EDITOR'S LOG "As one stands on the spar deck looking aft, the quarterdeck and poop sweep up at what seems to be impossible angles," says Tom Hale, reporting on his clambering about the 17th century warship llizsa. Tom, Vice Chairman of the National Society, is an architect who builds boats to his own basic design at the Martha's Vineyard Shipyard, and here he expresses a prejudice that has worked continuously on our appreciation of the first ships of the modern era. Consistently, we have depreciated the sweeping sheerlines shown in paintings of these ships of another age: so early representations of the llizsa show her with far too flat a sheer (in light of what we now know from the ship herself) as though our " pragmatic" wisdom doubted the sheer exuberance of 17th century design . Precisely the same error is found in the first working drawings and models made of the Mary Rose, the 16th century Tudor warship whose successful recovery is reported with cheers and gratitude to her gallant salvors, on page 16 of this issue. There is no substitute for the real thing -whether to catch such details as the 80-pound pull required to draw one of the Mary Rose's longbows (bows fashioned when Agincourt was only a generation or two over the horizon of living memory!) or to catch the ethos of an age as reflected not just in how people saw their ships in paintings, but how they built them-in wood .
LETTERS decry such sentiments, but they were not so decried at the time, when men lived and died by them. Hear also the voice of an American naval captain ring out in this story. Ordered to move his ship by the world's most powerful navy, he says: "I ...will not give way to any nation under the sun, but in a good cause." It is dangerous, of course, to hang too much upon a point of style, but please notice, along with the captain's robust patriotism, defying "any nation under the sun," how he acknowledges a superior moral order: "in a good cause." Uncle Sam, with his worldly-wise pragmatism, might learn at his ancestor Jonathan's knee, in this vividly recaptured scene. Thank God for old John Nicol's good ear. And what a shock of recognition when John comes to describe in his plain way the explosion of the French flagship L'Orient at Aboukir Bay! " When the French Admiral's ship blew up, the Goliah got such a shake, we thought the after-part of her had blown up ...." This incident cost of the life of Captain Casabianca, lying gravely wounded belowdecks aboard L'Orient, and of his young son, who refused to quit the quarterdeck until he had his father's permission to go. This seized the imagination of the English, who for the next century and a half taught their children a solemn poem beginning: "The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled ...."
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"We loved our captain," states John Nicol in the narrative of his time in HMS Goliath (pages 45-46). It is a current fashion to
We hope you share our refreshment and joy at the recovery of these real ships, and the testimony of their people who are also real , in another time frame than ours.PS.
MARINE CHRONOMETERS
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Why Did Steamers Replace Sailing Ships? Well, they, uh .... Sea mail from the US to Australia now takes about twice as long as it did in sailing ship days .... E. A . MITCHENER Kingston Beach, Tasmania
Mail took about 8 to 9 weeks to get here in sailing ships over a hundred years ago. Now, in 1982, it takes 9 to 16 weeks-a very sad state of affairs with high postage costs. RICHARD McKENNA Hilton Park, W. Australia I am returning this copy of SEA HISTORY , soaked and welded into a solid , unreadable mass. As there has been a drought here for some months , and I cannot believe that you would have presoaked it before mailing, I can only conclude that it was immersed en route in one of those wondrous containers on deck. A . 0. JONES Durban , South Africa Steamers replaced sailing vessels because they went much faster and kept -ED. cargoes dry.
From Icebound Nantucket: The Winters Are Too Short The rebuilt Gloucesterman and Cape Verde schooner Ernestina which returned to the US last August (SH26:27) arrived in Gloucester in October. I made a short trip to Gloucester and went over to the southwest corner of the State Fish Pier where she was then tied up. I looked her over and took a few pictures. I guess they did a good job-a strong job-but she has Jost the flavor she had as the Effie M. Morrissey, when she first went in the Cape Verde packet trade in 1949. No one can build or knows how to build the beautiful transoms the old shipbuilders of Essex could build! She is now a typical Brava packet. They made a mistake in painting the masts yellow. They would be smarter to scrape them down to the wood, cheeks to the saddles , and slush them down with grease as was done in her sailing days. Work the grease into all checks as this will give the spars a much longer life . The old mastalene they used in later days was a cheaper grade industrial vaseline . Mystic Seaport uses it in large quantities! I knew the Morrissey when Bartlett came in here in the 1930s two or three times . F. W. Wallace made a twelve-day trip in her earlier, when she was fishing from Nova Scotia. I doubt if anyone is alive who fished in her from Gloucester, early on. Rick Lopes, who is making a SEA HISTDRY, SPRING 1983