The Ernestina/Morrissey Comes Home
Coming out of the soft haze of a late August afternoon, Ernestina mounts a sun-dappled Atlantic swell rolling in toward Newport. What a moment for her friends! Michael Platzer UN Photo.
''May She Forever Sail on the Winds of Hope'' "A ship of many stories," her captain, Marcos Lopes called her, in accepting the Ship Trust Award which I had come up to present to the ship and her people soon after she came in on August 24. And so she is. On her decks, as he spoke, people were discovering common ancestors and shared experiences. Launched in 1894 as the Gloucester fishing schooner Effie M. Morrissey, sailed by Captain Robert A. Bartlett as an Arctic exploration ship from the mid-twenties till the end of World War II, and as an immigrant sailing ship, a Brava packet, 1948-65, she bound many lives together. Her fourth career now lay before herto train young people in the ways of the sea, and to celebrate her unique, wideranging heritage as a museum ship. Based in New Bedford, she is to sail up and down the coast at least from Philadelphia to Gloucester, and perhaps beyond to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland-where, in Brigus, nephews of her famous Arctic explorer-skipper Captain Bob Bartlett live today. She had been 41 days making the 3,500-mile voyage from Cape Verde. But she had taken longer than that, and come further, for the return voyage to the United States had begun in 1976, when she set out to join the Tall Ships celebrating the US Bicentennial in Operation Sail-76. Dismasted en route, she was forced to turn SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982/ 83
back. The Cape Verdeans then set to work and rebuilt her completely, to bring her to the US and donate her to the Schooner Ernestina Commission of the State of Massachusetts. The story of the ship is told in Sea History?, pages 20-21, and the story of the Brava packets in SH8:!9-21 and 9:27-30. The vessel is truly borne up on the tides of a movement shared in by people of utterly diverse backgrounds-that is how she has come home. Laura Pires Houston has commented on the "remarkable and rich intertwining of peoples and places" which is embodied in the Ernestina/ Morrissey movement. Ambassador Jose Luis Fernandes Lopes of the Republic of Cape Verde spoke for the whole past and future of the ship when he said in his address of welcome: "May she forever sail on the winds of hope, ever to remind us of the boundless possibilities of human understanding and cooperation." PS
People throng the wharf in Newport to greet the schooner with song and laughter and sometimes tearful reunion. Photo: C.H. Parker, Newport Times. Below, "Eugenio's House" was a nickname/or the schooner, since Eugenio Lopes, here at the helm, had sailed in the vessel from the 1950s on. Michael Platzer UN Photo.
You can join the movement by making out a check to "NMHS-Ernestina/ Morrissey" and sending it to NMHS, 15 State Street, New York NY 10004. Contributors of $5 or more will receive a copy of "Ernestina/ Effie M . Morrissey," by Laura Pires Houston and Michael K.H. Platzer, an illustrated booklet on the schooner, her history and heritage. 27