Sea History 033 - Autumn 1984

HERf:S TO THE RIGHI STUFF AND THOSE WHO HAVE IT. Before Chuck Yeager turned 22, he showed the world what he was made of by shooting down thirteen enemy planes in World Warll.

Five in one day.

But it wasn't until after the war, wlieh still only 24, that Yeager began to tackle an even more dan~erous adversary: the untested limits of space.

He went on to become the first man to break the sound barrier, the first to travel at more than twice that speed (over 1600 mph) and one of the first pilots to reach the edge of space, taking a plane above 100,000 feet.

If there's ever been anyone who had "the right stuff", it's Chuck Yeager.

Especially when it comes to the Scotch he drinks: Cutty Sark.

v

ISSN 0146-93 12

No. 33

SEA HISTORY

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE WORLD SHIP TRUST

SEA HISTORY is the journal of the National Maritime Hi sto rical Society , an educational , tax-exempt membership organization devoted to furthering the understandi ng of our maritime heritage . Copyright © 1984 by the National Maritime Histo rica l Society.

OFFICE : 132 Maple St. , Croton-on-Hud so n, NY 10520. Telephone: 914 27 1-2 177.

MEMBERSHIP is invited: Sponsor $ 1,000 ; Donor $500; Patron $ 100; Family $30; Regular $20; Student or Retired $ 10 .

ALL FOREIGN MEMBERS , including Canada and Mexico , please add $5 for postage .

CONTRIBUTIONS may be made for any recognized proj ect. Makeoutchecks "NMHSShip Trust ,'' indi cating on the check the project to which you wish support to be directed.

OFFICERS & TRUSTEES are Chairman: F. Briggs Dalzell ; Vice Chairmen: Thomas Hal e , Barbara Johnso n; President: Peter Stanford ; Secre1ary: A lan G. Choate ; Treasurer: A.T. Pouch , Jr. ; Trus1ees: Norman J. Brouwer , Alan G. Choate, F. Briggs Dalzell , Thomas Hale, Barbara Johnson , James F . Kirk , Karl Kortum , Robert J. Lowen , James P. McA lli ster, U, A. T. Pouch, Jr. , John H . Reill y , Jr. , Peter Stanford , John N . Thurman . Chairmen Emeritii.· Walter F. Schlech , Jr. , Karl Kortum .

PresidenT Emeritus: Alan D . Hutchinson.

ADVISORS: Chairman: Frank 0. Braynard ; Francis E. Bowker , Oswald L. Brett, George Campbell , Robert Carl , Frank G . G. Carr , Harry Dring , John Ewald, Joseph L. Farr, Timothy G. Foote, Richard Goold-Adams, Robert G . Herbert , R . C . Jefferso n, Irving M .

Johnson , Fred Klebingat, John Kemble, Conrad Mi lster , William G. Muller, Capt. Dav id E. Perkins , USCG (ret.) , Nancy Richardson , Ralph L. Snow, John Stobart, Albert Swanson, Shannon Wall , Robert A . Weinstein , Thomas Wells ,AJCH. Charles Wittholz.

WORLD SHIP TRUST: Chairman: Frank G .

G . Carr; Vice Presidents: Sir Peter Scott , Rt. Hon. Lord Shackleton ; Hon. Secretary: J. A. Forsythe ; Hon. Treasurer: Richard Lee ; Erik C. Abranson , Dr. Neil Cossons , Maldwin Drummond , Peter Stanford. Membership: £ 10 payable WST , c/o Hon. Sec. , 129a North Street , Burwell , Cambs. CBS OBB , England.

Reg. Charity No . 27775 1.

AMERICAN SHIP TRUST : International Chairman: Frank Carr; Chairman: Peter Stanford ; Hon. Secretary: Eric J . Berryman; George Bass, Norman Brouwer , Karl Kortum , Charles Lundgren, George Nichols , Richard Rath ; Senior Advisor: Irving M .

Johnson; Curator, NY Harbor: Mel Hardin .

SEA HISTORY STAFF: Editor: Peter Stanford ; Managing Editor: Norma Stanford ; Associate Editor: Norman J. Brouwer; Accounting: Maureen Conti ; Membership: Heidi Tepper Quas ; Corresponding Secretary: Mari e Lore .

AUTUMN 1984

CONTENTS 3 4 8 10 12 18

20 24 28 31 32 37 38 41 46

LETTERS EDITOR'S LOG : NMHS Annual Meeting, Remarks by Peter Neill IN CLIO 'S CAUSE: ROBERT G. ALBION, Benjamin W . Labaree THE SEA PEOPLE OF EXETER, Peter Stanford A PASSAGE TO EXETER, Mark Myers NEW YORK HARBOR CURATORSHIP: SEA DAY JOHN NOBLE'S VOYAGING STUDIO SAYING THE INTREPID , James Ean SAIL TRAINING: DAY 'S RUN , Report of the American Sail Training Association THE SAGA OF SEATTLE'S VIRGINIA V, Robert Chapel SHIP NOTES , SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS MARINE ART: NEWS ARTIST HISTORIANS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, John F . Henry BOOKS A NIGHT NONE OF US WILL FORGET, Lambert Knight

COVER: Gaily painted and richly adorned craft at the Exeter Maritime Museum are maintained and sailed , rowed or steamed by volunteers. See page 10.

The National Maritime Historical Society is saving America's seafaring heritage. Join us.

We bring to life America ·s seafa ring past throu gh resea rch. archaeo logica l ex ped itions and ship preservation e fforts . We wo rk with mu seums , hi stori ans and sai l training gro ups and repo rt on these activiti es in our quarterly journal Sea His1ory.

We are also th e America n arm of the Wo rld Ship Tru st , an international group working wor ld wid e to help save ships of hi sto ri c importance .

Won "t yo u jo in us to keep ali ve our nati on's seafaring legacy?

Membership in the Soc iety costs o nl y $20 a year. You ·11 rece ive Sea Hiswry, a fas cinating magazine filled with arti cl es of seafaring and hi stori ca l lore. You ' ll also be eli gibl e for di sco unts on books , prints and ot her items. Help save o ur sea fa ring herit age . Joi n the Nationa l Maritime Hi sto rica l Society today'

TO: National Maritime Historical Society, 132 Maple St.. Croton-on-Hudson , NY 10520

YES

I wa nt to help . I unde rstand that my co ntribution goes to fo rward the wo rk of the Society 'and th at 1"11 be kept informed by receivi ng SEA HISTORY quarte rly . Enclosed is: D $1,000 Sponsor D $500 Donor D $100 Patron ::J $30 Fami l) 'J $20 Regular Member C $ !0 Studen t/ Retired NAME - - - - - - - - - - - - - , , (p"'le-as-e-pr-in.,-.1) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ __ _ _ _ _ __

_ _ __ _ __

_

_

_ _ _ _ __

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Z IP _ _ _ _ _ _ __ Co nlribulions lO NMH S are lax deductible.

33

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The A111erica Sea111an Salutes a daring pioneer of American-flag shipping Container ship inventor Malcolm P. McLean

The NMU-crewed MV American New York, first of twelve new jumbo container ships on her maiden voyage. The 18-knot diesel ships, largest ever built, can traverse the Panama Canal and are the first Panamax container ships. They will offer round-the-world service, another first in container shipping. The new container fleet initiated by United States Lines' Malcolm P. McLean marks the largest expansion in American shipping history.

National Maritime Union Shannon J. Wall, President Thomas Martinez, Secretary-Treasurer National Headquarters: 346 West 17 Street, New York NY 10011 • (212) 620-5700

LETTERS Why Not Do Both?

I received your invitation to the 21st Annual Meeting but I could not attend-my health is slack now. I have even had to give up my trade of wooden boat building, which is a job of love to me.

I hope my small contribution is a help for the old ships ; so that the young can see the real ships of the past. It is a great thing to know that there are people who live the old sailing ships as I do. There is so much to learn of the old ships and boats. You can live a lifetime with the ships and boats and still learn from the past.

EDWARD LANG Hackensack, NJ I truly wish all the maritime buffs would pay more particular attention to the . "living" ships. Each new windjammer ¡ being built represents a considerable investment in getting people out under sail .

Must we always live in the past?

P.J. MATTHEWS Great Out o' Mystic Schooner Fleet Mystic, Connecticut Mr. Matthews, who this summer added the rakish new Mystic Clipper to his fleet , is a longtime supponer of our efforts with the ships of our seafaring past. -ED

The Eyes of Texas ...

The Texas wasn't the oldest battleship in our fleet in World War II as stated in your piece on her in the Spring SEA HISTORY. The Arkansas, sister of the ttyoming, had that honor and her 12in guns were quite heavy enough to reduce coast defense batteries then .

JOHN M . KENNADAY Captain , USN (ret.)

As a freshwater boy who was to become 9 years old on 3 June 1912, I witnessed from the deck of the Army mine planter General Matthews the launching of the battleship Texas on 18 May 1912. Little did I realize at the time that I would ever one day be a naval officer and observe gunnery practice aboard Texas on several occasions when I was a young officer in Arkansas.

You labeled the ship " the Last Dreadnought," but Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary has this definition : " Dreadnought, a powerful type of battleship or battle cruiser (dating from 1905-6) ." There are some of us around who believe that the many battleships built since Texas fit that definition. I think what you meant was that Texas was the last battleship built during the era of HMS Dreadnought.

M.D. MATTHEWS Rear Admiral, USN (ret.)

Princeton , New Jersey These gentlemen and others sent in valuable material about the ship, which will be SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

used in the restoration. Captain Kennaday is dead right about the Arkansas of the predecessor class to Texas-she not the Texas was the oldest US battleship in service. Many objected to our use of "dreadnought," a term we have confined to World War I era battleships only. -ED .

Not So Ill a Wind During May 29-30 we had a severe storm over Buenos Aires. For two days there were very strong southwest winds, and this produced extremely low waters in the River Plate-the lowest in the last hundred years.

Imagine the Riachuelo, where the Wavertree was until 1970, almost dry!

Near Quilmes City, 25km southeast of Buenos Aires the unusually low waters revealed the hull of an old ship. We believe this to be the Tous Deu.embro under the command of Commodore Pritz of the Brazilian Imperial Navy. Built in India and carrying a crew of 117, she was sunk on February 24, 1827 by the Argentine fleet under the command of Admiral Guillermo Brown , during Argentina's struggle for independence.

After the two days the water level returned to normal and the hull is once again submerged .

J UAN JOSE P. DE VALLE Captain, ARA (ret.)

Buenos Aires, Argentina Captain DeValle was in charge of the Wavertree, now at South Street Seaport Museum, while she underwent repairs in Buenos Aires in 1968-70.-ED

Floreat Stephen Taber-and Captain Guild!

I enjoyed Ken Barnes's story on rebuilding the Stephen Taber (SH30). I had become accustomed to seeing the hogged , somewhat tired-looking Taber sailing the coast, and it is a delight to see her graceful sheer restored .

I would like to pass on a chapter of the Stephen Taber's history which was missed in Captain Barnes's account: the important years when the schooner first began carrying passengers as her sole trade. Captain Fred Wood sold the Stephen Taber to Captain Frederick B. Guild of Castine in September 1945. At that point, the schooner was laid up in Orland , Maine, having been out of commission for the previous two years (contrary to the claim that she has never missed a season, unfortunately) .

That winter, Captains Wood and Guild made extensive repairs to the vessel. She was surveyed by the highly-regarded Captain John I. Snow, and pronounced to be in outstanding condition.

In the summer of 1946, having traded pulpwood for passengers, the Taber began

day-sail operations out of Boothbay Harbor.

Her below-decks accommodations were completed that winter, and for the next two summers she ran one-week cruises out of Boothbay Harbor. The summer of '49 saw the Stephen Taber running ten-day vacation sails out of Falmouth, Maine. She was sold the following year to Havilah Hawkins Sr. After selling the Stephen Taber, Captain Guild operated the Alice Wentworth for several years, until purchasing the threemasted schooner Victory Chimes. Captain Guild has been owner and master of the Victory Chimes for nearly thirty years since, and sails weekly out of Rockland , Maine.

JOHN EGINTON Captain, Schooner Charlotte Ann Mystic, Connecticut Captain Guild saved the Taber from the brink, has saved others, and is a person the whole historic ships movement may be proud of and thankfulfor.-ED

Thoughts on the Society's Work The main thing is that the Society has been there, consistent in its work , persistent in its effort to preserve history, visionary in its hopes. It does not matter so much if we agree on all points (I don't) or if our individual priorities are those of the Society.

What does matter is the quality of the articles in the magazine, the honest discussion of the issues of preservation and the resistance to the "fashionable" causes, whether the outcry over seals or the work of the Rouse corporation, as the thing to do.

MICHAEL COHN New York, New York The article on Alan Villiers brought back memories of his fundraising talks for the cause of the Wavenree at South Street Seaport Museum in the early 1970s. They are precious memories-these are my jewels!

MARIE LORE Brooklyn, New York Mrs. Lore is Corresponding Secretary of the National Society. To us, and to the many who write her and hear from her, she is our jewel.-ED

Lost Dories Whew! I almost drowned. Keep the great magazine coming.

JOHN B. GRIFFITH Elmhurst, New York Over the years our renewal systems have not been the best. This year, the year ofthe member, we are making a stout effort to gather in all our ''lost dories' '-members who for one reason or another have been dropped. ~ think the angels smile when one is recovered, and quite often the recovered member smiles too. -ED .t 3

We Must Draw the Circle Larger

by Peter Neill Director of Maritime Preservation National Trust for Historic Preservation

Summer 1934, Kay Egerton sirs wirhfriends in rhe srern of rhe Joseph Conrad (Alan Villiers ar righr). On This voyage she sewed an ensign for rhe ship. Fifty years later, on June 8, 1984, (below) Nancie Villiers presenTs rhar Red Dusrer To Mysric Presidem R. J. Schaefer 111. ~

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EDITOR'S LOG The 21st Annual Meeting of the National Society , held at Mystic Seaport Museum on June 8 , had an appropriate feeling of homecom ing. It began with a discussion of new ways of documenting ship restoration in the DuPont Restoration Shipyard , led

by Sh ipyard Director Don Robinson.

Quitting the cool, dusky space of the Shipyard building , we walked out to join Nancie Villiers and Mystic President R. J. Schaefer III , for a presentation to the ship Joseph Conrad of the first British ensign she ever flew . And at dinner that evening , we saw the late Lambert Knight's film of a Cape Horn passage with Alan Villiers in the Parma. A copy of the film and Knight 's journal , the gift of Frank and Debbie Knight , were presented to Mystic by Tom Ha le on behalf of the National Society .

(Excerpt on p. 46 .) Our chairman Briggs Dalzell , and Mystic's chairman Cliff Mallory , who are o ld friends , kept the company memorably entertained with reminiscence and forward thinking- the things a birthday should be about.

