Designing a Rig for Ernestina

Asked to design the rig for the newly-rebuilt Ernestina-Morrissey, Dan Moreland is relying on research rather than imagination to recreate the original 1894 sail and spar plans.

Marlinspike: Dan, seeing that you spearheaded the 1980s rebuild of Ernestina, formerly Effie M. Morrissey, I thought it was wonderful that the Massachusetts DCR reached out to you for the rig design.

Dan Moreland: That rebuild was an amazing experience. I was incredibly fortunate — and also fortunate in that back in the 1980s, there were a lot of living resources, a lot of memories, that now only live in me and a couple of other people. We’re it. I was just a young punk in the eighties, but I was a sponge and I knew I didn’t know... I was a squarerigger guy, not a big schooner guy, but I was fascinated.

MS: And 40 years later it’s become your task to design the rig for this completely-rebuilt schooner. Who could be a better guy for the job?

DM: There are certainly very capable people that can design them a nice rig for the vessel, but what they were seeking, quite naturally, is her original, most effective rig.

And that is quite wise, because it’s easy to say, “We’ll improve it.” No, no — easy does it, mate! This was a very evolved rig, highly thought-out. There was nothing random or half-baked about it. It wasn’t guys that went to law school and then decided to buy a schooner or something. These guys, building and rigging and sailing schooners, that’s all they ever did.

There was a very sharp pace of improvement [in the fishing schooners] from the 1870s, 1880s on. Quite a bit of scientific effort had gone into it. There was the Collins Report, there was the building of the Grampus. That was the government, saying “we’ve got to make these boats better.” And they did. They ended up with a hull design which was deeper, more stable, but still carried a lot of fish, and ended up being faster — which of course the fishermen liked — without losing capacity.

Fishing schooners like the Harry Belden and the Carrie Phillips were just immensely powerful vessels. Effie M. Morrissey was just one of those with a clipper bow, basically. She was a little bit simpler, she had sort of a flatter deadrise, and she wasn’t so hollow. And that makes you faster. It gives you more displacement, but no more weathered surface.

These were very much peak-design vessels, between 1885 and 1905. You can’t beat these vessels. The ones that came later were making room for engines and they were getting sort of complicated, but they weren’t better. In my humble opinion, the peak proficiency in the design of the Gloucester fishing schooner was basically between 1890 and World War One. That’s when they reached their highest and most effective development…

MS: You’re not a fan of the knockabout?

DM: …then they started putting engines in. They just lengthened them in order to keep the same amount of fish hold, they just made them 20 feet longer. So now they went from 105, 110 feet to 125, 130 feet. And that wasn’t driven by anything except that they just made the vessels longer so they’d have the same fish hold, but still have an engine room.

The racing boats, of course, exemplified by the Bluenose, were very big schooners. They were hybrids. The fishing subsidized their racing or some variation of that, but there’s quite a bit of difference between say the Adventure and the Gertrude Thebaud or the Columbia. They look the same, outwardly, but they’re very different vessels in terms of their operational capacity.

I got to know some of the skippers of these vessels. They could tell me about them. Leo Hynes was skipper of both the Adventure and the Thebaud. He described in fine detail how different they were. You can see it on the drawings. Adventure was a real hard-working fisherman; Gertrude Thebaud was funded to see if they could win a race or two, and then she fished.

MS: Tell me about Effie M. Morrissey’s 1894 rig.

DM: She was rigged in 1894 with a very stumpy foretopmast, a big, long, thick bowsprit, and no engine, in an era when they didn’t really anticipate putting an engine in. Once they started putting engines in, whether they actually put one in or not, they were still thinking about it, and that affected design.

So she was designed as a top-of-the-line fisherman by Mel McClain. He designed a lot of these. He was a fisherman. William Morrissey was in his fifties. Everyone knew this was his last vessel. And he had a lot of say, as a part owner, over a lot of the details, and that was very important for me to figure out in the 1980s, because he was older. He was conservative.

I found wherever I didn’t have an exact detail, and I would do my research and I’d find the most conservative version, if I chose that... later on, I’d find out that that was always the right choice. So conservative was the thing.

Back to the rig. Her masts are something like 80 feet and there’s almost no taper: 20 inches at the deck, 18 inches at the hounds. That’s a lot of wood aloft. Also, it takes a really big tree to make that. I’m going to say you need a 200-foot tree to get an 80-foot spar with no taper.

MS: Is it true her original lower masts lasted 60 years?

