Sailing in Sea Cloud by Ian Keown
A First Rate taking rn Sto res S igned "J M W Turne r 181 8" (19 x 17 in.} Superb quality print of a very beautiful Turn er watercolo ur. Art historian B.L. Bin yo n wrote in 1909. " Thi s is Turn er at the p €ak o f his po wers. his palette is positivel y tran slucent ." Th e original is in a private collectio n in England , and has rarely been seen sin ce 1819. wh en it was exhibited at Grosvenor Palace A few hundred copies were printed to commem ora te Turner's bicentenary. We have every one of them There will be no more avai lable once these few are gone Print $15.50
(Framed $59.90)
Calif residents add 6% tax. Tel. (213) 452-2443
OXFORD GALLERIES 2210 Wilshire Blvd. #627 Santa Monica, CA 90403 Name _
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Ya~ro
Clipper
Our specialty Superb seafood, exquisitely prepared fresh from the morning's catch Tender, choice steaks grilled to perfection In the heart of the historic South Street Seaport district Open for lunch, dinner and cocktails
The Yankee Clipper 170 John Street New York NY 10038 (212) 344-5959 Major credit cards accepted
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"Belay the braum!" It's not your everyday command but then Sea Cloud is not your everyday ship. Almost everything about it , including its Anglo-German language, 1s unique. It has been variously described as "the only square rigger ever built as a yacht," "the largest private sailing yacht ever built," and now "the last passengercarrying tall ship in the world ." She was designed by Gibbs & Cox and built in 1~31 by Kruppwerk in the German port of Kiel . Originally named Hussar, she was a wedding gift from Wall Street tycoon E. F. Hutton to his bride, Marjorie Merriweather Post herself heiress to the vast Post cereal fort~ne. In her time, Sea Cloud has hosted dukes and duchesses , statesmen and presidents and movie stars, Astors and Vanderbilts, and what we read about her today concerns mostly the sumptuous interiors-owners' suites with handcrafted paneling and parquet floors, bathrooms of travertine marble with gold-plated fixtures. But this is really second<:ry, for the great thrill of sailing aboard Sea Cloud, as I found last winter in the Caribbean , is just to be aboard a four-masted square rigger flying 35,000 square feet of sail. You' re constantly reminded that this is, despite the fancy trimmings , a living, working square rigger. I'd step from my cabin each mor?ing and come face to face with the mam mast and its massed halyards , leech Imes, bunt lines and belaying pins. " Wet paint" signs remind you that deckhands are constantly sanding and scraping and oiling (the rails are taken down every six months, finished with 20 coats of oil). In the fc'stle, a sailmaker from Yarmouth , England is sewing and stitching one or another ?f Sea Cloud 's 31 sails . Carpenters saw, nggers tend their 30 miles of lines and sheets. At almost any hour of the day, deckhands (male and female) are buckling on their safety harnesses to scurry up the ri~ging to paint or repair, going about their ta?ks oblivious (more or less) to the sunbathmg bodies below. Sea Cloud has a special breed of crew, sprightly, dedicated, and one of the pleasures of a voyage is the chance to chat with this hard-working group of young people, many of them dropouts from the landlubbers' rat-race (lawyers from Stuttgart , teachers from Aberdeen), eager to grab this one last chance to sail on on~ of the great windjammers. They 're multmational (but mostly American , British and German- hence the braum for topgallant, ubermaste for top mast). "We're all diehard romantics somewhere along the line," as one crew member puts it.
She is 316 feet of elegance from rakish bow to flowing counter aft, and with her graceful sheer she has a regal beari~g eve_n when lying at her moonng, sails up m their gear, mainmast soaring 191 feet above the deck. A few years after Sea Cloud was launched, Mrs. Post divorced Hutton to marry Joseph E. Davies, FDR's amb_a ssador to Russia · Sea Cloud went to Lenmgrad as a sort of floating chancellery, but was assigned to a backwater of the River Neva so that the Soviet citizenry would not be seduced by this ravishing symbol of the capitalist system. During World War II Sea Cloud was seconded to the US Coast Guard for weather patrol in the Atlantic (and since Mrs. Post had named the individual staterooms for fragrances and perfumed them accordingly, crewmen could, the story goes, identify their officers by the appropriate cabin , even when they could not, in the pitch black night, see them. After the war Sea Cloud became the property of Raf~el Trujillo, strongman of the Dominican Republic, who used her as his presidential yacht but was canny e?ough to mount a machine gun on the bndge and classify her as a warship to avoid harbor dues. In the sixties and seventies, this splendid anachronism fell victim to changing times and lay rusting and mastless in the harb?rs of Cristobal in Panama, before bemg rescued from a fate worse than scuttling. In 1978 Sea Cloud was acquired by a consortium of German industrialists, all of them yachting buffs with world racing records, who restored and modernized her at a cost of $6t/2 million-twice what Hutton had paid to have her built in the first place. She is now the classiest cruise ship in the world, a former plaything of celebrities now accessible to us all . .t
On September 22 this year, Sea Cloud departs on a two-week cruise of the Greek Islands sponsored by the National Society. Our Curator-at-Large Peter Throckmorton , who pioneered the development of marine archaeology in these waters, will be aboard to serve as guide. A descriptive brochure is available from the Society. SEA HIS1DRY, SUMMER 1983