Elissa: What's It All About?
The Ship and Her People Continuing a discussion begun the night before, Fewtrell and I lounge by the main hatch in the shadow of the great-bellied foresail. "Common sense and courtesy, that's what it's about," says Richard. David Canright, who has happened by, puts in : "That's what you learn, all right. People who are ragingly antisocial ashore behave at sea in a way that's almost courtly. " He goes on to explain how there is a place for everything and everybody-and how everyone works to see that things stay that way. Things have to work, and they have to fit, at sea. Technology is eroding the old culture: where men lived together for months on end, utterly dependent upon each other to make the ship go-dependent upon each other indeed at many moments for personal survival-voyaging today depends more on great engines and electronic calculations and controls than on the hardlearned sailorl y wisdom of hand and eye. But a voyage is still a voyage, there is still the midnight mystery and vastness of the sea and awe and terror when the ship encounters it aroused, and men still hang on like St. Paul in his famous voyage and pray for the coming of the day. "Besides, seamen remember," I suggest. " In my job I rub elbows with marineros quite a bit and I think they tend to be story tellers. I tell them I've crossed the ocean under sail, they want to hear about it. God, they love a good yarn, and a lot of talk and thinking has to be about remembering things in off moments. There's a strong continuity in it." Fewtrell points out that there has to be-you don't do a lot of innovating at sea or you end up on your backside in a hurry. "It's a conservative element, the sea is." I tell him this fits in with some revisionist history going on right now: we are no longer so critical as we used to be, say fifty yea rs ago, of seamen's notorious slowness to change their ways of doing things. And at this we all join in pooh-poohing the sensationalist view of the sailor's life, that he was a poor sod who went to sea because he had no place else to go and lived a brutalized life afloat and a victimized existence ashore. At the least, taking these things without taking in the philosophy and poetry you can hear even an illiterate deckhand articulate, is to sell an anc ient and honorable culture very short. Somehow this conversation helps answer why it is not just a luxury, but perhaps a vital necessity in our time to build a ship like Elissa. David Brink, a laughing, sociab le perso n who uses psychological argot freely, disdains salty tal_k and is constantly play-
24
''It was a process you couldn't understand until you were in it... '' ing with new ideas-but who is on the record an extraordinarily tough and able administrator-comments later on the building of the ship (everyone refers to it as "building," by the way, rather than "rebuilding," for reasons evident in Rybka's foregoing account). "You've got to see it as a process, really. You've got to understand-people got mad at the way we were doing it, and walked out on us. We had to fight like hell to use the Rybkas and other seeming amateurs-people doing it for the love of it anyway-rather than hard-nosed shore contractors. It was a process you couldn't understand until you were in it, but the point is it worked ." Future plans? "We can't let this ship stand alone, of course. We're working on a shore museum, and a commercial ship that goes out sailing while this one sits mostly at the pier and educates people in her ways. But we'll sail Elissa to Corpus next spring, and maybe to New Orleans for their tricentennial and maybe to New York for the Statue of Liberty birthday in '86-we're not sure that we should take it that far, its job is here in Galveston. "Anyway, whatever we do we're still doing it in that process. We're still building the boat." There is something timeless to the look of people aloft handling sail. How long have we been at this endeavor? Probably as long as we've had cities, or what you might call a self-aware culture, or a language we could transmit across time. I watch the people on the yard casting off gaskets. Michael Creamer is at the end of the main upper topsail yard. It was so unlikely he would ever be there! It seems to me he is
''A ship like this . .. brings out the best you have to give. ''
riding .a dream. Later I accost him: "Don Miguel, what earthly right do you think you have to be on that yard?" He takes my meaning instantly: "No earthly right, Don Pedro-unearthly.'' He is only repeating, 3,000 years later, Solomon's wonder at "the way of a ship in the sea." Eric Speth, chief carpenter, seems incredibly young for the job. But you can't argue with the lovely fitted work you see all around you. (The vessel is iron, of course, but what you see on deck is mostly wood, manila and canvas.) And he has long sea miles of experience sailing as mate in the traditional Baltimore clipper Pride of Baltimore. "A ship like this has a way of pulling people together," he says. "Walter [Rybka] says it's because she's beautiful. Anyway, she brings out the best you have to give." Rybka just listens, mostly, to these discussions though he will offer a pungent observation or occasionall y a sharp correction to a misstatement of fact. He said once that all he has to say about Elissa is contained in these words of Joseph Conrad: "A ship is not a slave, You must make her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thought, of your skill, of your self love. If you remember that obligation, naturally and without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or like a sea bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that every made you doubt living long PS enough to see another sunrise." Opposite page, Elissa's form and functions are brilliantly presented in a series ofsigns about the decks, written and designed by David Canright, who has been a merchant mariner himself and who worked on 19th century ships in San Francisco and New York before coming lo Galveston for Elissa. Canright's words invite you to reflect upon what you are seeing and to share in the experience of the people who walked these decks before you.