DM: The lower masts lasted till the mid-1950s with no change. And then she was dismasted... I don’t know the details, but I knew Alberto Lopes, a wonderful man, who’s still with us today, in Cape Verde, and he was involved with her at the time. I think it was a rigging failure in heavy winds. Off West Africa, the winds blow hard, and granted, the vessel was quite old. There could have been decay, but I’ve found that if spars don’t rot in the first 10 years, they tend not to rot at all.

It was in ‘53 she got dismasted near Cape Verde. I think something let go in the rig. The rig was also very old. Wire rigs aren’t supposed to last that long. They can, with really good care, but it was 60 years old, right? So if a forestay let go or a bobstay let go… and it’s tough winds around Cape Verde. So she was dismasted, but there was still a lot of life in the hull, so she was pulled up in Mindelo and given a probably 30% to 40% rebuild, but she wasn’t a new boat by any means.

And they were faithful to the original… they really loved her. You can see that in the work they did, because they didn’t change her. They had always replaced in kind and they did that again in 1980.

Bob Bartlett had her from 1925 to 1946, but he’d do a repair, and it was just a repair. Like if the cap rail with a double molding had to be replaced, he’d just replace it with a two-by-six, which is fine. It’s strong. This is a workaday boat. But the Cape Verdeans always replaced exactly like they found it. Pretty much from day one, they honored the fact that they knew they had a special vessel — Henrique Mendes and the people that fixed her up.

MS: Getting back to the original rig, what kind of materials were they using in 1894?

DM: The masts would have been Doug Fir, coming from the West Coast, by train. There was a big trade in this. Today it’s a big deal to get a big spar from the West Coast, but back then they were rigging vessels all the time. There were trainloads of these things coming all the time, and very high quality. All old growth, beautiful timbers. Some of her smaller spars could have been local.

I believe she was rigged with hemp, originally, for her shrouds, and then in very short order, we see wire shrouds, but the first photographs seemed to indicate that they’re hemp shrouds. But she was wire-stayed, so she was a bit transitional.

Again, that would be typical of Morrissey. He was very conservative. He went with what he knew; this is what mariners do. So she was hemp-rigged, I believe. The shrouds are very thick and they’re turned back and doubled over the way you would a hemp rig, in this 1894, 1895 photograph.

But soon she was clearly rigged with wire, likely iron wire, because that was what was being used. Apart from that, I see no significant changes up until the dismasting, although it could easily have been that she got new wires at some point.

MS: So Bartlett chose not to modify the rig when he took the schooner to the Arctic. I would have thought that maybe the rig might get cut down.

DM: Well, there was no reason to cut it down. [Her lower sails] move her along just fine. It’s a lot of trouble to cut down a rig. Why would you do that? She wasn’t a crazy racer.

MS: You wrote about Bartlett running the bowsprit into some ice and having to shorten the bowsprit with a hatchet at one point. The bowsprit on the 1912 photo you sent me is very long.

Ernestina under sail in the 1990s

DM: It’s very long, and very thick! But back to your earlier point, there would be no impetus to cut down the rig. I’d probably leave the topmasts ashore, just like he did, but the lower rig was the proper rig for it. It wasn’t too high. She was a working boat. She was not a race boat.

On later vessels, like Gertrude Thebaud, the lower masts are very tall. They’re very tapered, which is another point. One of the things they had to do later on, when you could no longer get these big, big, big, sticks, they started tapering them more and they had to introduce cheeks and stuff, which also means you have bolts going through the masts, which isn’t good, if you can avoid it.

So they went straight up. Round mast, 18 inches. Then they go square and there’s your cheeks, but no bolts, and very few holes in the mast. The more holes and rusty bolts you put in there, the more likely it’s going to decay.

But I would not have dreamed of shortening the rig for any particular reason. In the South Pacific, I’d probably want a leg-of-mutton mainsail, instead of that 45-foot gaff swinging around, but that’s because you get big swells and light airs. You just modify the sails.

But back to that bowsprit. Bartlett, he was an interesting guy. He loved his vessel, clearly. A bit brutal. He pounded his way up rivers to get soundings. There’s rivers on the east coast of Greenland that show 13-foot soundings all the way up the river. He just pounded his way up. He was bold. All sorts of pictures of her hard aground in all sorts of rocks and crazy things. He broke that 36’ bowsprit off — snapped it on an iceberg or something. Well, he just went out there with a hatchet and chopped it off and moved the iron down, shortened up the rigging, and that was it. He didn’t really need 36 feet of bowsprit. He now had, I’m going to guess, about 14 feet left, and it was very stout. It’s still just as thick. He didn’t change it. If he’d had a chainsaw, he’d have used a chainsaw, but he used a hatchet, and in photographs for another 10, 20 years, you can still see the hatchet marks on the end of the bowsprit. No one took a rasp out there to smooth it out.

