Concerns of the Ship Trust Committee Lovely in defiance, the bows of the
Charles Cooper, last of the South Street packet ships, gaze out on distant waters in the Falkland Islands. Damaged in batE ~ tie with Cape Horn, she put into this port ~ of refuge 113 years ago. Ten years ago, ~ through the efforts of Karl Kortum, she ~ was acquired by the Journal of Com-~ merce for South Street Seaport Museum, ~ and will ultimately be returned there. At ~ left, a section of the Down Easter St. ~~ ~ 0 Mary has been returned from the Falklands to Maine, where it is being erected at the Maine State Museum as a major (25-ton) display on Maine's proudest product. The Vicar of Bray, drying her sails in San Francisco at lower left, lives on in the Falklands. Plans are underway to return this last surviving ship of the California Gold Rush to San Francisco. Last spring, an attempt to save the remains of the Niantic (at left in John Stobart's painting) failed, though a major section was rescued by J. Patrick Mahoney of San Francisco, a patron of the NMHS. The National Maritime Historical Society's Ship Trust Committee works 32
with friends in the US and abroad to mount such saving acts, which being everyone's business, turn out too often to be no-one's. It is concerned with the ships, great and small, that carry the message of our seafaring through time, from one generation to the next. Looking to the ship as the bearer of that message, the Committee's concerns embrace the arts and disciplines that build and sail ships, and the who le heritage of their service, from sailor's song to shipcarving. In recent decades, by mutual support and cooperation, historic ship centers have been established from Bristol to New York t.o San Francisco to Sydney: the Ship Trust Committee draws on the learning of this vital work and draws it together. In that sense it is a Trust in itself, funded by imagination and experience and the caring of people. It led in securing the $5 million Maritime Heritage Fund adopted by Congress last year, and is¡ working for revised laws to encourage sea training and the preservation of historic skills, and to prevent the looting of the library of the seabed. SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1979