At the Annual Meeting Peter Neill of the Natio nal Trust deli ve red remarks wh ich appear on this page. We welcome his call fo r greate r cooperation and a wider c ircle of su pport for the heritage. You'll find further report on this in " Ship Notes ," including not ice of the Trust ' s Conference in Baltimore Oct. 24-27 . You' ll also find there some lovely words of Prof. Rossel ini o n historic craft at Cesenatico , Italy , whic h, he notes , "were not cold inanimate means of wo rk , but so mething far more warm, which has left in the hearts of these me n ... a serene, unfading memory ." The professor's thought is at the heart of what we celebrate in seafaring .

PS 4

This spring, officials of the National Trust for Historic Preservation met with us to announce that they were undertaking new directions and new cooperative measures in the National Trust's maritime program.

Soon after, Peter Neill, director of New Haven's Schooner, Inc. (a marine science education center in New Haven, Conneclieut), was named the Trust's Director of Maritime Preservation. At our invitation Mr. Neill appeared at the Waterfront Center's conference in Alexandria this spring and at our Annual Meeting at Mystic Se aport Museum, June 8, when he delivered the talk reported here in summary form.

Writing in National Fisherman , John Gardner described what I believe is the fundamental purpose of maritime preservation: "Our primary and ultimate goal is the pres ervation of a quality and way of life now threatened , of which the ships ... are but corporal remains ." I hope we can agree o n that simple definition . If we can , then what has been the reason for o ur difficult progress over the last decade, the reason for apparent counterproductive rivalries between various organizations, the reason for our apparent inability to reach a wider audience and to create a constituency that will affirm o ur dreams by public acclamation?

We appear to have been paralyzed by teapot debates: tall ships vers us small craft, restoration versus replication , artifact preservation versus skills preservation. It has been about as communal as the United Nations, and no more effecti ve.

The problem , in my view, is that we have drawn the circle far too small . We have expended our energy arguing amongst ourselves rather than taki ng our argument to the people to whom maritime history and preservation seem alien and useless things, while at the same time crowdi ng the harbors to catch a distant glimpse of the tall shi ps or saving up to buy that Sunfish or outboard to trailer to the shore.

Peter Stanford and I shared a presentation panel at a recent conference o n the rev italization of America's waterfronts. I , for one, was infuriated when of the 200 registrants o nl y a handfu l were interested in our sessio ns on maritime inte rpretation . The developers and city planners, the tourism and conference promoters , each and every one was there to learn how better to exploit the " mag ic" of waterfro nts. But each and every one was evidence of the "backdrop sy ndrome," seeing the water, the po rts and harbors, the ships and museums as nothing

more than a backdrop to commercial enterprise. They measured their commitment to maritime preservation in dollars spe nt to buy firehoses to wash down the sidewalks at the Fulton Fish Market so that the tourists wou ld not smell fish.

This is no one's fault but our own. For frequently, we own or control the territory.

We can influence public policy and political sy mpathies. We ca n leverage our involvement to guara ntee our financial stability and to generate the enormous funds required to restore and maintain the artifacts that drew the interlopers there. But we haven't , and the success Of those investments ca nnot be measured in our terms.

We must draw the circle larger. It is certainly not too late to take advantage of this ongoing return to the water. We must be clever, cleverness realized by increased sophisticatio n in the world of politics, real estate and finance, planning and zoning, tax abatement and development incentives, community o rgani zation, administration and management of non-profits, fundraising, and communications. We must extend our commitment to the artifacts and beyond ; we must extend skills ,preservation from quiet boatshops in distan.t Maine to crowded public schools in urban centers; we must extend our understanding of the value of maritime history to values understood and shared by all communities.

Work , self-reliance, competence, cooperation , appreciation of beauty and func tion , teaching and learning, respect for nature, these are the elements of maritime tradition that we value, and these are values that are not excl usive ly ours. When we make the public aware of what it is we reall y stand for, then I have no doubt that our more nar'row objectives will find greater sy mpathy and support .

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Maritime Historical Society have every reason to share this responsibility. I am certain that our cooperation will help preserve maritime artifacts, skills, and values in ways that will be open and meaningful to all aspects of our society -and th at will encourage pursuit of this goal with renewed vigor by us all. w

What happened aboard the Slocum in 1904?

THE B URNING OF THE GENERAL SLOCUM

by Claude Rust 160-page hardcover book: $11 .00 list plus $1.50 shipping ($2.50 overseas) Slocum Memorial Committee, Dept. SH, 291 Elmont Road , Elmont, L.l., N.Y., 11003-1693.

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

we were young, we we given a great gift...

Today, our challenge is to preserve it.

To live in a world which contains ships such as these! We were gifted to grow up in their presence because a generation of ship-savers refused to see them disappea r forever. Now it is up to us, a new generation of maritime preservationi sts, to see to it that the y survive for generations past our own.

These ships were we ll and strongly built, but their intended life span is long passed . The vessels which constitute the core of our marit!me heritage a re now in need of effort and money on a scale far greater than that needed to save the m, or even to build most of them in the first place. The bill for their long-term preservation is coming due.

A time ha s come for taking stock. Where are the ships we cherish, and realistically, what shape are they in ? What resources are required, in funds, skills and time, to truly secure their existence?

What are the strengths and object ives of the institutions charged with t hei r care, and wha t resources are available to them? And, not least importantly, how do the leaders, practitioners and su pporters of maritime preservation assess the priorities and goals of the field?

For more informatio n co ntact:

WHITE ELEPHANT (409) 762-8555

P.O. Box 1049,

The Maritime Program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has accepted the mand ate to achieve a truly national focus on these questions , and the widest possible dialogue on these issues. To this end, the Trust has undertaken a comprehensive Maritime Preservation Survey. With preliminary results available for discussion and fur ther inpu t at the Third Maritime Preservation Conference, to be he ld in Baltimo re this October 24th, the Survey can be the basis for an informed national consensus on priorities and planning to address the urgent needs of the maritime historical community.

White Elephant Management Company is honored to have been asked to design and conduct this survey. Our company was formed in 1983 by members of that second genera tion of ship preservatio nists, with deep roots and wide experience in the field. As White Elephant, we have done work on a fascinating variety of vessels, from the Battleship Texas to Mystic's full rigger Joseph Conrad (pictured above); from the Ferry Eureka at the National Maritime Museum in San Francisco, to the Coast Guard Cutter Valiant, among others. It has been a promising beginning for a new company, but as we begin the National Trust Survey we feel even more promise for our field as a whole. It is a project we strongly believe in, and we urge all interested institutions and individuals to participate.

~ MANAGEMENT ~y Galveston, Texas 77553

Caretakers of Maritime History

A fighting lady

One of her planes, an SB2C Helldiver, wheels home out of the lonely sky to land on the ship's welcoming decks. This was August 12, 1944. Intrepid has just joined Task Force 38, the main battlefleet in the Pacific, following repairs made necessary by a torpedo hit earlier in the year. lAter she'll be hit by three kamikazes, losing lives and planes. But always she comes back. She keeps on hitting.

It's March 18, 1945, offthe coast ofJapan.

Fighting a determined foe, the great ship narrowly avoids a Japanese kamikaze bomber which crashed into the sea alongside her. Her own planes, hunched down on the flight deck, will survive this moment to take off in operations against the Japanese home islands.

needs your help!

USS Intrepid helped us all when we needed her help desperately. Today she needs your help to perform her last, in some ways most vital mission-to tell her own story and that of her people, so that Americans of this generation and generations to come may know how a free people fought and won the greatest sea war in history. How they did it, and what it cost.

James Ean, director of the Intrepid Aerospace Museum, remembers well his first sight of the great aircraft carrier which houses the museum. The ship lies at quiet moorings today, on Manhattan's West Side just north of 42nd Street. When Jim first saw her, her huge grey bulk loomed over the horizon of the Pacific Ocean where the ship he served in, one of a scratch group of hastily converted aircraft carriers, was operating in the struggle to roll back the Japanese air-sea onslaught of World War II. "She looked beautiful;' he recalls. "With that kind of ship we knew we could win:' Intrepid was one of five Z7,000-ton Essex class carriers laid down just before American entry into World War II. Completed at Newport News Shipyard in just over a year and a half, she went through the arduous training that welds ship, planes and men into a fighting unit in the fall of 1943, steaming out to join the fleet in the Pacific early in 1944. Her arrival, with her sistersultimately 17 of these great carriers served in World War II-had a decisive effect on the Pacific war, punching great holes in the webbed defenses of the Japanese island empire and reducing the awesome power of the Imperial Japanese Navy to a few shattered hulks still afloat by the war's end.

Many of the people who worked to build the ship had never seen the inside of a shipyard before. Many of the people who served in her had never seen a ship before.

They learned. And they taught the world how great ships are built-and how they are sailed to victory.

The Intrepid Museum looks back to these lessons of history-hard learned lessons paid for at a high priceand also looks forward to the American adventure in space with the great influence that will have on future history. The ship carries a very important message to the people of New York City and the nation today. We of the New York Council of the Navy League of the United States want to see her strengthened and confirmed in that role. The great ship needs your help!

Here's what you can do:

• Write Hon. Edward I. Koch, Mayor of the City of New York, City Hall, New York, New York 10007 to tell him why you want to see this ship kept open to the public in New York. There is a good deal that the city can do in reducing rents and other costs, without spending tax dollars.

• Send people to the ship! It's a rewarding trip for families, school groups, office pals, golfing buddies ... people of all kinds, sorts and conditions.

• Give money to help with the budget, or time to help with volunteer tasks. Write or call Intrepid Museum Foundation, Intrepid Square, West 46th Street & 12th Avenue, New York, NY 10036: tel. 212 245-2533.

We of the New York Council of the Navy League are proud to support this important project. We run an active program of talks, lunches, ship visits in the New York area. If you'd like to know more about us, just drop us a line. We'd be glad to welcome you aboard!

NEW YORK COUNCIL NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES 37 West 44th Street • New York, New York 10036 • 212 575-1999

IN CLIO'S CAUSE

"GOOD DUTY": Robert G. Albion Recalled

by Benjamin W. Labaree The Munson Institute Mystic Seaport Museum Salty, sagacious, full of Yankee skepticism and the less-noted Yankee trait of a quick and ready helpfulness to anyone trying to do an honest job, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and his wife Jennie Barnes Pope may be said to have founded the modern school of maritime history-a school that rejects overblown romanticism and anecdotalism and finds its sustenance in hard facts. As Ben Labaree's warm remembrance suggests, this delving for the fact, working hard to get things right, did not breed a dry and lifeless character but one full of hearty appreciation for all life had to offer, and of a sense of adventure that lasted him all his days and inspired a like fire in others.-ED "You can gratify almost any taste in the name of history," the portly Harvard professor told the first-year graduate students in his American Maritime History seminar.

And he proceeded to illustrate his point by noting that when discussing possible thesis topics with his own mentor years ago he had been asked what his interests were. " The sea and the woods," had been his reply. The professor before us was Robert G. Albion and that thesis became the now-classic Forests and Seapower. None ofus students in the room that day had any intention of becoming maritime historians ourselves, but we were nevertheless drawn to this man and his seminar by the very spirit illustrated in the anecdote he told about himself. For many of us that session was the beginning of a professional and personal relationship that would last for over thirty years, until Bob Albion's death in August 1983 just a few days short of his eighty-seventh birthday.

After a distinguished early career at Princeton, Albion moved to Harvard in the late 1940s for both professional and personal reasons. As for the former, it was a simple matter of Harvard accepting from the Gardiner family a gift originally intended for Princeton to establish a chair in maritime history with Albion as its first incumbent.

But the other reason, I have always thought, was that as dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders, from Maine at that, both Bob and his wife were eager to return home. Years later Bob would tell of Jennie's delight at the new appointment. "Oh, good ," she had exclaimed , "Now I shall never have to go south of Boston again," and so far as I know, she never did . They settled down in Jennie's family home in South Portland , along with her mother, Mrs . Pope and several cats and dogs. Jennie and Bob never had any children of their own , but he would have been 8

Albion a few years back, standing next to thefullrigged ship Joseph Conrad-a ship about the size and roughly the style of the !#stern Ocean packets immortalized in his classic Square Riggers on Schedule. Photo, Mary Anne Stets, Mystic Seaport Museum .

a marvelous father. For the next fifteen years or so Bob commuted by train or bus from Portland to Cambridge, coming down Monday morning in time for his ll:OO AM lecture and returning late Friday afternoon .

In those days Bob was handicapped with gout, and his progress across the busy Harvard Yard was usually slow. Some of us would take this opportunity and fall into step for a few extra minutes of conversation .

His "destroyers,'' he would call us, "escorting their crippled charge through hazardous waters," as undergraduates whizzed by on all sides. Weeknights were spent at his "second home," the Harvard Faculty Club on Quincy Street. Summers from the midfifties on were spent at Mystic Seapon Museum .

Bob loved to travel and would rarely turn down a speaking engagement as long as the subject was maritime and all expenses. were paid. He particularly enjoyed going by train or, of course, by ship if available. The television courses he did for the Navy were what he called "good duty,' ' for at the end of each session he would be flown out to the Mediterranean, perhaps, or to South America, when he would give a final lecture and examination . More often than not trouble would break out in one or another of these places just days after his return , and I always wondered how he managed to escape.

During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war he was held for identification at the Cairo airport.

The letter he brandished from the commander of the US Sixth Fleet did no good

at all , but when he produced his American Express card the official waved him through, asking only why Bob had not displayed that document earlier in the proceedings.

Mystic was another assignment Bob considered "good duty." "Take your work seriously, but not yourself' was one of Bob's rare pieces of personal advice, and no phase of his own career better illustrated the point than his Mystic summers. In 1955 he had helped found the Munson Institute in American Maritime History, generously endowed by the Mallory family, and for the next twenty years he served as coordinator and director. Some of his graduate students who had done work in maritime history were invited to give lectures, and a few of us were even asked back. In 1966, when his colleague Jack Kemble took the summer off, Bob invited me to substitute, and for the next decade or so Jack and I split the job.

Our responsibilities included chauffeuring Bob around to his favorite area restaurants, namely, those with a view of a swimming pool and its bikini-clad patrons. After 1965, when the Blunt White Library was opened at Mystic, Bob had on hand a first-rate col1.ection of research materials. The museum staff thoroughly enjoyed his good humor, and the annual cocktail party he gave slowed the place down for several days thereafter. It was at Mystic that Bob did much of his later writing, the most recent edition of his Bibliography, for example, many of the sketches that went into Five Centuries of Famous Ships, and the final drafts of his contribution to New England and the Sea. And it was to Mystic he came in 1979 after he was no longer able to live at the Harvard Faculty Club.

