"The reality is better than the dream. "
Elissa Sails The very first time I saw Elissa, after all these years-21 years since our Curatorat-Large Peter Throckmorton spotted her in the Aegean, 14 years since I became involved connecting Throck up with Karl Kortum in San Francisco-it was like a scene snatched out of the running film of a dream . A vivid dream, a thing of hyper color, super reality: the startling crispness of the masts and yards, so utterly different from any structure for thousands of miles in any direction , stark, functional, ineffably aspiring against a deep-blue Texas sky; the bright bold blue of the intricately carved trail boards sweeping back from the white figurehead, a cleancut thing of restrained, one might almost say chaste sexuality, carved for the ship by Eli Kuslansky, formerly of South Street in New York~ And once aboard, the mounded heaps of manila running rigging hanging from the pins; the extreme order and
Above, Eli Kuslansky 'sfigurehead graces the bow, and, below, is admired by people on the martingale stays of the bark as shesetsforth under sail into a world much changed from that she sailed in on her last departure f rom Galveston in 1886. Photo, Galveston Historical Foundation.
look of belonging there of things about the decks ("That looks," said a foundation executive pointing to some bit of gear, "as if it had been there forever," and he was right!); the "jump to it" alacrity with which the crew responded to orders long rehearsed against the day that Carl Bowman , of the Star of India in San Diego, and veteran commander of the US Coast Guard bark Eagle, came aboard to take the ship to sea. Any casting off and putting forth from a pier has a sense of occasion about it; but what an occasion this was! There had never been a ship save like Elissa. The dream was to snatch a motorship (actually born as a delicate-lined bark in Alexander Hall' s yard in 1877) back from the literal brink of destruction, from where she sat only yards away from a beach near Piraeus where condemned ships were run ashore to be flensed like stranded whales and carted away in pieces to be melted down-to take that ship and restore her strongly curving stem and make good her wasted iron plating, tow her across the Atlantic, refit her with masts, yards and the miles of rigging needed to spread her washing-to train a crew, gather bucko mates and a seasoned skipper. .. and sail her. What a dream! Joseph Conrad (called by one of his friends a sea dreamer) said once: ''The reality is better than the dream.'' And so it is, for it is true, hard, demanding, and can be unspeakably satisfying . So it was to sail aboard the Elissa restored. Rejoice in these images from that sailing, and read on in the words of the ship-restorer who saw her through from a visionary dream in Piraeus to a reality in Galveston. And rejoice that confused, starving, dying man, running amok around half the world and threatening to do worse, could conceive such a ship, build and sail her, and now restore her. There is something godlike in that, and something reassuring. Joseph Conrad had another thing to say which Walter Rybka borrowed for this ship: "It is good to be in a world in which she has her being." PS *Other former South Street Seaport Museum emp loyees aboard besides myself, were Restoration Director Walter Rybka, Project Director David Brink, rigger Richard Fewtrell, exhibits maker David Canright, and master carver Michael Creamer, who also connected up the ship with Galveston and directed the first stages of the restoration, and rigger Jack Elliott from South Street's big bark Peking-in all, including Stephen Canright who like Kuslansky had worked on the ship but was not aboard, we counted nine South Street graduates involved.
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SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982/ 83