means would not stretch to pay deck seams and renew tattered rigging, they gladly gave her up to Colonel Green, who kept her as a public exhibit on his property outside New Bedford. He provided nothing for her in his will, however, and when he died the old bark began to slide downhill fast. Carl Cutler at Mystic, having regretfully given up the thought of saving the wooden full-rigged ship Benjamin F. Packard, turned then to the distressed Morgan and his trustees agreed at length to take her on, little knowing-as who could?the huge costs and immense rewards she would bring to their Marine Historical Association. She slipped quietly upriver into Mystic in December 1941, just before Pearl Harbor-a passage that would never have been undertaken in the wartime conditions that thereafter prevailed across America. Sitting with rocks in her lower hold, her keel in the sand, the Morgan made Mystic. Even during the war, visitation grew steadily. Afterward it took off, a seaport village grew up around the vessel, other vessels joined her. We would now find, and some found at the time, aspects of the desire simply to put on a good show in all this development, some of which has subsequently been quietly undone. But the Morgan remained real in her bones, and people came to Mystic for that real presence from another age. How, under the new philosophy, would the Morgan sail the seas of time? There was scant experience in this country of permanent preservation of a wooden ship her size, outside the periodically rebuilt Constitution and Constellation. Johnston went to Europe, where prevailing sentiment indicated completely dry storage, as the Cutty Sark at Greenwich and the Victory at Portsmouth are kept or totally enclosed, as Visitors to Mystic can handle the materials used in ship renewal work (left) one of the joys of wandering through the DuPont Restoration Shipyard. At right, a hackmatack lodging knee is fitted into the Morgan's tweendeck framing. Grown knees are sometimes got out of pasture oak as well, and are one of the articles of faith in the ship restorer's creed.
in the case of the Vasa and the Fram in Scandinavia. An impressive array of arguments came back with him in his briefcase. But Johnston had to dig deeper. Wood preservationists were called in to assist in studies, engineers were consulted. Showmanship indicated the simple, superficially most economical solution, one that would visually present the ship to the public quite cheaply for decades. Simply fill her hold with concrete to the waterline, forget everything below, and maintain topsides and deck, cabins and rig like a dry-land structure. "I could not stay at this place, and see that ship destroyed," says Johnston now of that last option, waving his hands before him, "nor could others. But we looked into it. We looked into, I think, everything, every single course we would imagine and some you might not want to." A Second Coming And always, like a running tide pulling at the keel of a vessel ready to depart, there was the ultimate alternative: rebuild, refloat, rerig her as a ship. By the spring of 1973, this became the decision, which was published in the New York Times, as befits a decision of this calibre taken with a national treasure. What was said at the time, as the reporter caught it, seems apropos here. "We decided to save the life of the old girl to keep her alive and visible for future generations," said Johnston, and later, commenting on the philosophy behind the act, and the real resources brought together to execute it: "We want to preserve not only the vessels but also the tools, the skills, the expertise that originally were used to build them." The reporter caught onto the hackmatack knees, which have become a kind of watchword or touchstone of truth at
Mystic. "Hackmatack was used by the original builders in 1841," said J. Revell Carr, then and now Curator, "and the whole idea of this restoration is to proceed exactly as the original builders did in the nineteenth century." In the summer of 1974 the Morgan was brought back to her old berth, afloat, moored to a new stone wharf built to accommodate her, the kind of wharf she sailed from in New Bedford. The operation had gone well. There had been work to do strengthening her for the move. Over 200 test borings had shown, however, that great strength resided in the old timbers in the underbody that supported the heavy hull. The new shipyard shed had been built large enough to take the whole ship, once she'd been floated round and brought out of water on the new lift dock-but the extent of the repairs did not make that necessary. The most anxious moments were unquestionably those spent trying to work her free of her sand berth; in the event, after two previous attempts had failed, she came off on a high tide on December 6, 1973, at 4:55 in the morning-a moment well remembered by the senior staff who turned out of their beds early to help float the old ship again after twenty-two years. ''When she finally decided to leave her bed of sand, she moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a sedate matron heading for the hors d'oeuvres," said Johnston. The ship's reappeance was rightly called "the Second Coming of the Morgan." She was in many respects fit for sea, fitter, perhaps, than in some of her later voyages, and rigged right through to the main royal, which was completed and sent up by staff working over the weekend to give a final present to the ship. Maynard Bray, shipyard supervisor in charge of the restoration,