In his last years, Bob continued to take a lively interest in current events, subscribing to two daily newspapers, and a newsmagazine, but disdaining television. He read voraciously, and , as he said , discovered Westerns just in time, for he had read almost every other sort of adventure literature. Whenever he was asked how he had spent the day, Bob's invariable answer was "just being thoroughly lazy." Although his body gradually gave out over the last months, mentally he was anything but¡ lazy. To the very end of his life he enjoyed a good conversation, recalling facts and anecdotes from his seemingly endless store of knowledge.

Bob Albion did not leave much in the way of worldly goods behind . His legacy was far more valuable : an unquenchable spirit, a love oflife and of people, and half-a-dozen of the finest books in maritime history that we are likely to see for years to come . .:ti SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

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THE SEA PEOPLE OF

by Peter Stanford

The doughty steam tug St. Canute served in Danish waters, doubling in brass as firefighter and iceboat, until brought to Exeter where she is maintained in operating condition.

The Bedford lifeboat, built in 1886and launched from the beach to save shipwrecked mariners, served into the 1930s. It now rests in the old.fish market with the elegant Customs House of1689 in the background.

10

!SCA-International Sailing Craft Association-is the banner they came ashore under, with the verve that is a hallmark of the founding director, David Goddard (and of the body of likeminded souls he and his wife have gathered around them).

It is also the Roman name for the old Roman port of Exeter. The town, with the old half timbered hostelries of pastoral England surviving among more modern brick buildings of the industrial era, crowds with its crooked streets and narrow lanes under the imposing towers of its great Cathedral-a quiet-seeming town, located some way up the River Exe in Devon's rolling countryside, in the West Country. Being inland gave it some protection from sea marauders and the river made a convenient roadway to the English Channel, that broad avenue of European trade which even before Roman times may have been connected by ships with the more advanced Mediterranean world .

In 1566 a canal was dug to improve Exeter's access to the sea particularly for the wool trade that had flourished by then for some centuries from this port. Later, as ships grew in size, other ports took the lead and Exeter became a backwater frequented by coasters and fishing craft, its vanished glories honored in the superb cathedral and history books. After World War II the last local maritime commerce died out, and for a few decades the city waterfront slumbered on , populated only by weekend strollers and occasional motorcyclists who staged races on its long wharf-until a young Major Goddard opted for early retirement in order to settle in Exeter and make the old harbor a center for the preservation of traditional sail.

Strange craft began to arrive from all over-a pearling dhow from Bahrein , where Goddard had served, the old Bristol pilot cutter Cariad, immortalized in Frank Carr's A 'fuchtsman's Log, and others. By June 1969 when Goddard and his gang opened shop as the Exeter Maritime Museum, they had 23 craft on display in the Canal basin and in one old building fronting on the basin. From there they rapidly expanded, saving craft from far corners of the world, and training a highly skilled corps of volunteers (with a very small cadre of permanent staff) to restore and to sail them.

Quaint, even amusing as the jumbledtogether hulls of the craft that once again crowd the Exeter waterfront may be, they do not make up a grab bag of curios. The vessels are collected because they are vanishing from the ken of the human race, to whose progress each has in its way contributed. The skills, and yes, the attitudes SEA HISTDRY, FALL 1984

EXETER of mind and world outlook of the peoples that built and sailed them , are to the degree possible kept alive.

The xavega illustrated here-a monster craft of immemorially ancient design , used in special fishing operations on the Portuguese coast-became extinct after the Museum's example of the type was saved . A French tunnyboat , the kind that I saw lavishly kited with topsails and flying jobs, fishing under sail off the Breton Coast when I sailed that way in the late 1940s, now also is passing into legend : currently ISCA seeks to preserve (and sail) what they believe to be the last example of these buxom, saucy-sheered craft that would otherwise be remembered only in fugitive photographs and some memorable paintings by the French Impressionists who haunted such ports as Quimper and Concarneau.

This living and growing collection is described in the article that follows by sailorman-artist Mark Myers. It includes an Australian surf boat, a Chinese junk, and the famous old French pilot cutter Jolie Brise. Jolie Brise is used for sail training cruises as far afield as the Baltic and Spain, whence she annually imports the rioja wine of Bilbao, continuing a trade in sail older than any written records, the inspiration of the grandest of sea songs, "Spanish Ladies."

The determined sea people who descended upon Exeter were fortunate to be welcomed ashore by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, who has maintained a steady interest in the Museum , and who serves as President of England's Maritime Trust (see SH19) , and they have enjoyed the continued participation of Frank G.G. Carr, former director of the National Maritime Museum and Chairman of the World Ship Trust , of which SEA HISTORY is the official journal. Frank is Vice President of the Museum.

"There has scarcely been a moment," reports Director David Goddard, "when some crisis has not either just been averted or has been seen approaching.

However, we have survived and , moreover, steadily improved our position in Exeter, and our collection of craft." That it continue to do so, must be the hope of everyone who values the sailing heritage of mankind .

The formidable jumble ofexotic-looking craft includes the richly adorned Tagus sailing lighter Sotero, astern of her an iron dredge of 1843 and the tug St. Canute. At right (and below) is the unique xavega which was launched from a Portuguese beach to spread a great fishnet , with eleven men on each of its fi_ ou_r_o~a_rs_._~---

The splendid ISCA Newsletter, and free admission to the Museum and also to the Maritime Trust's historic ships at St. Katherine's Dock in London comes with membership, for ÂŁ5 payable Exeter Maritime Museum , The Quay, Exeter EX2 4AN, England.

SEA HIS10RY, FALL 1984

11

The Sea People of Exeter

A Passage

by Mark Myers

...-

.-.-

The intimacy and charm of the sheltered river port, already a backwater and haven of more glorious memories a century ago, survive today-enhanced by the burgeoning new life brought to it by people seeking to preserve a far-ranging seaborne culture. The museum must be approached by ferry across the river, an ideal way to come to its vessels.

Below, the gallant ketch Nonsuch, visiting Exeter on August 15, 1969, with the author/artist aboard.

I~

I. /,

Exeter is not the easiest of ports to reach from the sea, as I found out in the summer of 1969. I was then bo'sun of the Nonsuch Ketch, a replica of the little 17th century square-rigger which founded the fortunes of the Hudsons Bay Company some 300 years before. After taking her from the builder's yard at Appledore, North Devon , we had been passage-making along the south coast of England under the command of Adrian Small, flying the company flag and nosing into a score of ports between London and Land's End which hadn't seen a sailing ship for fifty years or more.

We sailed for Exeter at sunset on August 14, standing out of Salcombe harbor under topsails and slipping quietly past the grave of the Herzagin Cecilie. As we bore to the east to pass Prawle Point and the Start, the sky astern was alive with color, our rigging etched jet black against it.

My memory of that night is still fresh and clear-a picture of the Nonsuch beating silently up Lyme Bay against light north-northeast airs, under starlight bright enough to make her sails glow in muted tones of green and blue. To the west were the lights ofBrixham, that premier port of fishermen and fast trawlers. Beneath us the seabed was scarred with the bite of innumerable anchors-a legacy of the great days of the Channel Squadron on blockade duty in the Napoleonic Wars, and others back to the times of Romans, and perhaps before them the Phoenicians who had come this way.

Early next morning, we picked up the pilot off Straight Point and stood into the estuary of the River Exe. Just past Exmouth (still a busy port for motor coasters) the river widened into a vast expanse of water, most of it shallow. The pilot cheerily guided us past the sandbanks with the aid of a few buoys and a lot of local knowledge. Some distance up the river he steered us toward a desolate looking spot where a solitary building and the entrance to a small lock mark the beginning of the Exeter Ship Canal.

We learned while making fast outside the lock that the building was a pub-the Turf Hotel, no less-and we seemed to be the only customers for miles. Then a few locals materialized from nowhere and we lent them our muscle in working the old lock gates. They told us that although Turf Lock and this first stretch of the canal were fairly new (ca. 1830) some of the higher reaches and pound locks had been dug in 1564, the first in England. While waiting in the pub for the water to rise we also heard the tale of the big Dutch schooner Trio which had had her bowsprit

to Exeter sawn off in order to fit into the Jock while bound up to Exeter in 1938.

We squeezed past a small outwardbound tanker outside the lock , grateful to be meeting her here rather than in the narrow "one lane" body of the canal. This sludge boat and an occasional tiny oil tanker were then the only regular users of the canal, apart from the odd yacht. We motored along the canal proper, passing through miles of flat meadowland . The only spectators were herds of fat dairy cows and a few indignant anglers, although the lockmaster, pedalling along the towpatch on his bicycle, managed to pass us. And then followed the finest stretch of all along the canal-a sea path through green fields and trees leading to the heart of Exeter. We watched as the ancient city rose on its hillside ahead.

There were tall masts in sight and above them, shops and houses spilling down past the old Roman walls. The skyline was crowned by a magnificent medieval cathedral. We rounded a bend, and arrived at Exeter Basin.

The quayside was ringed by tall 19th century warehouses and its banks were lined with the queerest collection of craft we had yet encountered-everything from a super-streamlined racing yacht to a weather-stained Arab pearling dhow.

Promising ourselves a closer look at this maritime menagerie when time permitted, we fired two of our iron cannon in salute and came alongside the quay wall astern of the dhow.

Over the next few days we explored the Exeter Maritime Museum , in whose precincts we lay and by whose initiative this remarkable fleet of working craft had been brought together. The museum had opened just over a month before, yet already its collections were impressive. A

large stone warehouse on the quay held most of the smaller craft. There was a room full of Arab boats complete with their gear, even down to the traditional brass cooking pots. In other rooms we found reed boats, coracles, dugouts, and dinghies-a whole United Nations of boats, from Irish curraghs to Polynesian proas. The scene was dominated by the noble schooner Result. She was not on exhibit, but sadly laid up here after the death of her master and owner Peter Welch, two years before. A stalwart of the sailing coasters since her launch in 1893, she had even survived a stint as a "Q" ship in the First World War. When we saw her she had been much reduced in rig for the sake of economy, but in the next year she was sold for restoration to her original glory at the Ulster Folk Museum in Carrickfergus, where she was built.

AlongsidetheResu/twas the St. Canutea snub-nosed steam tug built in Denmark in 1931. She had been working out of Fowey in Cornwall until the year before and was still in full seagoing order from the top of her lofty funnel to the depths of her stoke hold. The pearling dhow ahead of us hailed from Bahrein, and she, too, was kept ready for sea. We marvelled at her construction-the frames were twisted , unsquared limbs from some ironhard desert tree and the planks simply nailed on where they touched. Her lines, however, were sheer poetry.

Nearby lay a fine little gaff cutter named Moonraker. She had been built as a Looe fishing lugger in 1896 but since her conversion to a cruising yacht had notched up half a dozen transatlantic passages. Her sturdy, typically Cornish build contrasted with the sweeping sheer and light clinker construction of the vessel next ahead-an opulent State Barge built

A Nigerian sailing dugout (above) and a nimble Fijian proa (below) are actively sailed today.

7hese vessels were built for the Museum in their places of origin in order to preserve the type.

A variety of craft (left) , driven by paddling, rowing, punting and quanting are carefully studied and preserved. 7he bladeless oars of the Irish curragh in the foreground testify to the easily driven quality of the light, flexible hull-and to the harshness of the seas she is born to swim. 7he Venetian gondola (right) is usually rowed from one side and has a lopsided hull to compensate.

SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

13

A pearling dhow, the Museum's first overseas craft, ivas built by the Sheik of Bahrein as a present, in the living tradition in which no plans are used, but only the shipwright '.s eye, "coupled with experience and instinct."

for film work as a replica of the Queen's Shallop of 1698. When Sir Alec Rose came to open the Museum in late July that year, he had been rowed up to the basin in style aboard her.

Two more sharply contrasting craft were on display ashore. One was the racing proa Cheers, a bright yellow futuristic-looking object sporting two sliverlike hulls. She had been built for the 1968 Singlehanded Transatlantic Race and had done well, placing third . Swelling above Cheers was the ample bosom of the Bedford, a beamy pulling lifeboat built in 1886 for the Tyne Lifeboat Society. A fat cork belt encircling her upper strakes did nothing for her looks, but the extra

buoyancy it provided had seen her safely through decades of hard weather service on a particularly nasty stretch of coast.

We sailed from Exeter on August 21, continuing around the coast, but returned to the Basin and our friends at the Museum in October. We laid up there for three months, preparing the ship for her eventual passage to Canada. This visit was bracketed by trouble at Turf: we went firmly aground in the lock entrance going up and remained there until the pub ran out of beer and the spring tides made again a few days later. Bound out en route for Bristol in January we were weatherbound there for another three' days.

No, Exeter is not the easiest place to

Jolie Brise, built as a French pilot cutter just before World War/, and sailed between the wars by yachting immortals E.G. Martin and Bobby Somerset, is owned by the Museum and operated by Dauntsey's Sailing School. ~

14

The 6lft Hong Kong fishing junk Keying II, was new-built for a Hong Kong festival in London-with Exeter and the world ofhistoric ships the ultimate beneficiaries.

reach by sea, even less so since the completion of the new motorway bridge which would have had the masts out of our ship. But the Exeter Maritime Museum is thriving, adding significantly to the collection of working craft and bringing lustre and new life to what had been a seedy part of a beautiful city. Let us hope that it will long continue to do so! ..V Mr. Myers, an artist, who has done much work for the National Maritime Museum, San Francisco, and the National Society, is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the American Society of Marine Artists, and has sailed with the likes of Alan Villiers and Adrian Small.

He lives with his wife in Cornwall.

The Exeter Philosophy No one knows how the Greeks managed to row their triremes, with their three great banks of oars, for none survive. Experience with modern replicas of Elizabethan sailing ships seems to indicate that we have either failed to reproduce correctly or have too little experience of how to sail such ships, for we do not seem to be able to get them to go as Drake must have done. The Arabs are forgetting how, only fifty years ago, they sailed their beautiful baggalas down the African coast. And are we not ourselves losing sight of the intricacies of firing a coal burning boiler or the pitfalls of running a reciprocating steam engine-the heartbeats of the industrial revolution?

If an object is worthy of preservation, so, surely, is the knowledge of how it was used, but better still the technique of actually using it. So, for this reason the museum sails a number of its craft and raises steam both in the tug and in Brunel's drag-boat which has been in working order for more than one hundred and thirty years.

Unfortunately it does not follow that because the museum can sail its pearling shewe or its Shetland fourern that it can therefore get the best out of these boats for this requires much experience.

The museum would therefore be very chary at making any firm deductions as to the ability of this or that craft in relation to another or to the wind itself. Nevertheless, the practice will continue for those in the future to make their own deductions, for the technique, if not the expertise, will be preserved .

-D.A. GODDARD SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

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Led by the stick ligher Vernie S. of 1897, the parade of working harbor craft passes beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Tugboats , a pilot boat, a Coast Guard cutter, excursion boats, a fireboat and others turned out to honor the heritage of the harbor. Photos, John Skelson.

