Around Town Community
Matthew Turner Lives! n Kevin Nelson Photos by John Skoriak In the first years of the last century a major effort took shape to find answers to one of the world’s greatest scientific mysteries. This mystery had bedeviled sailors since before Columbus, and the leading physicists of the day described it as “the most puzzling of natural forces,” second only to gravity. To delve deeper into this puzzle, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. formed a body with the unwieldy title of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Its ambitious mission was nothing less than to map the earth’s entire magnetic field, and to do this it would need a ship that could make the perilous voyages far across the oceans, from the North Pole to the South and everything in between. For this unprecedented scientific quest, the Carnegie called upon a ship made by the best and most prolific shipbuilder in America, the bearded genius who revolutionized commercial sailing ship design, the Elon Musk of his time. His name was Matthew Turner. Jump forward many decades later, to the 1980s, when a Sausalito sea captain and shipbuilder named Alan Olson embarked on a mission of his own. His “life’s dream,” as he called it, was to “build a new tall ship for the Bay Area,” a tall ship not unlike the majestic many-masted sailing ships of old, powered only by the wind. The most famous tall ship captained and built by Olson was the Stone Witch, a 74-footer that for many years was the flagship for the environmental group Greenpeace. But for this new venture he had a different constituency in mind: young people. To put them aboard a sailing ship, where many had never been; to teach them about the oceans and bay,
14 • Benicia Magazine
the fastest sailing ships of his time is The Matthew Turner Shipyard Park, a favorite launch point for windsurfers at the foot of Twelfth, off West K Street. But a better place to picture the size and dynamism sea life, science, maritime history; and of those 1880s and 1890s shipyards is at to show them the values of teamwork the Ninth Street park and boat launch. by getting them out on the water and Stand on Commodore Jones Point with taking an active part in sailing a vessel its American flag always fluttering in the themselves. breeze and look north where you can As Olson began to figure out how to see the “bight of Turner’s shipyard,” as turn this dream into reality, his research Jack London called it. Bight is an oldled him to the same place where the fashioned word for a bend or curve, and D.C. geomagnetism folks ended up. “It while the shipyards are gone, the curve became evident, pretty quickly, that of the shoreline remains much the same Matthew Turner was the guy,” he recalled, as it was when London engaged in his “that his ships were the ones to look at.” oyster-thieving runs. Those rotting halfsubmerged columns in the water once That guy’s name will of course ring supported the piers from which the newly-constructed Galilee pushed out into the strait for its maiden voyage. But here is the good news: Matthew Turner lives! His creative, entrepreneurial, visionary spirit is on full display at a pier in Sausalito, in a sleekly beautiful, 132foot, $6 million wooden tall ship that came into being, in large part, through the leadership of Olson, who showed that dreams can come true after all. And the name of this dream tall ship? The Matthew The Matthew Turner Turner, of course. For it was the ancient Galilee, built in bells all across Benicia, especially 1891, that served as the inspiration and among the teachers and students of model for the new ship, which launched Matthew Turner Elementary School. in 2017, but has only been sailing with The Benicia Historical Museum has an passengers since last year. exhibit devoted to Turner, and there is “The Matthew Turner is based very a podcast on its site about him, hosted heavily on the Galilee,” explained by the charming Dean Putong, Benicia Olson, who worked from drawings of High and Yale University grad. Behind the old ship in designing the new. “His one of the museum’s buildings is the ships were the fastest around, and splintery bow of the Galilee, the most we used his unique concepts.” Those famous ship ever built by Turner and concepts, revolutionary for their time for the one the Department of Terrestrial commercial vessels, included narrowing Magnetism ultimately called upon first the bow to give it a sleeker look and in its pioneering voyages to chart the less drag in the water. “He changed the magnetic forces of the oceans, and shape of the bow; it was very sharp. His perhaps even crack the riddle as to why boats were wider in the stern, so they the earth is essentially a “great magnet.” weren’t so deep in the water. They sailed (Spoiler alert: We still don’t know.) to windward better. They could be sailed Another honorific of the man who built without ballast, unlike others of that time.”
