis. “Had it been stormy,” one passenger wrote, “I believe not a soul could have been saved.”
Turner moved from ship to ship and at one point sailed under his father’s command, aboard a square-rigger. “I was the quickest man aloft in a sailing ship,” Turner said. His adventures continued. While he was second mate of a clipper ship, the Thunderbolt, a wave knocked him into the sea. He had been fishing at the time. A fellow crewman saw him fall and threw him a life buoy, but he floated for over an hour among circling sharks before the ship could fight its way back to his position. He joined Cunard on October 4, 1877, at a salary of ￡5 per month, and two weeks later sailed as third officer of the Cherbourg, his first steamship. He again proved himself a sailor of more than usual bravery and agility. One day in heavy fog, as the Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship struck a small bark, which began to sink. Four crew and a harbor pilot drowned. The Cherbourg dispatched a rescue party, which included Turner, who himself pulled a crewman and a boy from the rigging.