New York Harbor Curatorship: I

SEA DAY: New York Celebrates the Working Harbor The morning of Saturday, May 19 brought a soft spring rain sifting down from the grey blankets of cloud hanging over the still waters of New York harbor. Up and down the floating walkways at Staten Island's Bay Street Landing, hard by where the ferryboats come in from Manhattan-whose tall towers gleam in transitory sunlight across the silvery waterthe people were in a holiday mood not to be dampened by the weather. I say to a

young woman coming down the way with two toddlers in tow : " It's good to see them getting out in the harbor so young." " Oh , this is a family day," she says. "Their aunts and uncles are on the other boats."

And ultimately, after some tinkering with a faulty magneto on Jerome Kern's old yacht Showboat, which has been contributed to the occasion, the working fleet sets off, thirty-six craft in all, including the 425-foot fuel barge Cibro Philadel-

A festive f ountain of spray salutes the Vernie S. as she comes up to the Fulton Ferry Landing pier with Anthony Rando, born 1989, at the helm.

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18

phia, pushed along by the tug Jean Turecamo with the Tottenville High School Band and majorettes aboard . And there are Moran and McAllister tugs, and Poling Transportation's Rebecca P. , the Sandy Hook Pilot~' big 180-foot New York , the 110-foot icebreak~r Mahoning of the US Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers 100-foot catamaran Driftmaster, which swallows up huge balks of floating timber and other flotsam and jetsam, in a perpetual harbor cleanup campaign-and enough people aboard the three dozen vessels to hold a worthy family party, and enough horsepower, surely to move a mountain if that should be called for.

All these vessels follow docilely in the wake of a 65-foot wooden lighter, called a "stick" lighter from the immense cargo boom she swings. She sits low in the water-waves from a passing wake slop easily aboard. This is the J.-emie S., launched into a quite different world in 1897. At her helm is Anthony Rando, born April 5, 1898 on Filicudi Island, off the northeast coast of Sicily. He came to Boston in 1909 to live with an aunt while his father was working in a Waltham cotton mill. Ten years later he came to New York to work on the coal docks in Red Hook.

By 1922 he had is own boat running harbor errands and buying up old rope and sails for Domenic and Johnson's junk shop at the foot of 16th Street in Brooklyn-a rare business run by Italo-Norse partners-and that year he married 16-year old Josephine Santangelo, whose family came from Stromboli, a neighboring island off the Sicilian coast. As Anthony told me these things, acting out SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

the chapters of his varied waterfront career with real gusto, especially when he remembered first seeing Josephine, I remembered what the harbor artist John Noble had told me : "The harbor lighters, these little wooden boats you wouldn't pay attention to, carrying lube oil out to the big ships and doing a thousand other errands-they're all manned by people from Stromboli, off Sicily." Stromboli and neighboring islands, he might have said.

And Anthony now refines this picture a little, pointing out that it was predominantly a Scandinavian business until after World War II . Then the bottom dropped out of it, and he and his sons growing up in the business bought up the boats and carried on. He has sons who are skippers, grandsons who are deckhands, and great grandsons learning the ropes, afloat with us today.

The H?rnie comes in to the National Society's pier at Fulton Landing. The other lighters of the Standard Boat Company, Anthony's company, put in at odd spots around the pier, and after the speechmaking by Borough President Anthony Gaeta of Staten Island, and Ports & Terminals Commissioner Susan Frank, and Board of Education President James F. Regan- and a very short speech, echoing over the waters via the PA system , from Anthony : "This is the happiest day of my life':._there is music, here and there a little dancing on the unsteady decks, and much joking and laughing and consuming of vast picnic luncheons brought along in big baskets.

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All this at the behest of John Noble, the artist and historian of the harbor who died a year before, May 15, 1983. He told us we should set up, in effect, a curatorship for New York Harbor. He knew these people, and other societies that make up the life of the working harbor. His paintings, drawings and lithographs celebrating that life are known by all portefios, as we might call ourselves, borrowing a term from the very similar culture of Argentina's Riachuelo, 6,000 miles south . John's work has yet to be hung in the Museum of Modem Art, 6 miles from the Upper Bay at the heart of New York Harbor- but a special room is devoted to it in the town museum of Mandel , Norway, across 3,000 miles of stormy North Atlantic. It is better, surely to be remembered by the people than the critics, for the people go on forever.

Through the New York Harbor Curatorship, inaugurated on this waterborne festival occasion , we hope to remember the people of the harbor, their ships, their work, their lives .

PS SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

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New York Harbor Curatorship: II

JOHN NOBLE'S

by Peter Stanford

lbu are aboard John Nob le's barge, under tow of Fred F. Kaiser 's schooner Lady Churchill , August 1948.

He came to New York very young, and very much in rebellion against his father's world of Paris studios and ladies under lacey parasols strolling the sands at Provincetown on Cape Cod . One catches glimpses of him in old photographs, a curly-headed kid of fifteen or so, scrambling around the schooners he found unloading lumber in the Harlem River. By 1929 we find him at age sixteen , settled in his career as artist and keeper of harbor history-a curator, if you will, of that rough hewn , incredibly complex and interrelated pattern of trades and societies that kept cargo moving through the New World's greatest port . This was interrupted by schooling in Grenoble, France, where he met "green-eyed Susan," who became his wife and partner. Sitting by her bedside with John two years ago, as Susan was dying, I heard of their early days in New York together, their unending walks through industrial byways , and their explorations by rowboat of creeks and backwaters, which no one ever saw but transient seamen from the far corners of the world-and the people who lived and worked there. From an early date, I think , John achieved that highest good expressed by Conrad of his Lord Jim, that he had become "one of us," at one with the community he lived in and whose ways he sought to understand , record and in some sense interpret to the world.

By the 1930s we find him sailing in the last of the schooners that came to New York under sail (his first passage was at age fifteen, in 1928, aboard the Anna Sophia, a granite schooner bringing in Maine granite for Long Island gravestones) and in between doing the odd carpentry jobs that kept these aging hulls afloat and moving cargo. His friend Fred F. Kaiser, a Long Island boy who haunted the schooners where they gathered in Newtown "Then the things of the deep come up and look at you ''. .. porpoises frolic around the Studio Barge, as a rapt Noble looks on. Below, the schooner laid ashore at Port Jefferson for caulking the garboard. They did not use oat husks, or silk like Sir Patrick Spens, but, prosaically, cotton from a life jacket. Photos Fred F. Kaiser.

I

II

20

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

VOYAGING STUDIO Creek, Whale Creek and Greenpoint lumber terminals, describes him "replacing deck planking, making gaffs, bitts, etc." And he recites one incident where the Annie C Ross 's skipper traded his big, heavy yawlboat for a light 16-foot Old Town double ender that John brought him . This was in City Island . John and his brother rowed the yawlboat some dozen miles back to Manhattan, where John lived on East 15th Street.

He rode the tugs out to pick up incoming ships-a splendid way to see the harbor's trades-and sometimes rode outgoing schooners, who could use an extra hand at the pumps when they first put out deep-loaded and leaking at every seam. He would return with the tugs. In time, he came to make a kind of headquarters at the Port Johnston coal dock in Bayonne. There old schooners, and other aged craft, came to end their days. One of these old hulks that came to haunt his imagination was the fivemasted barkentine Molfetta, built on the Gulf of Mexico in 1920.

Anthony Rando remembers her as she came in on passage from Genoa, Italy, when she was two years old. "Big, white sails,'' he says. " There was another, just behind her. A beautiful afternoon ." Anthony bought some old rope off her, unloading it by darkness at the mate's request, after the skipper had gone ashore, presumably. Two years later the Molfetta came in again damaged and leaking, on passage from Boston toward Norfolk with cut-up armor plate from a warship scrapped in that port-a wicked cargo. This was her last trip, she was finished. "I'll never forget the Molfetta ," Anthony said, "She's still there, where she laid up in Port Johnston-did you know?"

Did I know? I had been educated on tales of the Molfetta and her sisters, most of whom ended in New York Harbor (one, the City ofBeaumont, crept up the Hudson River to Hastings to die) , tales taught me by John Nable as part of his tutelage of me in the ways of the harbor and its changing life.

"My Own Little Leaking Monticello" John's studio on the pier was the deckhouse of a big yacht, John was never quite sure which of the hulks it came from. After a while he added a sort of pilot house on top, illumined through arched windows from the Carteret ferry. As time passed , and the hulks moldered away around him, the wooden pier began to go too. John then built a barge and went afloat with his studio, his " little leaking Monticello," which on one memorable occasion went to sea!

John's friend , Fred Kaiser remembers the voyage vividly, '37 years later. John had decided to go to Port Jefferson , 60 miles out on Long Island's north shore: A sand dredge was working there and John wanted to make sketches for a lithograph. In addition, the crew and he were great friends.

So it happened-three days of put-putting by the 14 horsepower make-and-break Lunenburg Foundry engine. We ate and cooked aboard the barge, while the schooner chugged away up ahead. Our connector was his heavy rowboat, and it took some rowing to catch up and board the Lady Churchill.

At Port Jefferson sandpit we had trouble anchoring due to the very deeply dredged abyss that reached close to the steep shore. I believe we made the houseboat fast to an unattended buoy and tied the Churchill alongside. . .

The Studio Barge represented freedom in John's life, and it has come to stand as a monument, a Monticello indeed, to the people of the harbor. The National Society is interested in preserving it, so that others may meet aboard it, and so that others may come to share John Noble's vision of the life of the working harbor-a hard life, made warm by companionship and shot through with moments of memorable beauty, as when Anthony Rando saw the Molfetta come in from the sea. .t

As John Noble saw her in his mind's eye, the Studio Barge moored in a timeless sea, attended by the bow of the Molfetta-note the steel hawse plates for the stockless navy anchor, and the multiple chainplates for the square-rigged foremast. The Molfetta lay right by the pier where the studio was first emplaced, and hard by where John later moored it once afloat. Of that floating, he wrote: "The shock to me was deep when the dock, already badly collapsing, was abandoned. In panic I built the wooden barge here shown which enabled me to escape from the boneyard... There is not cuteness nor color in all this for me-the only small romance was that I did escape."

John Noble aboard with his portrait ofhis "little, leaking Monticello" as he called the Studio Barge. This photograph was made on July 22, 1977 by his friend Joe Dirsa, Bartender Emeritus at Hendrickson's Restaurant, Bayonne.

On April 23, 1838. the woo den-hulled paddle steamer SIRIUS arrived at New York . respo nsible for starting the first North

a new era .

Atlantic steamship service, heralding

On April 25, 1981, we, the men and women comprising the SIRIUS crew of today, moved across the East River and settled into our own and permanent berth alongside this historic shore. Please note our new address and communications numbers below.

212-330-1817

Capt . Wolf Spille, President

SIRIUS HOUSE - 76 Montague Street Bro oklyn Heights, New York 11 201 Teleph one: (2 12) 330-1800 Cable: "SIRIUS NEWYORK" lnt'I Te lex : TAT 177881 /I TI 422871 /R CA 225111 Domest i c Telex: WU 126758/645934 / TWX 710-584-2207

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OPERATIONS AND RESEARCH : Capt. Arnaldo Tassinari , V.P. Janet Forti

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212-330-1835

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TO ALL N.M.H.S. MEMBERS N.M.H.S. says please contribute to the "Mathilda Fund " for the restoration of the 1897-vi ntage steam tug Mathilda.

She has a new coat of paint but needs new plates and a refurbishing to becom e a gleaming attraction at her new home at Rondout, NY. So pl ease co ntribute to the "Mathilda Fund " or donate yo ur expertise to restore her. Your contribution is tax-de· ductible and yo ur time will be well spent.

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SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

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SEA HISlORY, FALL 1984

23

This is the awesome sight a young Jim E:an saw when he first encountered Intrepid in the Pacific 40 years ago-a ship "enormous and beautiful."

New York Harbor Curatorship: III

Saving the Intrepid for ~

School programs aboard Intrepid trace the story offlight from its beginnings to the frontiers of space.

The broad space ofthe flight deck has accommodated several generations of aircraft, as well as Scott Carpenter's Mercury space capsule, which the ship recovered in the Pacific in 1962.

by James Eau, President Emerit She was one ofthe 17 new fast carriers that steamed offto turn the tide of World War II in the Pacific. This was a war that began with the virtual wipeout of the conventional battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. In the first two years of conflict, 1942-43, the United States husbanded its scarce resource in aircraft carriers, which had suddenly become the capital ships of sea battle. Losses were inevitable-at one point only one US carrier was left operational in the Pacific. The hard-pressed British provided one of their fleet carriers to bolster this thin force. But priceless experience was being gained, and a new doctrine of air-sea war was evolving under Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Fleet. This doctrine was to use the gathered might of a faststeamingfleet ofaircraft carriers to sweep the seas and the skies, cut off the oceanic Japanese Empire from seaborne supply, and ultimately carry the war to the Japanese home islands. In 1943, the first of the Essex-class carriers began to train their flight crews. Late in the year they arrived in the war theater. They swept all before them, but not without cost. The Intrepid, third ship in the new class, was torpedoed soon after arrival on the scene, in February 1944. She was repaired, then hit again, in October, this time by a kamikaze. She repaired herself and kept operating, until within a month, she was hit by two kamikazes, and forced to withdraw with over 100 casualties. In April 1945, she was kamikazed again, but each time she came back. Of the fast carriers of World War II, just two survive: the Yorktown at Patriots Point in Charleston, and the Intrepid on the Hudson River in New York. Here the story ofher preservation is told by the person who led the effort.

Early in 1944 when I first saw the Intrepid in the South Pacific, I could not know that our destinies would be so intertwined 30 to 40 years later. I was a member of Fighting Squadron 22 based aboard the aircraft carrier Cowpens , an Independence class converted light cruiser, flying the Grumman Hellcat (F6F). At the time, the enormous size and beauty of the then classified CVll, newly arrived in the war zone, were what struck me. This was the first of the new Essex-class carriers we had seen, a mighty purpose-built machine three times the size of the made-over ship I was serving in. Passing under the lntrepid's bow, in the captain's gig from the Cowpens, accentuated both of these characteristics

24

SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

In October 1944, Intrepid's planes help sink the superbattleship Musashi. The battleship Iowa, steaming in the background, never had to meet Musashi or her equally formidable sister Yamato, which was also sunk with Intrepid's help. Today Iowa has been reactivated.

~ew

York and the Nation

us, Intrepid Museum Foundation

of the Essex-class carrier, and inspired in me a feeling of awe: this is how we're going to win the war, I thought.

Twenty-nine years later, in 1973, I became a part of a team which attempted to save carriers by utilizing the Randolph and Essex as a STOL (short take-off and landing) airport. The idea was to weld them bow to bow, using both flight decks as a landing field in New York's Hudson River at Pier 76.

