The Seaport Experience Here we undertake reflections on what happens where sea trails meet the land in harbors. Reflections that invite you to walk in history's paths, the ones that lead to the water. To make a beginning, we simply decided to follow the spring northward from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and Philadelphia, New York and the Connecticut shore. Spring comes early to the Yorktown peninsula. If you go there, explore the extensive collections of the Mariners Museum-one of the few first-rank artifactual and record-keeping marine museums in America, which takes the whole of man's experience at sea as its province-and visit also Colonial Williamsburg, where you will see people making staves for barrels, and smell young flowers (only those that grew here in Colonial times) and old brick in a spring rain, and hear oxcarts creak out their slow music, and talk with the blacksmith who makes hot iron leap swiftly into useful shapes. And we ask you please to board the replicas of the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery maintained afloat at the Jamestown Festival Park. They are well designed, though crudely finished and not kept in totally seamanlike manner; but they sail, and going aboard them tells you important things about how men sailed before our time. In Baltimore, at the head of the Bay, a 240-acre Inner Harbor renewal project predicated on ''the return of the shoreline to public use" is coming to flower under the leadership of Mayor William D. Schaefer. The sloop of war Constellation is there, successor ship to the immortal frigate of 1797, Captain Don Stewart's Sea School runs a training program from the port, and the Five Fathom Lightship, submarine Torsk, and handsome Cape Cod steamer Nobska, in service as a restaurant, round out a major fleet. Ashore, the Baltimore Historical Society on West Monument Street houses the Radcliffe Maritime Museum. This spring, the ships of Baltimore were joined by the 90-foot Baltimore clipper Pride of Baltimore, built for the city by Melbourne Smith, to designs by Tom Gillmer. Original materials were used, no faking, all done on public view, with fittings forged by Jerry Tro-
bridge, who built and sailed his own boat round the world with his wife. With steeply rising floors, the Pride packs 60 tons of ballast, making up half her 121-ton weight, and floats with only 2'6" amidships. A fast and rakish ship! Visiting ships come in, and you can hire a rowboat or go on a harbor tour (including a visit to Ford McHenry at the harbor mouth) or catch a motorship to Annapolis and the quiet purlieus of the St. Michael's on the Eastern Shore. Annapolis has the brilliant collection and fine old buildings of the Naval Academy Museum (see American Naval Prints review in "Books") and old taverns like Middleton's on the market square, which have recaptured the verve and vitality they had in history, and streets ending in the water everywhere. The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum has traditional Bay craft assembled in an old shipbuilding center, with a working restoration shipyard, and museum exhibits on Bay life and history salted into old buildings that stand with quiet dignity close to the water. Do not hurry through such places! Philadelphia, next north, boasts the mighty Moshulu at the Penn's Landing waterfront, the beautiful four-masted bark (in some opinions the loveliest ever built) that David Tallichet of Specialty Restaurants recovered from Finland, and after many vagaries opened as a restaurant ship: "a place to fall in love," the papers call her. We fell rather in love with the careful work of restoration being done abovedecks by Andre Armbruster of Penn's Landing, we admitted that we enjoyed looking out of the windows cut in her tweendecks, and we lost our last reserve in walking through the excellent museum display shaping up in the Liverpool House. Ashore, the Philadelphia Maritime Museum maintains a splendid building housing displays on seaport history, and the life of man on and under the sea. They also sail the Grand Banks barkentine Gaze/a Primeiro of 1883, and think now to join forces with the Heritage Ship Guild to run a boatbuilding shop on the Penn's Landing waterfront. The protected cruiser Olympia, a lightship and submarine, the Guild's schooner Nellie and the wreck of a dragger called Quest, which we lately learn is to our sorrow to be removed, and other ships
are on this waterfront, and amid this gathering of maritime culture, we remember the lonely efforts of our Vice President Karl Kortum to get Philadelphia to take one ship a little over a decade ago ... What more? We went lately to enjoy the pleasures of Smith Street Society jazz aboard the ferry Binghamton on the New Jersey shore overlooking Manhattan from just south of the George Washington Bridge, and rejoiced in the preservation and sympathetic adaptation of the interior of this magnificent Lackawanna ferry. We thought that people should go to seaport hinterlands to seek out the life these centers supported through time. In New York one should go from the commercial buildings of the South Street Museum to the houses of Sleepy Hollow Restorations, scattered at easy railroad stops from the city along the mighty Hudson River, to pick up the restored strands of this life amid original buildings and furnishings, with the crafts of miller and farmer being practiced. We looked at the grand fleet of ships locked in the ice at Mystic-ships there for care they could get best at that center-and regretted that we did not speak of winter visiting in our last issue: in winter much work goes on, slow work in a quiet ¡ world. We're proud to publish Mystic's summer schedule, a remarkable, very real program built up over decades, in this issue. And we resolved to get more West Coast news in our next, and more Gulf, Great Lakes and river news into "Seaport & Museum News" and "Ship Notes," which follow. w Needed for the Moshulu Photos, memories, mementos of the Moshulu-including the original plans, still not brought to light-are sought to aid in the further restoration of the ship and in the development of the shipboard museum. Write Moshu/u, Chestnut Mall at Penn's Landing, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Attention: Ms. Deborah Schafer. Philadelphia, at the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, was the grandest of the Colonial seaport towns. New Life burgeons on this old waterfront today. Courtesy, E. Moore, Wynnewood, Pa.