MS: Otherwise, as you said, she remained the schooner that was built in Essex in 1894 for a very long time.

DM: A lot of these restored vessels got converted to power, or changed dramatically, or had big pilothouses put on. She got an auxiliary engine installed in 1926 — badly installed, according to Bob Bartlett’s last engineer, who actually sailed with me on Ernestina. George Pomeroy. I met him in Newfoundland, and then he became my engineer for two years and he was awesome. So there’s things you can’t do anymore. We don’t get to do that again.

I wouldn’t put Kevlar on there any more than I’d put vinyl siding on Mount Vernon.

But there was never any conscious, intentional, “Oh, God, let’s change this out” thing. Things migrated, moved around, and when you work in the tropics and put the galley on deck, that’s a good idea. But she was never grossly converted for anything. She was always the vessel that was built in Essex in 1894. That’s kind of neat. And that guided us in the restoration of work we did 90 years later.

We had a hull and a pretty leaky deck, but it was all sound. She was sound. The deck-keeper did a great job, but she sat in Gloucester for eight years without much attention. So we had a lot of catching up to do.

MS: When you re-rigged the boat in the eighties, to become a sail-training vessel, you tried to put back what had been there in 1894.

DM: Right. I tried to recover the design of the rig, and that’s what I’m doing today. Did I come up with this rig out of my brain? No, no. I’m trying to reestablish the original rig, per the request of the people that are trying to do it. There’s a lot of discovery and research in the process, and a little bit of interpolation. Yes, I have to turn that into a design, so that makes me a designer. But this rig isn’t a product of my imagination. It’s a product of research.

MS: I notice from photos that during her sail training career, she sometimes sailed with both topmasts, and other times without the fore-topmast.

DM: In the eighties, we were in a mad rush. I did a lot of the research, but I didn’t get to effect some of it. So we had two spars laying there. They had a lot more taper than the original, but they were there and we had to go. We put them in, they worked fine. But now we’re actually going to get closer to the original sparring and masting.

One of the things that’s neat about the original design is, she had a short fore-topmast. Short and thick. Her main topmast was tall and skinny, but her fore-topmast was stumpy and she never had a fore gaff topsail in her working days or in her commercial days. William Morrissey knew that the fore gaff topsail is useless. Everybody who sails a big schooner knows it’s just for postcards.

But the jib topsail — the ballooner — gives you another half knot, three quarters of a knot, another knot, in almost any conditions. And if you can carry your jib topsail longer...

So she had a stumpy fore-topmast. It’s roughly half the height that you might aesthetically consider the norm, but it means you can carry a jib topsail forever and you can really make her go. You can see it in some pictures, because it’s a little bit unusual, and in the 1902 photographs of Gloucester harbor, you can actually pick her out by this one feature.

My intention in the eighties was to reproduce that, and then after I got off, they put a tall fore-topmast in. Very nice, very pretty, it looked great. She’s got great stability, so it wasn’t a problem. You could put any rig you want in her — you could put in a lot taller rig, I suppose. But the rig we’re putting in is within inches of the original, which allowed the captain to carry that jib topsail any time.

MS: So given that Ernestina-Morrissey has such great stability, there was no temptation to consider some of the newer, lighter materials that are available?

DM: Oh, farthest thing from my mind. I wouldn’t put Kevlar on there any more than I’d put vinyl siding on Mount Vernon. I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s a very sticky wicket. It’s a swamp when we start thinking we can improve these vessels. Guys like me and Harold Burnham and a couple others have [created rigs] a fair amount, compared to anyone else, but we haven’t done this anywhere near as much as they did back in the 1890s. You know?

Actually, in the eighties, I had my bright ideas. “Maybe it’d be better to do it this way.” And I would try it. Then we made the decision: “Let’s just make it the way she was, as best we can.” And in every case, that was the right thing to do, the right operational thing to do.