Then, in 1976, I and Larry Sowinski, current member of the Board of Trustees of the Intrepid Museum Foundation and Director ofExhibitry, were recruited by a group called Qdyssey in Flight to assist in acquiring an aircraft carrier, for the purpose of converting it to a museum. Larry, then a freelance art director, was to handle graphics and exhibitry. I was to be in charge of public relations. At that time, I represented Lufthansa, the German airline, in that capacity.

It soon became apparent to Larry and me that in order to accomplish this considerable undertaking, we had to acquire a berth and show the financial wherewithal to have a vessel donated by the US Navy. This hard fact necessitated a change in our original roles and we devoted our time and energies to fulfilling these two immediate prerequisites. Thus we embarked upon our pilgrimage. Before it was over, we had secured the approval of two Presidents of the United States, (Carter and Reagan) ; Secretaries of the Navy Woolsey, Hildalgo and Lehman; Mayors Beame and Koch; and four commissioners of Ports & Terminals, Mastriani , Gliedman , Heilbron and Seale.

In securing the interest of the Navy we were passed up a ladder of friends who became enthusiasts for the undertaking. Advertising executive Michael Gillespie introduced us to Captain Ted Wilbur, editor of Naval Aviation News. Wilbur, a former Navy fighter pilot and renowned aviation artist, had been part of the team that created the great Navy Air Exhibit in the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum. With his help we climbed the Navy chain of command, ending with Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Hayward.

In New York, where we had to secure a berth and financingultimately, over $20 million-the National Maritime Historical Society's Chairman the late Admiral John M . Will, USN (ret.) led us to the late Rear Admiral John Bergen, a retired Naval Reserve officer prominent in the hotel business and dedicated to SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

Jim Ean , age 23, in his F6F fighter plane aboard the USS Independence (CVL 22) in the South Pacific ca. 1943.

Forty years later, in Intrepid's hangar deck Jim Ean exchanges reminiscences with Vice President George Bush , who flew an Avenger torpedo bomber like the one in the background, when he served in the light carrier San Jacinto in World War II.

25

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patriotic good works. National Society Trustee James P. McAllister II , then President of the New York Council of the Navy League, brought us recognition in both naval and shipping circles. Grumman Aero Space, our first corporate sponsor, joined with these leaders to give us support and credibility to undertake next steps.

We embarked on a massive, volunteer-supported campaign to reach the public, without a budget. An extensive exhibit with aircraft and ship models and dioramas of air-sea actions was put on at the World Trade Center, where some of our more visible members, including Senator Barry Goldwater and Maureen O'Hara, spoke to the press and attracted attention to the cause. A similar effort was put on with Mayor Koch, at City Hall Plaza, with a model of the LEM used in the moon landing, and a thirteen-foot model of the Intrepid. And at a breakfast presentation put on for us by Dick Shortway, Publisher of Vogue (and World War II Flying Fortress Pilot), Zachary Fisher, builder and philanthropist, joined the project. He sharpened our goals in establishing our effort as the Intrepid Museum Foundation, and rounded up the funding necessary for the accomplishment of the task. He continues to give his personal leadership.

Today the Intrepid, the Navy's old CVll , is an important installation in New York, with people streaming down 42nd Street to see her in her berth at Intrepid Plaza. There is a great deal still to be accomplished, and both corporate and individual members are invited to support the educational message the big, graceful ship carries in the heart of America's greatest city.

J,

P.O. Box 150, Dedham, MA 02026. Tel. 617-329-2650 or 603-893-6365. Write or call day / night.

J,

J,

For further information: Intrepid Museum Foundation, Intrepid Square, New York NY 10036; tel: 212 245-2533.

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Famous Sail Training Ships

Eisenhower House, Fort Adams State Park, Newport; RI 02840

US Coast Guard Bark &gle

by Kirsten L. Mann

Eagle was the second of three almost identical German Navy training ships built by Blohm and Voss of Hamburg between 1933 and 1938-the first of the three being Tovaristsch (ex-Gorch Fock I) , and the third being Sagres II (ex-Gunabara, ex-Albert Leo Schlageter). Eagle was completed in 1936 and launched as the Horst ~ssel. She had a hull length of 265.75 feet , 21 ,530 square feet of sail, and more than 20 miles of rigging.

After these three German ships, the same yard built Mircea for the Romanian Navy.

In 1958, they built and launched Gorch Fock II to the same plans. Although all five ships are considered by authorities to be "sisters," Gorch Fock I and Mircea were slightly shorter (hull length 241.75 feet, as against 265.75). Alben Leo Schlageter, Horst ~ssel, and Gorch Fock II were lengthened by adding extra frames amidships.

The three original ships were built to Lloyd's highest classification for steel craft; all decks, including the quarterdeck and forecastle, are steel plated throughout, with the weather (exposed) decks covered with three-inch teak planking, and all internal decks sheathed in Oregon pine of the same thickness . For auxiliary power Eagle has a 16-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine rated at 1,000 horsepower; electrical power is supplied by two 225-kilowatt generators.

The general accommodation layout has officers and instructors occupying the after end of the ship, two large cadet bunk areas in the midship section, and quarters for petty officers and crew forward of this. The internal furnishings were all of the highest quality, the captain's quarters being lined with hardwood paneling and wainscoting, while the other officers' quarters and mess rooms were finished in bright colors .

Furniture throughout the officers' quarters was in polished mahogany, while that in the petty officers' area was ash.

All three vessels were rigged as barks, with spike bowsprits, double topsails, single topgallants, and royals. The only difference was that Gorch Fock I had a single spanker, and the two later sisters had double spanker gaffs. The sail plans of these ships was not lofty, having been designed to navigate the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal without having to strike their upper masts. The fore and main lowermasts and topmasts are in one single spar, while the mizzen is one single steel pole from heel to truck .

The original color scheme of Horst ~s28

sel was the standard one for German training ships : hull white above the boot-topping, poop and forecastle superstructure deep cream above the bulwark line; masts and spars natural , with . the mastheads, yard-arms, and all spar ends picked out in white. All steel superstructure inboard was white, and all doors, skylights, and other wooden furnishings were natural teak, varnished highly. All boats were white with natural trim. The original figurehead was a large carved eagle with its wings spreading up either side of the bow. It was felt by some that its colossal size interfered with the natural beauty of the curving bow.

Horst ~ssel made only a few training voyages before World War II broke out; she was used extensively during the early war years for transporting men and supplies in the Baltic, and was credited with downing three aircraft in combat. After the war, the ship was turned over to the US Coast Guard in Bremerhaven in 1946, as part of the agreed-upon reparations, and re-christened Eagle.

The name Eagle has a proud history in the US Coast Guard. In 1790 Alexander Hamilton , the first Secretary of the Treasury, founded the Revenue Marine (later, the Coast Guard) , which commissioned a number of boats whose main task was to prevent smuggling. Just two years later, the first Eagle was commissioned. For eight years, the Coast Guard fleet of which she was a part was the only navy the United States had .

The second Eagle fought French privateers in the Cari bean. The third operated out of New Haven, Connecticut under Captain Frederick Lee. Her crew held off the British at the battle of Negro Head dur-

ing the War of 1812. Nearly one hundred years passed before the next Eagle saw service in the Coast Guard. She was a hundred-foot patrol boat used to prevent rum-running during Prohibition- the only Eagle in Coast Guard history that was not sail driven.

World War II broke out while the European training ship Danmark was visiting this country. Caught here, and unable to sail for home, she was used by the Coast Guard to train cadets. When it came time for her to return to Denmark , there was considerable agitation to build a similar vessel to replace her. Postwar budget cut backs made this impracticable, so the opportunity to acquire the Horst ~ssel came as a godsend to those who wanted to see sail training continue in the US Coast Guard .

Today's Eagle is the seventh cutter to bear that name. Her mizzen mast has been rerigged to take a single spanker like her sister Gorch Fock I. The large eagle figurehead has been replaced by a smaller one which blends better into her bow lines; the original is on exhibit today at Mystic Seaport Museum.

When at home, the Eagle rests alongside a pier at the Coast Guard Academy on the Thames River in New London, Connecticut. The Academy was originally founded in 1876 with a class of nine students, on board the Revenue Cutter Dobbin. A series of cutters replaced the Dobbin and in 1932 a permanent shore facility was built for the Academy on land donated by the New London community. Enrollment at the Academy now numbers approximately 1,000 men and women , all of whom sail at one time or another aboard Eagle. Used mainly during the summer, Eagle serves as a seagoing classroom for about 175 cadets and instructors. Aboard Eagle cadets have a chance to practically apply the navigation, engineering, and other training they receive ashore. As upperclassmen , they perform functions normally handled by officers.

They guide the ship and serve as the leaders they will one day become in the Coast Guard . As underclassmen , they fill positions normally taken by the enlisted crew of a ship, including helm watches at the triple wheel that steers the vessel.

Eagle has been an active participant in sail training events, including the International Sail Training Races in Europe in 1972 and this summer's Race Two (Bermuda to Halifax) and the Cruise-in-Company up the Saint Lawrence to Quebec.

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

SUSAN P. HOWELL

Loss of the Marques Early on Sunday morning, June 3, the bark Marques was lost at sea about 75 miles north of Bermuda, on the Bermuda-Halifax sail training race. Commanded by Captain Stuart A . Finley, Marques was overpowered by a violent squall which sank her in less than a minute. Of the ship's complement of 28, only nine were saved . Among those lost were ASTA counselor Susan Howell. " In the 28 years that the Sail Training Association and the American Sail Training Association have been organizing 'Tall Ships' races and sail training cruises,'' observed Henry H. Anderson, Jr. , Chairman of ASTA , " there has never before been a fatality-or even a life-threatening injury.

This loss is a tragedy which has deeply affected the sail training community."

Following are excerpts from Chairman Anderson's report: At the start , the sky was clear; seas were a little rough from an earlier front . As co-organizers of the race, ASTA had consulted satellite data and local sailing experts- all of which indicated that conditions would soon improve. As they lost sight ofland , the " Tall Ships" fleet experienced steep seas and strong winds: by midnight, the latter was at a speed of 25 to 30 knots , and fairly steady.

During the evening other ships in the race had radio contact with Marques, and all was well aboard. One of the final known radio conversations-with Our Svanen about 2330-revealed that Marques was sailing well and falling off a little to a more comfortable course for the night. ...The Captain, who had spent a large part of the night topside keeping an eye on weather and sail , finally went below about 0400. The two ASTA counselors-who had been on deck working with trainees and attending to their needsalso picked up their normal watch routine.

The moon was out and there were some stars.

The wind was from the west; seas were 12 to 15 feet. The ship was heeled over some, under approximately one third sail ; her lee rail was not under, but there was some water on deck from wave and spray. The crew remember it as an exhilirating sail , although the heavy sea and accompanying ship action made many seasick who had not been so before.

According to statements of surviving crew members, soon after the end of the midwatch, a sudden and unexpected local squall of undeterminable violence struck the vessel.

The storm was upon the ship in seconds; the masts , already leaning toward the water as she skimmed along, began to be driven dangerously close to the horizontal. The crew remember a mate yelling, "veer off, veer off," and the helmsman struggling to turn the wheel so as to swing the ship's bow away from the wind, easing the pressure on its sails.

It would have taken about fifteen turns of

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

the wheel to bring Marques ' rudder completely around; the helmsman managed only one or two before the wind had its way. Some crew members and trainees sprang to the lines, trying desperately to cut them and divest the ship of the pull created by her canvas sails. But, although the ship made a brief attempt to right herself, the forces which were driving Marques down were too powerful to be reversed. The momentum of the ship-and two waves (estimated by survivors to have been approximately thirty feet)-sent her bow slicing forward and down into the water; her stern came up, bring the rudder above water, and making it totally useless.

The surviving crew state that the ship was completely under water within a minute, and they had to fight the suction caused by its downward motion to prevent being drowned.

Those who had been on deck, and those in the companionway- just having gone below after their watch , and then responding to the cry of "All Hands on Deck! "-who had been able to make their way topside, now found themselves in the water.

The ship's liferafts inflated automatically and floated off the sinking hull as they were designed to; competitors, nearby merchant vessels, and Coast Guard and Naval forces joined in the search for survivors; ultimately only nine were recovered from the rafts, and the body of one trainee. The rest clearly went down with the ship.

In the memorial service held in Bermuda Cathedral a week later, Bishop Ellison said: One of the ways in which the free spirit of man expresses itself most definitely is in the desire for adventure. It is part of man's very being that he longs to uncover the hidden , to know more about himself and his surroundings, to stretch out into the unknown; to find what lies on the other side of the mountain.

We here in Bermuda are very conscious of our debt to this questing spirit of man. For we attribute our very existence to that spirit so strong some four hundred years ago in England which drew men and women away from their comfortable homes to seek new worlds across the seas. It is the same spirit which compels people to achieve great things-to climb mountains, to discover new lands, to penetrate outer space, to create new artistic forms . And it is this spirit which inspires men to pit their skill and wits against the forces of nature, to learn the thrill of danger and the satisfaction of success. Man would not be man ifhe were merely an automaton . He becomes what God intends him to be ¡when he ventures forth upon the unknown and challenges the unpredictable.

Lost in the sinking of Marques was Susan Peterson Howell, ASTA's Chairman of Sail Training and Education who was acting as counselor for the nine trainees aboard.

Raised on the coast of Maine, Sue had a deep love for the sea . She sailed frequently with her parents , Murray and Susan Peterson, on schooners of her father's design-and in her own catboat , Frolicbecoming a fine sailor.

Sue graduated valedictorian of her class from Oak Grove School in 1964, having become an avid horseback rider while there. In 1968, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College (with a mathematics major) , married David S. Howell, and joined the staff of the Mystic Seaport Planetarium , becoming Associate Planetarium Director in 1981.

Many new programs at the Seaport Planetarium were brought to fruition through Sue's boundless energy and enthusiasm . She developed and taught courses in piloting and navigation , gave weekend seminars, and wrote and published a series of review problems in celestial navigation every two months for the past ten years . Sue wrote and published Practical Celestial Navigation, an excellent text with practice problems, revised and reprinted a limited edition ofWilliam Tyler Olcott's Field Book of the Skies, and wrote many articles for various publications.

She was also an invited speaker on navigation education at the National Conference on Navigation sponsored by the US Naval Academy and held at the War College in Newport, Rhode Island in 1980.

Sue is survived by her husband, David S. Howell; her three children: Heather (11), Kristen (8), and Timothy (6) ; her mother, Mrs. Murray Peterson; and three brothers: William , John, and Harry.

In addition to being a loving wife and mother, Sue managed her professional life with the highest integrity, enthusiasm and dedication. Although her accomplishments will live on far into the future, her presence with us will be sorely missed.

Donations may be made to the Susan P Howell Memorial Fund and mailed to Connecticut National Bank, 54 Ui'st Main Street, Mystic CT06355. This fund will be used to advance youth educational programs at Mystic Seaport and other nonprofit institutions.

