Captain Bob Bartlett's ''Little Morrissey'' The Story Behind a Painting by Thomas Wells, AICH, Fl ASMA The Gloucester schooner Effie M. Morrissey was over 40 years old when I put-putted out to her in a little gasoline motor launch in 1936. She lay at anchor off City Island, N.Y. on that never-to-be-forgotten June afternoon when I clambered up her boarding ladder to sign on. I was 19 years old. Standing on her deck my first impressions were t!ie massiveness of everything, the staunchness of her rig, the smell of Albany grease on her mast hoops, marlin in her servings, and Stockholm tar in her stay lanyards. The Morrissey was famous before I had heard her name; she had already passed more Arctic water beneath her keel than any vessel afloat. Captain Robert A. (for Abram) Bartlett, her owner and skipper, was born in Brigus, Newfoundland on August 15, 1875, and died in New York City on April 28, 1946. In that life span he made Arctic history. A few months before he died, he wrote: "My first love is the Effie M. Morrissey, my schooner; my second, the Arctic, whose icy waters I have sailed for nigh on to half a century.'' He had begun exploring the Arctic in 1898 with North Pole discoverer Robert E. Peary. In command of Peary's supply ship Roosevelt, he established the last "pit stop" for Peary's dash to the Pole of 1909. In 1913, he took Vilhjalmur Stefansson up into the Beaufort Sea in the old sealer Karluk. The vessel was crushed in the Arctic ice, and Captain Bob with an Eskimo traveled hundreds of miles over ice to
Nome, Alaska for help to save the crew. He served in the Navy in World War I. In 1926 we started sailing his own ship the Morrissey. After I sailed with him he carried out wartime surveys for the Navy, backed by President Roosevelt's order that he was to have whatever he needed . In 1930 he had begun taking teenage boys along, whose parents paid a stipend to help the voyage. That is how I came aboard, as a student floundering around in my first year of Yale's School of Fine Arts. I was lucky to be assigned to George Richard's watch. He was a fisherman from Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, and had a voice that could command the wind, a hand like an ape that could two-block a throat halyard in one pull. Yet in the watch below, down in the fo'c's'le, George would gently play his fiddle to the roll of the ship, the noise of the sea against the forepeak, anchor chains clanking in the chain locker pipes, and up would come the melodic tune "Over the Waves." Captain Bob had the midship fish hold built into quarters for us boys, plus mess hall, radio shack and sick bay. The professional crew were Newfoundland fishermen, \he best in the business. They berthed forward. The cook, Billy Pritchard, had been with Captain Bob since he sailed with Admiral Peary. The Captain and First Mate, his brother Bill Bartlett, the Second Mate George Bartlett, a cousin, berthed with expedition scientists aft. We forged our way north, up Green-
Some of the Morrissey's boys, with Captain Robert A. Bartlett in the foreground, hands on railcap. A mixed crew of professional Newfoundland seamen and college lads stand behind him: from the left (back row) Jim Dooling; engineer Len with chin in hand; Jack Cunningham in white hat (skipping three unidentifiable souls); Jeff Kennedy; the formidable Bos'n George Richards; Philip Morris; John Beal; Stanley Burke; and the ship's photographer. Dr. Province (eyeglasses); Ted Donaldson in Camp Calumet sweater; Pete Cantrell.
land's east coast, until on July 30 we were turned back by heavy ice at 73°30'N. We then caught our two musk ox in a seine net (after a false start in which two of the same sex were caught), and started the voyage home on August 3, stopping at the Eskimo village Angmagssalik, the only habitation .on the grim east coast. When on this side, Captain Bob would always drop a hook here to bring gifts and greet old friends. Captain Bob's knowledge of piloting in ice, confronting Arctic currents and floes under sail was the best of his day, and I am sure that some of his nautical artistry rubbed off on a great many of the Morrissey boys. I served my last two years of World War II as a Lieutenant (Junior Grade) navigator and salvage officer in the USS Sarsi (ATF 111) in the Aleutians. Captain Bob and our days in the Arctic ice in Greenland were often in my mind. I'll bet that many Morrissey boys will be discovered with fine records on land and sea, and that they will be the fust to attribute this to sailing with Captain Bob in the "little Morrissey, " as he liked to call her. At the end of his life he said: "The twomasted, 98-foot Morrissey has been my home, office and magic carpet for 22 years .... Though she is 51 years old, this confirmed bachelor cherishes her as he would a wife."
www
Mr. Wells went to sea in a Cape Horn voyage in Passat two years after this, as recounted in Sea History 18, pages 57-63.