Young sea dreamers aboard the Vicar of Bray, last surviving ship of the California Gold Rush of 1849, now in the Falkland Islands. Photo: Karl Kortum.
The World Ship Trust Established By Peter Stanford Many roads join at the crossroads marked by the founding of the World Ship Trust, whose charter was signed by six trustees on December29, 1979. For Frank G.G. Carr, chairman of the World Ship Trust Project Action Group, the road perhaps began in 1949, when he watched the scuttling of HMS Implacable, the last two-deck ship of the line in the world, captured from the French at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He resolved then to see HMS Warrior saved; a project well begun 30 years later, as reported in the following pages.* Readers of SEA HISTORY will have followed the ecumenical and outreaching style of the ship-saving movement as reported in these pages. For each member the road begins in a different place: but in the idea of service to the ship, and the arts and disciplines man has brought to her service, all roads come together. Tht leading purpose of the World Ship Trust, as expressed in its charter, centers properly on the ship herself: "To advance the education of the public by the preservation and display ofsuch surviving historic ships and other craft as have either individually or as being representative of a type played a significant part in the history of mankind.... " The charter then outlines a spectrum of activities for the Ship Trust, beginning with the compilation of an international register of historic vessels, and an archive of recovery and restoration methods. Your Society is now completing a compendium of Norman Brouwer's historic ship lists, published piecemeal in SEA HISTORY and widely discussed and annotated over the past decade. We are also completing an initial catalog of ship restoration information sources in the United States, funded in part by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in this country. These may be a first contribution from the US chapter to the World Ship Trust. Publication, discussion, educational programs and funding for projects including an emergency fund for immediately imperilled ships, are embraced in the Ship Trust charter, which picks up the program outlined in Frank Carr's "Toward a World Ship Trust,'' published three years ago in SH 7 to launch discussion toward the SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1980
foundation now achieved . The founding Trustees of the World Ship Trust are: Erik Abranson, President of Mariners International; Frank Carr, former director of England's National Maritime Museum; Maldwin Drummond, Chairman of the Maritime Trust of Great Britain; James A. Forsythe, President of the Norfolk Wherry Trust: Philip Green of Cornwall; and myself representing the Ship Trust Committee of this Society. More will be heard on their deliberations at a first meeting, about to be scheduled as we go to press. The style of the undertaking is one of open discourse and the definition of truth offered once by H.G . Wells-that it is a thing best developed not in private conclaves but in what becomes "widely and generally known ."
* * * * * The saving and return to San Francisco of the last surviving ship of the fleet that built the city of San Francisco in the Gold Rush of 1849, the Vicar of Bray, has been proposed by the World Ship Trust Project Action Group as the first priority project for the Trust. Given to our Society in trust for the American people by the Falkland Islands Company, she has been surveyed and found fit to move. She is shown at the head of this report as she lies in the Falklands, with children embarked in her on their own voyage. Youth and an old ship the world had forgotten may be as good a way as any to introduce the founding of the World Ship Trust. For it is a young and vital idea that we should share in the lives of people before our time, and come to see our lives in a continuing story with theirs. Respect, affection, and a dedication to the developing purposes of man's voyaging through time-purposes expressed in our ships as perhaps in no other handiwork of man-are not excess baggage but needed on the voyage. JJ
*Frank Carr's career embodies much of !he concerns of !he ship saving movement. An apprecialion of it, published on his visil to the US in 1974, "Take Good Care of Her Mister," is available from the Society for $1 .50. 9