29

SAIL TRAINING

R.H. JOHN CHART-AGENCT--~ Salutes the

Galveston Historical Foundation and the barque

Elissa

~

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Th e tall ships gathered in Quebec.from the left: Russia's Kruzenshtern , Portugal 's Sagres , Philadelphia sGazela, Poland$ Dar Mlodziezy, and the US Coast Guard 's Eagle. Photo by Norman Brouwer.

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1984 International Sail Training Races More than fifty sail training ships, with several hundred young trainees aboard , took part in the recent summer series. From St .

Malo, France, European entrants went on to Bermuda (where they were joined by a feeder race from San Juan , Puerto Rico) , and proceeded to Halifax (joined by a feeder race from Portsmouth , New Hampshire) .

From Halifax, the ships cruised in company to Quebec for the celebration of the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier's voyage of discovery up the St. Lawrence. Following the celebrations in Canada, a number of ships raced back across the Atlantic from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Liverpool , England .

Race IA-San Juan, Puerlo Rico to Hamilton, Bermuda: First to Finish : Marques, United Kingdom. First Overall on Corrected Time: Marques, United Kingdom. Winners in Class A- Division I: I-Simon Bolivar, Venezuela; 2-Belle Blonde, Canada. Winners in Class A-Division II:

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! Corporate Meeting of Members and Twelfth Annual Sail Training Conference U.S. Coast Guard Academy October 17-19, 1984 If you would like to be included, contact ASTA: Newport Harbor Center, 365 Thames Street, Newport, RI 02840 (or phone: 401/846-1775) .

30

I-Marques, United Kingdom; 2-Ciudad de Inca , United Kingdom; 3-0ur Svanen, United Kingdom. Winner Class B: I-Elinor, Denmark.

Race II-Hamilton, Bermuda to Halifax, N.S. First to Finish: Dasher, United Kingdom. First Overall on Corrected Time: Carola, West Germany. Winners in Class A-Division I: I-Dar Mlodziezy, Poland; 2-E.agle, USA; 3-Simon Bolivar, Venezuela. Winners in Class C-Division I: I- Carola, West Germany; 2-Swanrje , West Germany; 3-Tineke, Netherlands. Winners in Class C-Division II : I-Dasher , United Kingdom; 2-Christian ~nturer, Bermuda; 3-Flora , USSR. Race IIA-Porlsmouth, New Hampshire to Halifax, Nova Scotia First to Finish: Dulcinea, USA. First Overall on Corrected Time: Dulcinea, USA . Winner in Class C: Dulcinea , USA.

Great Lakes Races Twenty-four ships went on to take part in two races on Lake Ontario-the first International Sail Training Races ever held on the Great Lakes.

Race I-Toronto, Ontario to Rochester, N.Y. First to Finish: Providence, USA . First Overall on Corrected Time: Providence, USA. Winners in Class A-Div ision II: 1-Playfair, Canada; 2-Pathfinder, Canada; 3-Ciudad de Inca, United Kingdom. Winner in Class B: ZawisZJl Czarny, Poland. Winners in Class C: I-Providence, USA ; 2-Defiance, USA; 3-Joana I, Canada.

Rochester, New York to Kingston, Ontario First to Finish: Ubjewoda Pomorsld, Poland. First Overall on Corrected Tune: Defiance, USA. Wmners in Class A-Division Il: I-Play/air, Canada; 2- Pathfinder, Canada. Winner in Class B: ZawisZ11 Cmrny, Poland. Winners in Class C: I-Defiance, USA ; 2- Joana I, Canada; 3-Providemce, USA. .t SEA HISTDRY, FALL 1984

The Saga of Seattle's Virginia Y.

by Robert Chapel The Northwest region of this country has a strong maritime culture, but a generally dismal record of preserving its history.

Most ships of any historic value, such as the schooner C.A . Thayer or the tug Mary D. Hume , were long ago towed away to grace other ports. Eventually Puget Sound was left with the cod-fishing schooner Wawona and the little steamer Virginia V. In a future issue we look at plans for the Wawona, whose tale has been told in SH21 , 22 and 25.

For now let's look at the sole success story in northwest ship preservation: the Virginia V and the people behind her progress.

The Virginia V was built in 1922, at the end of the era of Mosquito Fleet steamers.

These handy little vessels were the predominant mode of transportation on Puget Sound , as well as the fastest, in the years before the automobile. Villages sprang up wherever the steamboats stopped to pick up farm products , lumber and fish , as well as passengers. Where these villages were on good harbors they grew to be cities.

Captain Nels Christensen began the West Pass Transportation Co. with the launch Virginia Merrill and continued to name his boats Virgina , referring to them as the III, JV and the Virginia V. The V was built on a beach on the Kitsap peninsula by Matt Anderson, with the best of the region's old growth Douglas fir, and lots of it. (Her garboard is llOft long, without a scarph.) She is 125ft long by 24ft in beam . The engine which still powers her today was built in 1906 and was used in the Iv. It's of the triple expansion type, producing 400 IHP. She's oil fired with a Stoddert water tube boiler producing 200 PSI. For 17 years she shuttled between Seattle and Tacoma, making thirteen stops at tiny communities enroute. In 1931 she added a midday express trip between the two cities, averaging 45,800 miles annually. But by 1939 the heyday of steamers was at an end.

She found it increasingly hard to compete with trucks and cars which now had miles of good roads to travel . A brief time running between Portland and Astoria on the Columbia River ended in bankruptcy.

Back on Puget Sound she ran between Seattle and Tacoma again and later was used as an excurison boat, a trade she has since followed under several owners. She has always been a very popular little ship, a fact no doubt responsible for her continued existence.

In 1977 when herowners decided to sell, there were enough people that wanted to see her saved to put together a foundation and raise the money to buy her. The Spaulding family was part of this group. Peggy Spaulding, who as a young girl often rode the Virginia V to her family's summer cabin, was the first President and was reSEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

sponsible for raising the money needed to gain control of the ship's future. In 1979 her husband Phil Spaulding became President.

Phil is a graduate naval architect and President ofNickum and Spaulding, an old-line marine design firm in Seattle. Phil was responsible for the design of the modern ferries for Washington State, Alaska , and British Columbia. In 1938, while working for Carl Nordstrom, he measured the Virgina V and drew her plans for the US Steamboat Inspection Service. In his youth he too had boarded the ship-to woo Peggy at her summer place.

The ship had been poorly maintained for years due to scanty funds. The Foundation has since completed extensive repairs to the hull, including a new stem and planking, as well as a complete boiler overhaul and machinery rebuilding. Much of the work has been necessary to maintain her Coast Guard certificate to carry passengers-no little thing for a 62 year-old wooden vessel powered by steam!

Perhaps Phil Spaulding's greatest contribution has been to keep the ship alive and operating. He says: "Wooden vessels cannot be laid up-they must be kept alive and continually husbanded ."

Doing all this has taken money. The Foundation's main source has been charters and excursions. This operating income has gone to pay the crew, buy fuel and cover maintenance and repairs, but restoration funds must come from donations. Spaulding says, however, that the ship has never been operated to her potential due to insufficient expertise in marketing and promotion. He also believes in membership, and under his direction the foundation has grown from 160 to 900 members. The effect of these members is considerable, not only in fundraising , but in volunteer energy and encouragement to doers. Phil laid down the presidency of the Foundation in December but continues to get things done when they need doing. His ability to focus on a problem and stick to it until completed has been vital to the steamer's success.

Taking over as President this year is Merle Adlum , who has been a Trustee for five years. Adlum went to sea in 1936, joining the Navy and serving aboard the Oklahoma. He earned his Master's ticket on inland waters, working for a time on the Virginia V During the war he went offshore, and then in 1954 he went into the Masters, Mates and Pilots Local #6 as assistant business agent. Later he served for 19 years as Commissioner for the Port of Seattle.

His goals are to pay off the vessel's bank loan and continue her restoration while keeping her alive and operating. And he notes: "If the Spauldings hadn't raised the

"Wooden vessels .. . must be kept alive and continually husbanded," says Phil Spaulding, naval architect and designer of modern ferries, seen here in the steamer's wheel house. He served as president of the Steamer Virginia V Foundation from 1919-1984.

first $35,000, we wouldn't have her today."

The Steamer Virginia V Foundation has been lucky to have had leadership by people familiar with ships and the sea. And she has been kept working, carrying lots of people and earning income. When she gets underway her steam whistle is heard echoing through the canyons of office towers, an emphatic reminder of her presence. .t

Mr. Chapel is the Secretary ofthe Traditional Wooden Boat Society, and editor of its journal Lines and OftSets. Contributions and inquiries may be sent to The Steamer Virginia V Foundation, Inc., Maritime Building, 911 Western Ave., Seattle Wt 98104.

31

SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT EUROPE On Italy's Adriatic coast between Ravenna and Rimi ni , a collection of eight sailing craft is fu lly restored and afl oat with individually adorned sails at the Cesenatico Maritime M useum. An important harbor since the 13th century, Cesenatico was host to a rich profusion of Adriatic fishing and tradi ng craft, each with its own geographi c distribution and modu s vivendi . Not only the vessels but the cultures that flourished aboard are being studied ; one at least used symbols pre-dating the Roman alphabet. And of the bragozzo, a 3- to 5-man schooner-rigged Chioggian boat rigged with the vele al terzo (a fourcornered lugsail which replaced the prevalent lateen) , Professor Siro Ricca Rossell ini notes : "The older hands commanded great respect and in bad weather would come up on deck, givi ng wise orders." The effect of th is is onl y slightly undone by the ensuing observation: "When they were in harbor, the Chioggian men mended their nets, dried cuttlefish, made polenta and squabbled incessantly." The professor also writes of the hot competition with which the boats were sailed , and the warmth with which they are remembered , as noted in " Editor's Log" th is issue. Thi s comes fro m an illustrated report in the May issue of 1he Mariner's Mirror, National Maritime Museum, London SEIO9NF England.

Tim Severin has now completed his re-enactment of the Black Sea voyage of Jason's AfXoa voyage once thought to be mythical but latterly fou nd to match ancient Greek patterns of mar itime trade. It is also reported that the Greek government is undertaki ng to bu ild a trireme of classic antiquity. We hope to report further on both these ventures, and also on recent archaeological discoveries of the era of ancient galley wa rfare conducted by the Haifa Mariti me Mu seum .

GREAT BRITAIN It is reckoned that one Museum a fo rtnight is being opened in Britain currently. As this column has noted , maritime mu seums represent a fa ir proportion of these. The new Aberdeen Maritime Museum opened in Provost Ross's House in Ship Row on April 26. Displays explain the contribution of maritime activities to this area of Northeast Scotland , once well known as a center fo r the fi shing industry, and now prominent in the offshore oil trade. Exhibits range from a replica 19th century shipowner's office to a re-creation of hand rivetting the plates of a vessel under construction.

An area of England somewhat out on a limb is West Cumbria, in the northwest , where the old ports of Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport and Silloth hold much of interest. At Whitehaven the steam dredger Clearway built (1927) still operates. At Maryport there is a collection of

hi storic vessels, mostly owned by the Treloar family, and recently moved there from the Tyne.

The two wet docks, dating fro m 1857 and 1884, are now open to the tide. The Treloar vessels lie in the earlier Elizabeth Dock and they incl ude one of the Kaiser Wilhelm's steam yachts , Schar-

horn (above left) ; the S.T. Goliath , once the Empire Tessa of 1946 ; and the S.T. Chipchase , a modern vessel dating from 1953, which operated at Seaham Harbour until ca. 1980. A Clyde puffer, now motorized I believe, the Lady Morven was also present ,¡ as was one of the Admiralty variants on the puffers, the VICtwo very attractive steam vessels. Silloth , the most northerly port , still has a traffi c in grai n, but these little outports are quiet compared to what they were in the last centu ry. All the dock installations at these harbors are of hi sto ric interest and their history is available (see Industrial Archaeology of the Lake Counties : Marshall & Davies-Shiel).

Canal over the Ship Canal, is sti ll operatio nal.

Passenger trips are occasionally operated.

The M erseyside Maritime Museum was host to the Tall Ships Race August 1-4. One aspect of the celebrations was a ceremonial unloading of a cargo of cotton carried by the Polish full -rigged ship Dar Mlodzi ezy-a re-enactment of the shipment 200 years ago of the fi rst cotton fro m America to Brita in . The eight bales and three bags continued by canal and cart to the Styal Mill near Mancheste r. Along the Ship Canal to Runcorn , the cotto n traveled in the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum's steam vessel Basuto.

The Humber Keel & Sloop Preservation Society report an acti ve seaso n with their two sail ing vessels. They are rebuilding their two cogboats, 14ft clinker-built boats used as tenders to handle warps, etc. , under sail o r sculled with a si ngle oar. Mention was made in a previous issue of the discovery of the hull of a Norfolk keel sunk since 1890. Considerable interest has been aroused and an archaeological diving team has helped shape pl ans fo r recovering the hull and mov ing it to a safe underwater store. Any reader fee ling he might have a practi cal co ntribution to make, either in terms of fin ance or with conservation experti se is invi ted to contact Major J.A . Forsythe th rough the World Ship Tru st.

There is a further attempt to restore the paddle steamer M edway Queen, bu ilt in 1924, which served as a pl easu re steamer on the Thames and Medway until 1963. She gained fame for her war service, when she acted as a mine sweeper, and the Dunkirk evacuaton; she made seven trips to the beaches and rescued over 7,000 men. Since then she has become a rather run-dow n part of a marina on the Medina River accompanied by the Southern Ra il way paddler Ryde. Now, however, the Medway Queen Trust plan to restore her as a museum ship on the River Medway.

On a week's holiday in the West Highlands of Scotland, a variety of craft were found , carrying passengers th rough some of earth's most storied and picturesque scenery. Most famous is the paddl e steamer l#lverly (1947) , whi ch offers regul ar cruises in the Firth of Clyde. A surpri sing number of scheduled services operate both around the coast and on inland lochs. One of the most famous is now but a sad tale. The last paddle steamer built in Britain, the Maid ofLach (1953) is now acting as a floating landing stage at Ball och Pier on Loch Lomond , giving access to the much smaller motor vessel Countess Fiona. Owned and operated by brewers Ind Coope, she will take you to Inversnaid and back-a fi ve ho ur crui se.

Ninety years ago, the Manchester Ship Canal was opened . Built to take 12 ,500 ton ships, it became a feature of the age. However the last ten years have seen a drastic decl ine in usage, and the closure of all but the bottom 13 miles to Runcorn of the 36-mile canal has been announced for 1987, when the Manchester sludge carriers will be replaced by a pipeline. It will be interesting to see what new future can be fo und fo r the canal and docks. The waterway still retains much of the original hydraulic machinery at bridges and locks. The fa mous Barton Swing Aquaduct, carry ing the pioneer Bridgewater

On Loch Lomond's neighbour, Loch Katrine, the Denny built screw steamer Sir Walter Scott (1900) gives two trips a day the length of the lake.

