Bill Baker (left) and Alan Villiers aboard Mayflower II, April 1957. The passing of these men, Bill last September and Alan this March, leaves our company of sea historians sorely diminished. Our salute to Bill appears here; an appreciation of Capt. Villiers will follow . Photo courtesy Ruth S. Baker.
A Farewell Salute WILLIAM AVERY BAKER,
1911-1981
by Erik A.R. Ronnberg, Jr. On September 8, 1981, William A. Baker died, one month and three days prior to his 70th birthday. He was undoubtedly the best-known and most highly regarded ship historian and designer of historic ship replicas of his time-an era that spanned two important phases of American maritime history and two very different generations of maritime scholars . Well established in his chosen profession of naval architecture at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard at Quincy, Massachusetts by the mid-1930s, Bill's spare-time interest was sparked by the pioneering work of Howard I. Chapelle, Marion V. Brewington, and the legions of yachtsmen, artists, and modelmakers who followed these two men and a handful of sympathetic academicians. The 1930s became a great period of gathering information on regional maritime cultures-the trades and tradesmen who lent purpose to the ships. The results were prodigious, and even now they have been only partially assessed, but this decade brought forth the bulk of the raw information which we are studying today. Although Baker's interests in this field were then passive, he was keenly aware of the gathering processes at work and their significance to future historians. By the late 1940s, new viewpoints were becoming manifest. In contrast to the quantitative approaches used by Chapelle, Baker preferred qualitative methods. Instead of dealing with many ships in a generalized way, he preferred to work on a single vessel and learn all he could about it, leaving behind a carefully organized and very detailed record of what he learned and how he used this knowledge. His work on the restoration of Gjoa in 1949 was the first test of these work methods, and they serv40
ed him well when he began his work on a design for Mayflower II. Gathering source material for the 1957 replica, he left few stones unturned on either side of the Atlantic and when he finished, he produced not only a superb reconstruction of a 17th century ship, but published a book, The New Mayflower, which describes his research methods and the logic behind his solutions to this project's most difficult aspects. His descriptions of 17th century ship design in this and later volumes, particularly his explanations of the geometric constructions for hull forms, are the best yet to appear in print. Moreover, he adhered strictly to these methods in designing Mayflower !I's hull, something that other designers might have been less inclined to do, but a necessity if the old methods were to be proven workable. It was fortunate that Baker, a designer employed by a builder of very large modern ships, should become so deeply involved with designs of old wooden vessels. As a Bethlehem employee, he was for three years a specialist in stability and weight distribution problems, supervising the department in charge of these studies. Such intensive experience was exactly the background to have when confronted by 17th century hull designs which produced stout hulls with considerable freeboard and topside structural weight. In his design for Mayflower JI, Baker had a chance to demonstrate the soundness of a forgotten design technique. What was originally built as the result of centuries of acquired experience had to be repeated in one attempt with little to go by except what modern methods of calculation could indicate. The combination of Baker's historical research and practical experience reassured both mariners and
scholars that this vessel would be a faithful yet seaworthy replica, which indeed she is. Baker's work on Gjoa was more widely acclaimed in Europe than in America (The Norwegians awarded him the St. Olav's Medal for this restoration project), but Mayflower II brought him the recognition he deserved in this country. Subsequent publications on colonial American ships were balanced by an introductory picture book, The Engine Powered Vessel, which has become a widely-used reference on steam and combustion engine-powered ships and demonstrates the author's versatility in widely disparate aspects of watercraft history. In 1963, he was appointed Curator of the Francis Russell Hart Nautical Museum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thus launching the more academic phase of his career. By the late 1960s he had settled into a rich routine of freelance designing, writing, lecturing, and contributing his expertise to a variety of marine museums and professional organizations of maritime historians. Baker's versatility as a writer in maritime history was further demonstrated in his published histories (in three editions) of the Boston Marine Society and the monumental two-volume A Maritime History of
Bath, Maine and the Kennebec River Region, the latter work begun in 1966 when he picked up the fragments of a history begun by a Maine historian. Designing and writing about ships were not the only activities in Bill Baker's busy life; he had considerable aptitudes in drawing and etching, photography, and woodworking (he was an excellent carver of half-models). A budding artist in childhood, he drew pictures of ships all his life, mostly in pen-and-ink and illustrated sev1eral of his books and magazine articles. SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1982