A distinguished American views a long-awaited film on the Ship Trust heritage
'GHOSTS OF CAPE HORN' OBSERVED By Walter Cronkite The Duchess of Albany.found by the "Ghosts of Cape Horn "film crew just north of Slaten Island on !he Argenline mainland, Sep/ember 28, 1979. Nikon pholo by Jesper Sorensen.
We've all watched the films of seafaring in the age of sail which live on in late-night TV screenings. I confess I enjoy them! Who amongst us will speak against John Huston's magnificient "Moby Dick"? Who has not prized some of the seafaring scenes of the movie made from James Michener's epic Hawaii? Or has failed to be caught-up in scenes of the white-hulled Kiiulani slipping through the frames of that wretched potboiler, "Souls at Sea"? There is some good stuff around, stuff worth turning out for, to those who follow the sea and man's great adventure in sailing it. But put on your body-and-soul lashings and prepare for something different in "Ghosts of Cape Horn." This is the true wine from man's greatest sea adventure, the endeavor to get round Cape Horn under sail. You have to look at the face of the sea in a storm, Joseph Conrad told us, to know the age of the earth. That is how the film opens, in a Force 10 gale off the pitch of the Horn. You are confronting, as sailors had to, a primordial force from the world's beginnings. Before the story ends, you'll come to know well the ships and men who made this passage around that brooding headland at the tip of South America, westward into opposing winds and seas, in what Alan Villiers has called "The War with Cape Horn." The story is carried in footage made on the decks of ships embroiled in the individual battles that made up that war of over 300 years' duration-including priceless film made by Villiers himself in the little full-rigger Joseph Conrad in the 1930s. That redoubtable seafarer, my friend Captain Irving Johnson, contributed scenes from his famous film made abroad the big German bark Peking, in her Cape Horn trip of 1929, just over half a century ago. SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1980
Much other first-hand testimony is gathered. You'll see sails blown from their boltropes, seas coursing almost unhindered across the decks of deep-laden ships fighting not just to survive but to make progress-make westing!-in scenes worked up not by movie moguls or media mavens but by the original designer of our planet. How has Jam es Donaldson, the young producer of this film, handled his mission? He chose well in his director, Keith Critchlow, and in all who touched this film. They show respect for the lives and deaths of valiant, fallible ships and men committed to battle with the sea. This shows in little things, as well as the ultimate confrontations, in vignettes of a captain spearing fish in easy Trade Wind sailing as his teenaged crew looks on, of sailors picking over rotten potatoes to see which go to fatten the pig (carried in a sty on deck) and which to the lobscouse dinner. We go to the roots of the story, in scenes of wooden shipbuilding in the snowy Down East winter. Tall pines fall in the forest. Obdurate oak crooks are shaped to natural knees, to take the stress of traveling in earth's harshest interface, between sea and sky. We watch the hands that do this work and see the faces of the men. We see what the ships achieved, in building the city of San Francisco from a sleepy Mexican hamlet to a world seaport and metropolis, almost overnight, during the California Gold Rush. And "Ghosts of Cape Horn" carries on this same, close-up exploration of real scenes and real crews, to follow the work of people who seek the learning of the great adventure, from archaeologists at work on the hulls of Cape Horn ships in the Falkland Islands (where the bow of the last American clipper ship still confronts
the sea) to young people learning to build to old disciplines in the Apprenticeshop at Bath, Maine-and to people sailing such ships as Unicorn, Gaze/a, and Pride of Baltimore today. The original concept of this unique film grew, I understand, from the work of Peter Throckmorton, Curator-at-Large of the National Maritime Historical Society, on the Falkland Islands hulls. Like the historic ships movement itself, the film grew from that concern with the relics of our voyaging past, to embrace the whole living heritage left us by sailors before our time. That heritage is a growing one, as new ships like the Pride of Baltimore are launched, as new songs like Gordon Lightfoot's "Ghosts of Cape Horn," written for this film, are sung. The work is unique, and uniquely rooted in scholarship and the experience of sailormen alive today. Alan Villiers' and Irving Johnson's roles have been mentioned. Frank Carr, savior of England's Cutty Sark and Chairman of the World Ship Trust headquartered in London, Karl Kortum, Chief Curator of the National Maritime Museum at San Francisco, Peter Stanford, President of the National Maritime Historical Society and Chairman of the US Chapter of the World Ship Trust, are among seamen and scholars involved in its making, as well as in bringing about some of the latter-day scenes it records. For all of us who follow the sea, "Ghosts of Cape Horn" is an open doorway to a vital heritage of man. Cross its threshold, and the world of ships and seafaring will never look the same!
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Mr. Cronkite, amateur sailor and follower of the sea, is a newscaster for CBS-TV. He is a member of the Maritime Preservation Commi11ee of the National Trust for Hisloric Preservation. 11