As fo r Clyde puffers, two steaming examples were tracked down. The Admiralty des ign VIC 32 spends much of the year berthed in or working fro m the C rinan Canal . Hav ing been aboard her, I can imagi ne a week's c ruise around the Firth of Clyde to be of immense interest with plenty of scope fo r wielding a shovel. Write: Ni ck Walker, SS VIC 32, CRINAN , Lochgilphead , Argy ll , PA3 1 8SR , Scotland.

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32

SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

& MUSEUM NEWS The puffer Auld Reekie was berthed at the opposite end of the canal, when I was there, and 30 miles to the north , a now dieselized puffer, the Eilean Eisdale was berthed in the harbor of that name. With their short, tubby flat-bottomed hulls, these boats exude instant charm. They were immortalized in the Ealing Comedy film "Whisky Galore." The puffer used in that , christened the Vital Spark , may be seen, I was told , as a hulk at the Bowling Basin of the Forth & Clyde Canal.

The last "full-blooded" British aircraft carrier, HMS Hermes, laid down during World War II in 1944, but not commissioned until 1959, has gone into reserve and a letter from Adrian Wilkinson has appeared in Ships Monthly calling for her preservation . "I, for one, would not want to see the British carrier disappear like the British battleship, without a fitting memorial ,'' he says, noting that the veteran warship was indispensable to British victory in the battle forthe Falklands in 1982.

The remains of one of200 people found in the hull of the Mary Rose (sunk off Portsmouth in 1545; see SH23) were interred at the Royal Naval Hospital , overlooking the waters where they sailed and died. The mass was sung to music by John Taverner, who also died in 1545. "Most of them did the best they could , according to what they knew and believed ,'' said London columnist Gynne Dyer, "and we owe ihem all that we have."

Finally a recommendation to travel the Loch Nevis mail boat serv ice. Few places in mainland Britain, lacking road access, depend on a mail boat for provisions, mail and supplies. Running on Mondays and Fridays from Mallaig all year, the Western Isles, a wooden hull of fishing vessel style, maintains this essential service. The threehour voyage takes one to the isolated Knoydart peninsula and up Loch Nevis surrounded by precipitous mountains. For a feeling of water and land at its most remote within Britain, this service will take one to a settlement whose one house is the Post Office, and through narrows whose tidal rip reduces the vessel to a walking pace.

ERRATUM: In SH32, two costs given in$ should read£.

ROBERT FORSYTHE

Information and photos should be sent to Mr. Forsythe at 129A North St., Burwell, Cams, CB5, OBB, Great Britain.

SOUTH AMERICA The Fifth Annual Conference on Nautical and Hydrographic History, concentrating on the period 1780-1880, will take place October 8-12 at the Naval and Oceanographic Museum of Rio. This is organized by the General Documentation Service of the Brazilian Navy in honor of the Museum's IOOth anniversary. Inquiries: Captain Max Juso Guedes, Serico de Documentacao Geral da Marinha , Rua Dom Manuel , 15-Centro, 20010-Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brazil.

SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

UNITED STATES & CANADA The National Trust for Historic Preservation will hold its Third National Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore, October 24-27, as part of the 38th National Preservation Conference.

An interesting series of objectives and priorities developed by the Maritime Heritage Task Force, under the direction of J. Revell Carr, Director of Mystic Seaport Museum , will be presented , in the context of what Maritime Preservation Director Peter Neill calls "a working conference wherein your ideas can be heard." For some of Neill 's ideas, see page 4. To make sure your ideas are heard-and to receive a draft copy of the task force report-write Maritime Heritage Conference, National Trust, 1785 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036.

Part of the National Trust's maritime heritage program is a far-ranging survey of the condition of historic ships in the United States, and their probable needs for survival. This needed project is being conducted by White Elephant Management , a group whose people acquired their experience working in South Street Seaport Museum and the National Maritime Museum, San Francisco, and who restored the bark Elissa to sailing condition as the cu lmination of one of this century's most important ship saves. Anyone interested in the survey or the Elephant's work should write: White Elephant Management , 2104 Strand, PO 1049, Galveston TX 77553; tel: 713 762-8555.

Legislation giving states "the right to manage cultural as well as natural resources on their submerged lands," as the Preservation Coordinating Committee rather elegantly puts it, is in trouble in the Congress despite support by Reagan Administration officials, who have testified to the priceless public values at stake in shipwrecks on the seabed along our shores.

Permitting their spoilation by treasure-seekers is analagous to burning the Alexandria library (which cost us the lost plays of Sophocles, among others). You are invited immediately to ask your Congressman to urge House Speaker Tip O'Neill to permit the HR 3194 to come to a vote in this session-and to ask your senators to press favorable action on S 1504. Committee, 1785 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036.

The loss of the Marques (see p. 33) reminds us that the sea remains an unforgiving medium . Lloyd 's Register of Shipping reports 97 vessels of 100 tons or over lost in the final three months of last year, the average ship lost being over 330 tons . Every day, in some corner of the world 's oceans, a ship goes down.

Captain Manny Sousa , USN, Deputy Director of the Naval Historical Center, seeks a World War II carrier aircraft for the Navy Memorial Museum in the Washington Navy Yard. The Museum has been expanding its installations and educational program , and visitation is running three times the level of previous years, aided by the presence of the destroyer Barry (DD 933) on the waterfront nearby. Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard, Bldg. 57, Washington DC 20374; tel: 202 433-2379/2553.

SHIPS THAT SAIL: The Pride of Baltimore (above), "another in the series" of Baltimore clippers that but for her would have gone extinct generations back, has undergone extensive refit since returning from her epic West Coast tour and is planning a 20-month goodwill voyage to 28 ports in Europe in 1985-86. She is shown, above stretching a stuns'! in California waters last year. • The graceful bark Elissa of 1877, having survived ramming by a floating drydock barge while she was peacefully in her berth in Galveston , will go out day-sailing in mid-October with supporters in crew. • And the Star of India, stalwart iron bark of 1863 at the San Diego Maritime Museum , plans to go sailing under her Captain Carl G. Bowman in November. • The sailings of the barkentines Regina Maris of Gloucester and Gaze/a of Philadelphia is noted elsewhere in these pages.

"Conference 84,'' a conclave of ship modelers and historians sponsored by the Nautical Research Guild in cooperation with Manitowoc Maritime Museum and Nautical Research and Model Ship Society will be held at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, October 19-21. Program includes tours of the submarine Cobia and the Museum (including film showings) on October 19, with technical and historical lectures and round table discussions on the next two days.

Conference 84, D.K. McCalip, 6849 S. Keeler Ave. , Chicago, IL 60629.

The International Sail Training Races brought an unusual number of foreign Tall Ships to North America: West Germany's Gorch Fock, Brazil's Cisne Branco calling at Boston in June, while Simon Bolivar of Venezuela visited Newport on her way back from Quebec, and the Argentine Libertad visited San Juan , Boston and Quebec later in the summer, though she was not able to take part in the sail training races.

The schooner Western Union, newly refitted by her new owners, YisionQuest , sailed from Philadelphia to take part in some of the program, as did the barkentine Gaze/a ofPhiladelphia, as the Grand Banks fishing vessel Gaze/a Primeiro has now been renamed . While the United States has lagged behind South American and both West and East European nations in sending major sail training ships to sea, it is good to report the launching this spring of two historic schooners to Melbourne Smith's design, the Spirit ofMassachusetts in Boston and the Californian in San Diego. Melbourne's dream of course is to build a full scale sailing replica of the China clipper Sea Witch-a project warmly supported by the National Society and American Ship Trust (SH30:22-3; 13:19).

33

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The barkentine Regina Maris, having undergone extensive refit, continued her explorations of marine life on Georges Bank, Jeffries Ledge and other traditional fishing grounds off the New England coast this summer. The hard-working ship, which has traveled from Alaska to Greenland seeking out the ways of the surviving whales, offers a $25 individual, $50 family membership to support the ship's sailing. Members can go on a daysail , and are kept in touch through the Ocean Research and Education Society's wonderfully salty, on-deck newsletter.

ORES, 19 Harbor Loop, Gloucester MA 01930.

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Wouldn't you love to build this ! historic ship model? It's a true-toscale, 21" replica of the 2-masted schooner Swift, a Virginia pilot boat of 1805. Well, now you can! And you don't have to be a skilled craftsman to do so.

A cornucopia oflighthouse and lightship lore is conveyed the newsletter of the Shore Village Museum in Maine. During an exhibition on lightships this summer, the Museum was visited by the Nantucket ll. The collection comes from all over, tying together the efforts of aficionados across the nation. Museum, 104 Limerock St., Rockland ME 04841 ; tel : 2ITT 594-4950.

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Quality you can see and feel The materials in our kit may be better than those used in the original Swift. The keel section and frames are pre-cut plywood, ready for quick assembly. The Swift's hull is planked twice; once with thick, flexible limewood for strength, then overlaid with planks of African walnut for lasting beauty.

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On July 28 the Rockport Apprenticeshop, led by the redoubtable Lance and Dorothy Lee launched the healthy, bouncing Prospect Marsh

·t pinky schooner Perseverance-aptly named for one of the Yankee virtues the Shop teaches, and forthe spirit of the founders, who are doing well in their new location. They have also launched a West Coast shop and a magnificent journal, The Apprentice, which records all kinds of first hand experiences in boats, from Brazilianjangadas to the Tancook whalers of Nova Scotia. The drawings alone are worth walking a mile for, particularly in the recent No. 3, sumptuous annotated wash drawings of the Eliboubane, a Paimpol built Breton fishing lugger. Rockport Apprenticeshop, PO 534, Rockport ME 04856; tel: 2CJ7 236-9646.

Mystic Seaport Museum sponsors the Fourth Annual Symposium on Southern New England Maritime History on November 3 at the Seamen's Inne. The program includes Fred Calabretta on Captain George Comer, an East Haddam whaleman and anthropologist who lived among the Eskimos, Edward Wanton Smith Jr. on the Jamestown-Newport Ferry, 1871-1969, Brenda 0. Milkofsky on an overview of Connecticut River shipbuilding in the 19th century, National Society Trustee Norman Brouwer on New York Harbor working craft of the past, and Dr. Randolph Bartlett on the career of Lorenzow Dow Baker, of Well fleet, a Cape Cod fisherman who went into the Caribbean fruit trade.

Symposium , Museum , Mystic CT 06355; tel.

203 572-ITTll.

C ity

State Zip I Fairfield, N.J. 07007 ~--------~----------------------------.J

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS Inviting patrons to cruise "channels and backwaters so obscure that the charm and beauty of their quiet waters remain unknown to all except those who live and work on the banks," Coastwise Cruise Line announces inauguration of a variety of cruises aboard their new, traditionally

configured Pilgrim Belle. Line, PO 1630, 36 Ocean St., Hyannis MA 02601. And, as noted in "Letters," in Connecticut the Out o' Mystic Schooner Fleet has added the Mystic Clipper,

a 90ft (on deck) centerboard schooner, built in 1983 to National Society Advisor Charles Wittholz's design , a rakish and somewhat fuster craft than the well known Mystic Whaler that they have been sailing these past 17 years. P.J. Matthews, President of this enterprising outfit, is a strong advocate and supporter of the maritime heritage.

Outo' Mystic, 7 Holmes St., MysticCT06355 ; tel : 203 536-4218.

The Whaling Museum at Cold Spring Harbor, New York , continues its lively public interpretive program under Director Robert Farwell, formerly of Mystic. October's events include, on the 7th, "The White Dawn", a film of three seamen separated from their ship in the Arctic hunting polar bear and walrus; on the 12th, a walking tour of the old whaling village, and on the 21st, a presentation of the history of scrimshaw by Richard Malley, author of " Engraved by the Fishermen Themselves."

Museum , Main St. , Cold Spring Harbor NY ll724; tel: 516 367-3418.

John B. Ricker, Jr. , former Chairman of the Continental Corporation, has succeeded James R. Shepley as Chairman of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York. The real estate development arrangements for the historic district having at length been completed a decade after the Museum's founding chairman, Jakob lsbrandtsen, bought the land for the Museum; the first priority becomes the task of museumbuilding. "It's fascinating ," says Chairman Ricker, "to have the Museum retain and preserve the background and knowledge of the area and the activity that made New York glorious." The Museum conducts livt(ly tours of historic buildings and ships and the Fulton Fish Market.

There'll be Fisheries Weekends September 22-23, and 29-30, and October 6-8, and Working Boats of the Harbor October 13-14 and 20-21, and the Schooner Race for the Mayor's Cup on September 29. Museum, 207 Front St., New York NY 10038; tel: 669-9400.

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

A few blocks further south, at Gouverneur Lane and Front Street , Revolutionary War wharves have been uncovered, the newly uncovered cribbing showing axe marks as crisp and fresh as though the great trees had been felled only last week. A little fleet of casually whittled model boats also came to light in this dig, which is sponsored by the British developer Howard Ronson, who also covered costs of recovering the remains of the Ronson ship further north last year (SH28). The archaeological project is led

by Diana Wall, Greenhouse Consultants, 50 Trinity Place, New York NY 10006; tel: 212 943-5873.

The Calvert Marine Museum opened its new boat basin, first phase of a major new program to expand the Museum's facilities, in May, and in July opened a new J.C. Lore Oyster exhibit.

Along with its slightly older cousin, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, across the Bay on the Eastern Shore at St. Michael's, this can-do outfit, established in 1970, is doing much to conserve Bay history and artifacts and open the Bay heritage to people. A fine newsletter, Bugeye Times, is sent to members. Museum, PO 97, Solomons MD l 20688; tel: 301 326-3719.

WEST COAST "Shipwrecks of the Golden Gate;' an exhibit exploring the rich treasury of wrecks buried in the beaches around the entrance to San Francisco Bay, opened in July at the National Maritime Museum, SF, and will remain open through November, 10AM-6PM, seven days a week, admission is free. Park Archaeologists, led by Martin Mayer with historian James Delgardo, report that of 327 vessels wrecked off the Golden Gate or inside the Bay since 1595, 96 stranded in waters now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area-a National Park whose holdings in San Francisco include the National Maritime Museum and its collection of historic ships. The wrecks include the

schooner Reporter, which went ashore in 1902 virtually on top of the bones of the medium clipper King Philip, built in 1856 and lost in 1878. Museum, foot of Polk St., San Francisco CA 94109.

The yacht Potomac, built in Wisconsin in 1934 as the Coast Guard patrol boat Electra, was used

by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a floating White House from 1936 to 1945. She is now subject of a national campaign to restore the ship "for use as a floating classroom and museum of the Roosevelt era," according to Bruce Seaton,

President of American President Lines, who heads the restoration committee. Presidential Yacht Potomac, 77 Jack London Sq ., Oakland CA 9470 94697.