She is a marvelous vessel to operate. If you want to improve her, go build a new one! And when you improve her, you don’t really re-establish what she did. You don’t really tap into the knowledge, the wisdom, that’s inherent in the fabric of this vessel. You’re just proving whether your own

Ernestina under sail in the 1890s

bright idea works or not. Can you rig her in Kevlar? I suppose you could, but I wouldn’t dream of it.

MS: So the rig you’re designing now is going to have that original fore-topmast…

DM: She was sail training for many years without a foretopmast, and the plan is to have the stumpy fore-topmast. This is why they got me. They could’ve gotten someone else. They got me to re-establish the rig as designed by those that knew what they were doing, back in the day.

If someone wants to change it later, it’s none of my business, but there’s a historic preservation element here that should not be cast aside. That’s the way she was. I don’t think I’m more experienced than William Morrissey. I’m the go-to guy now, but not compared to him. I think that we wander into a swamp, with landmines all around it, when we start improving things, or thinking we can.

It’s arrogant as hell to think we can improve these vessels. These are smart, thought-out vessels. They were high performance. They look old-timey and cute and charming and romantic, but they were finely tuned vessels. Lots of wisdom in how everything worked, how everything fit. That was one of the great experiences I had, discovering that. I have much more to gain by reproducing it, than by executing my own notions of what might be an improvement.

MS: And will the Coast Guard sign off on those topsails, on the approved sail plan?

DM: They should do. They did in the 1980s with taller stuff, when we got ocean certification for SSV with full topmasts, so I don’t know why they can’t do it again.

I mean, she’s deep, she’s heavy. Look, the Harvey Gamage is a great vessel. The Spirit of Massachusetts was a good vessel. Ernestina-Morrissey is an order of magnitude bigger, even if she’s not that many feet longer. She doesn’t have any more bunks than the Harvey Gamage. She’s only five or six feet longer, if that, than the Spirit. But she’s an order of magnitude larger. Skippers of Spirit would sail with me and say, “Wow, this is a different boat. It looks the same, but it’s not.”

She’s big, strong, and powerful and that’s all good, but you have to be up to it. I was lucky. I could grow into her. Things took time and I had had a lot of seafaring and shipyard time behind me, but not a lot of big schooner time, so she taught me how to sail her, and that was pretty cool.

MS: Have you been to Boothbay Harbor to see the hull as it exists now?

DM: I’ve seen photographs. I haven’t left Lunenburg in a long time, what with COVID, but it’s obviously a beautiful job. David Short has done a tremendous job in the shipyard.

He’s first-class. Hannah Gray and Harold Burnham have done a great job. When she’s all done up, it’ll be amazing to see. Second place will be pretty far away.

MS: Would you like to drive her, at some point?

DM: I could, if they want me involved at some point. If I can be of service to the next skipper, I’d be happy to do that. There is an order of magnitude difference between her and her nearest psychological competitor or equivalent. Even though she doesn’t really look bigger, she is different.

Mass Maritime is going to get something very, very powerful. I hope they realize that it’s not just another 110-foot motorboat with a ticket. This is a very different thing for them. And I hope that they get that, because if they don’t get it beforehand, they’ll get it during the process.

I mean, the Navy gets it. If you’re going from the Executive Officer of a destroyer and you’re going to be Commanding Officer, even though you’ve been on that same ship for three years, they send you to the Surface Warfare Officer training school, and put you through a four-months training program, even though you just got off that ship. I think that type of thinking would be valuable at this point. This is ancient technology, but to them it’s brand-new technology and it cannot be trifled with.

MS: You’ve called Ernestina-Morrissey one of the best-documented vessels of her era. That’s got be a huge help in your task.

DM: She’s probably about the best photo-documented 19th century American sailing ship. There’s quite a few pictures in 1912, before there was any real change [to the original rig]. She was in National Geographic in 1912. There’s a bibliography on this vessel which is probably two inches thick. During the Bartlett years, a lot of photographs, obviously. And it’s all spread out over a lot of archives and museums and what-not. It still isn’t collated. It would be a job to put it together. It should be put together.

MS: There’s wonderful material there. It really should be a book. It’s not an article — certainly not this article — but it should be a book at some point.

DM: Well, it’d be fun to do, if I can get around to it before my mind completely melts out my ear.

It was the most amazing experience. My board was the Schooner Ernestina Commission. We talked about overall conceptual parameters, and then it was left to me to execute. And that is how it should be, in a way. They set the tone — “here’s what we want to do.” The goal we were trying to achieve was a collective goal of people that were just wonderful, and they saw the big picture of what this vessel should and could be.