Villiers with his wife Nancie, and, from the left, their children Peter, Christopher and Catherine, gath ered on the poop of the Mayflower II in Brixham, prior to her Atlantic crossing in 1957. At right, the ship herself, which proved staunch and able-a piece of working history.
Villiers with the ship's company aboard the Mayflower II; crew members prize the memory of his talks to them on the voyage. Below, in pursuit of history, Villiers in his later years visits the German square-rig skipper Captain Miethe.
Plimorh Pfa mario11 Photo
he found her she had just been shorn of her spars and hulked. Alan took command of the sailing vessels engaged in a number of films; notably Moby Dick in the Irish Sea, John Paul Jones in the Mediterranean, and Hawaii in the Pacific. Karl Kortum, then director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, and a number of West Coast sailors were shipmates with Alan in the bark Wandia, engaged in Hawaii. Karl later spoke enthusiastically of "the Villiers style." This style was perhaps best exemplified when Alan sailed the Mayflower from old Plymouth to new Plymouth in 1957, across the Atlantic; a gesture which caught the imagination of the whole world. A voyage that particularly interested him was one which I proposed , of sailing a reconstruction of Captain Cook's Endeavour from England to Australia for the Cook bicentenary in 1970 commemorating Cook's discovery of much of New Zealand and Australia. The governments of the various countries involved approved the plan and made substantial financial contributions. Construction of the vessel was about to begin when suddenly, for reasons still unclear, the venture was discontinued. Perhaps, after all, Archie Horka best summed up what Alan meant to us all after meeting Alan at a glittering New York Yacht Club dinner and lecture organized by Peter Stanford to raise funds for the Wavertree in April 1969 : " That was a twenty-one gun evening that was! At long last I fell in with a man whom I had been pursuing, figuratively, for most of my life as a seaman. As I mentioned to him , our paths must have crossed somewhere in the sailing-ship ports of the world. Perhaps in Sydney's Lower George Street, maybe on Stockton's 'ballast bank,' or in Newcastle's Hunter Street. Then again , maybe amid the horse-dust and flies in Flinders Street, Melbourne or admiring the Tassie ketches in the Little Dock. Maybe even in the rollicking taverns of Hamburg's Hafenstrasse though old Alan was never much ofa lad forthat sort of thing. He knew all these places as I did and oft frequented them with the same dreamimage in his eyes-the sight of a square-rigger's lofty rigging soaring skywa rd above the wharf-sheds."
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With a dreamer's zeal and diligence, each of us found what we sought at sea. To get it all down in pictures and the printed word as no one had done before-that was Alan Villiers' achievement. I was happy to find him easy to meet , pleasantly spoken and so ready to give to others of his vast knowledge of his lifework. w
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1984