Recognizing the need for a repository for the history of the port of Vancouver, the Vancouver Port Corporation's general manager Erik W. Tofsrud is moving to set up "at least the beginning" of a museum with archives and an information center. This news from that admirable publication Harbour & Shipping, (estab. 1918) , C310 Marine Building, 355 Burrard St., Vancouver BC V6C 2G6, Canada; tel : 604 685-4385.

QUERIES During World War II, were there three women's volunteer groups that knitted warm clothing for merchant seamen? Did such groups gather in each other's homes where wives and mothers brought in their work? Mrs. E.H. Hartge, 490 Lakeshore Drive, Eustis, Florida 3m6.

Information, including pictures if possible, is sought on the famous Cunarder lvernia (1900)

by Carol L. Johnson, 527 W. Redwing Street, Duluth , Minnesota 55803.

Information is sought on the Danish ship Norge (1881), operated by the Gunnar Line, which was wrecked with heavy loss oflife near Rockall Reef near Scotland, on passage toward New York , June 28, 1904. Verna Anderson Goeddertz, 650 Cotterell Drive, Boise, Idaho 83709.

Information on Samuel Poorman, ship's carpenter in the US Navy, ¡who served on board the frigate Cumberland and war sloop Plymouth 1842-1847 is sought by Arthur L. Thomas, 20 Brookside Drive 3D, Greenwich , CT 06830.

Information is sought on the vessel and captain in this inscription found on a whale's tooth: "Ship Mercury. Captain Daniel Jordan. Green Park 1862-70." Clyde L. Tinklepaugh, Jr., 1305 Elson Rd. , Brookhaven PA 19015.

"One of the key maritime happenings of the 19th century was the establishment, by an Act of Congress, of the post of Shipping Commissioner for leading ports, including New York, in 1872."

John E. Duncan's inquiry centers on this office, which was held by his great grandfuther, Captain Charles C. Duncan, from the establishment of the post until 1884, when Elihu Root kicked him out. Duncan was quite a man: "He had earlier operated a shipping brokerage office on Wall Street, and in 1867 captained the ship Quaker City on an expedition to the Holy Land, made famous by a profane and intemperate young passenger/reporter named Samuel Clemens'~in his Inno cents Abroad! Duncan's conduct of his office was supported by the Seamen's Church Institute and many seamen, and attacked by Clemens (Mark Twain) and shipowners. But it's not heroes and villains that our Duncan is after; rather a sense of how the office worked , from people who know the period and literature. John E. Duncan, 10 Socha Lane, Scotia NY 12302. .i,

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MARINE ART NEWS Now that we have seen the exhibition of Milton Burns's work at the Schaefer Gallery at Mystic Seaport Museum, we urge all hands to tum out and see this marvellous stuff. The show moves on to Smith Gallery in New York in September. An illustrated catalog of the exhibition is available for $6. 50 (ppd.) from Mystic Seaport Museum Stores, Mystic CT 06355, or Smith Gallery , 1045 Madison Avenue, New York , NY 10021.

A richly varied exhibition at the Peabody Museum, The New England Fisheries includes a handsome catalog, available for $15 from Peabody Museum of Salem, East India Square, Salem, MA 01970.

"Tribute to John A. Noble (19131983) " went on exhibition at Mystic Maritime Gallery, August 18-September 5.

This is a special feature of '' Coastwise,'' a changing exhibition of contemporary marine art. The work of the marine watercolor painter Steven Cryan is on exhibit at the Hudson River Maritime Center's gallery in Kingston, New York from August 4 through September. John Stobart is expected to have a major exhibit in Wunderlich Gallery, in New York City, this autumn. In Seattle, Kirsten Gallery's 10th Annual Northwest Marine Exhibition is being held July IS-September 15.

A boxed three-volume catalog, "The Willem Van de Velde Drawings in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum , Rotterdam," is offered by the Museum , Eendrachtsweg 21, 3012 LB Rotterdam , Netherlands, at D.fl. 750 (about $230 or £160).

John Chancellor John Chancellor, distinguished British marine artist and former seafarer who survived two torpedoings in World War II , died suddenly at his home in Brixham on April 9 , at the age of 59 . " He was gentle by nature," says Dr. Alan McGowan, Head of the Department of Ships at the National Maritime Museum, going on to describe him as "a man of considerable humor and sensitivity who always had an air of amused disbelief in his own success as a painter.'' An interest he shared with the American artist and writer Lois Darling was the design of Darwin's Beagle; his painting of the vessel appears on the cover of Darling's study "HMS Beagle, 18201870," recently published by the National Society .

Robert 0. Skemp Robert Skemp, a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists , who lived in Westport, Connecticut and commuted by boat to a summer home in Amagansett, Long Island, was killed in an automobile accident in June. He will be sorely missed.

An appreciation of his life and work will PS appear in a future SEA HISTORY .

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

MARINE ART by PAUL McGEHEE

"NANTUCKET'', a limited-edition of 950 prints by the noted marine artist PAUL McGEHEE. Available signed and numbered for $100, or with artist's remarque for $150. Please include $5 shipping. Depicted is the entrance to the famous whaling port's harbor in 1908. The steamer "Nantucket'', built in 1886, is shown passing the Brant Point lighthouse, erected in 1901 and still standing . A Paul McGehee print is not only a piece of fine art , but a historically accurate window to the past.

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Sailing Adventures SCHOONER HARVEY GAMAGE a 95' windjammer in true "down East" tradition U.S. Coast Guard inspected

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MARINE ART

Artist Historians of the American Northwest

by John Frazier Henry In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, venturesome men spent years surveying the coast of the Pacific Northwest, recording the region and its inhabitants, and sometimes making, or losing, fortunes in trade. The legacy of their adventures exists in their journal and logbook descriptions and in the drawings, paintings, and charts of the previously unrecorded coastline-the Northwest Coast of North America as seen through the eyes of its first maritime explorers.

Had it not been for a four- to five-foot long, furry, amphibious creature of the Northwest Coast, these voyages might not have been made. To its great misfortune and near extinction, the sea otter (Enhydra lutris) was insulated against the frigid waters of the North Pacific by a deep, soft, lustrous brownish-black fur that was fated to arouse the greed of man.

Survivors of the Russian Bering voyage of 1741 along the Aleutian chain of islands to the American mainland brought home not only skins of the sea otter, but descriptions of islands whose beaches and waters teemed with these animals. The reports soon resulted in a great movement of Russian traders and hunters toward the North American coast, to harvest the riches of this fur.

Similarly, when reports of the value of sea otter skins sold in China by members of the Cook expedition reached the shrewd merchants of England and the United States, the result was a growing number of fur-trading vessels bound for the Northwest Coast. Later, the traders were followed by official voyages of exploration and survey to establish claims of national sovereignty.

Not all voyages of exploration included artists, although in the period before the invention of photography, the failure to utilize this resource would today seem tantamount to moon exploration without cameras. The three voyages captained by James Cook all had skilled professional artists, while Vancouver's voyage had no

one officially assigned to that duty. Fortunately for posterity, Vancouver recognized the lack: "It was with infinite satisfaction that I saw, amongst the officers and young gentlemen of the quarterdeck, some who, with little instruction, would soon be enabled to ... draw landscapes, make faithful portraits of the several headlands, coasts, and countries, which we might discouver...without the assistance of professional persons." He was able to persuade the Admiralty to include a supply of drawing materials.

It was a rare fur-trade voyage that produced drawings as a byproduct of the collection of furs. A notable exception was the second voyage in 1790 of the Columbia under Captain Robert Gray.

He enlisted twenty-two-year-old George Davidson, a housepainter with some artistic ability, with the expectation of obtaining a visual record of the voyage.

Some of the most valuable drawings were produced by men not motivated by an official directive, who possessed the ability and incentive to portray scenes which stimulated their imaginations.

Jose Cardero, a cabin boy on the Malaspina voyage of 1791, for example, apparently had no formal training in art, but possessed native ability coupled with an urge to draw.

Ship's officers who had taken formal training in navigational schools also received instruction in drawing, enabling them to produce some exquisite coastal profiles. An appreciation for skill in drawing by seamen was one of the major reasons for establishing a drawing school in 1693 at Christ's Hospital in Sussex, England.

The drawing school was part of the school of mathematics, training boys for the Royal Navy and the merchant marine. Drawing masters placed primary emphasis on sketching seaviews and coastal profiles, which helped raise the standard of draftsmanship in the navy.

Other countries also recognized the importance of such training.

Peter the Great established a school of navigation and mathematics in Russia early in 1701.

Harbour ofSt. Paul in the Island ofCadiak , 1805, a color lithograph based on a drawing by furi Lisianskii. "The settlement consists ofabout thirty buildings, the principal among which are the church, the barracks, the compting-house, the warehouses, the houses. of the director and the clergyman, the school, and the shops of the handicraft workers: at a little distance are to be seen the habitations of the Aleutians" (Lisianskii voyage). Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.

38

SEA HIS'IDRY, FALL 1984

HMS Blossom's barge leaving Point Barrow, 1826, by William Smyth. After a hostile reception, the barge continued south along the shore, passing several villages. At one place, "nineteen ofthe natives came down opposite us, armed with bows, arrows and spears, and imagining that it was our intention to land, motioned us to keep off, and seemed quite prepared for hostilities. Notwithstanding this show of resistance, we still advanced nearer to the shore, as being more out of the current ... at the same time having the arms in readiness in case ofan attack. When within about thirty yards ofthe beach, we lost the wind and continued pulling and towing along shore, the natives walking abreast of us on the beach" (Smyth's account, Beechey narrative).

View of Pori Desengafio (Disenchantment Bay), 1791. This is an "improved" version ofa drawing by Jose Cardero,. The ships entered this bay from Port Mulgrave by a passage through a mountain range.first thought to be the fabled Northwest Passage. Before leaving, the explorers "left enclosed in a bottle, together with the inscription of our survey, the date of which we had taken possession in the name of his Majesty, proved by a coin buried at the side ofthe bottle" (Malaspina voyage). Courtesy Museum of New Mexico and Museo Naval, Madrid.

MARINE ART

View ofthe Port des Fram;ais , 1786, by Gaspard Duche de Uincy. A survey party is on the beach at the left, setting up a marker. Small ice floes , broken off the glacier in the distance, are floating to the right. The Astrolabe at right bears a windmill on the stem. This came about through the urging of "the superintendents ofthe victualing department, persuaded that kilndried com would keep better than flour or biscuit, had proposed to us to take on board a large quantity." Courtesy Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.

A View in Ship Cove, Nootkn Sound, 1778, by John Webber. "We had every day new Visitors, who generally came in large boats & apparently from some distance. On their arrival they always perform'd what seem'd a necessary ceremony, which was pulling & making a circuit round both Ships with great swiftness, & their Paddles kept in exact time; one man would stand up in the middle with a Spear or rattle in his hand, & a mask on which was sometimes the figure of a human face, at others that of an Animal, & kept repeating something in a loud tone; At other times they would all join in a Song , that was frequently very Agreeable to the E.ar, after this they always came alongside & began to trade without Ceremony" (King's journal in Beaglehole, Cook's last voyage). Courtesy The British Library, London.

Prior to the departure of an official voyage of exploration detailed instructions were issued by the government, covering every aspect of its expectations. Orders to La Perouse in 1785, for example, stated that the "draughtsmen" were to sketch "all the views of the land, and the remarkable situations, portraits of the natives of the different countries, their manner of dress, their ceremonies, their pastimes, their edifices, their vessels, and all the production of the earth and of the sea."

The need for accuracy might be stressed, although it could be reasonably expected that an experienced artist would conscientiously render faithful images. Perhaps for this reason artistic specifications for the Billings Russian expedition of 1787-92 were cursory, almost an afterthought: "You are likewise to make ...drawings of the most curious productions of nature ... and take views of the coast and remarkable objects."

For the Staniukovich voyage of 1826-29, the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts set forth standards: the artist was to strive for accuracy, avoid drawing only from memory, and shun the embellishment of what he saw.

After the voyages had ended, some artists, and perhaps most, produced copies of their drawings, either as gifts for friends and shipmates, or for sale. These later versions differ in various degrees from the originals. John Webber was one professional artist who produced income for years by selling copies. Amateur George Davidson made an unknown number of copies, usually no two the same, so that it is impossible to know which version is the most faithful to the original scene.

The engravers of the drawings done on the Vancouver voyage included some of the finest in Britain. In preparation for the work of engraving, the sketches were redrawn by William Alexander.

Some changes were made in drawings used to illustrate the text, presumably for human interest, and probably on Admiralty instructions. One drawing by Humphrys done near Port Dick, which contained no native craft in the original, was reproduced as plate XIII in Vancouver's JVyage of Discovery, with the addition of numerous baidarkas (kayaks).

In the case of the Spanish voyages, artists called "finishers" redrew originals for publication, sometimes altering them according to their inclination or the direction of their superiors. Italian artists in Acapulco, who joined Malaspina on his return from the Northwest Coast, "improved" the faithfully accurate drawing by Tomas de Surfa of the elevated burial chamber of a Tlingit Indian chief at Mulgrave Sound. Jose Cardero and Surfa, in turn, were engaged with a group of twelve other artists from Mexico, to complete the preliminary sketches done by Atanasio Echeverria during the mission to Nootka Sound in 1792. In this case, at least the two had actual experience in the area, and hence their redrawn sketches may be considered accurate.

Some doubt exists among anthropologists as to the accuracy of the artists' depictions of facial features of Northwest Coast natives, owing to their similarity to European features. After studying many drawings from the same region, executed at different times, and examining contemporary written descriptions, I believe that the facial representations are reasonably correct.

Mr. Henry is a retired banker, resident of Washington State, and a student ofNorthwest Coast history. The above is excerpted from the introduction to his book Early Maritime Artists of the Pacific Northwest Coast, to be released in September 1984 by the University of Washington Press, Seattle.

BOOKS The March of Folly/From Troy to Vietnam, by Barbara W. Tuchman (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984, xiv + 447pp, illus, $18.95).

Barbara Tuchman again shows us that the study of history may make us wiser but it will not necessarily make us happier. (Except that we are always the happier for reading a good book, of which Mrs. Tuchman has now given us several.)

Her theme here is "pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest." She defines selfinterest as "whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed; folly is a policy that in these terms is counter-productive." Four hundred pages later, she refines the definition: "If pursuing disadvantage after the disadvantage has become obvious is irrational, then rejection of reason is the prime characteristic of folly."

In Mrs. Tuchman's book, "folly " is strictly delimited to exclude the ordinary errors, stupidities, oppressions, tyrannies, o'er-vaulting ambitions, and incompetences common to misgovernment. "Folly" must, for discussion here, "have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight"; there must have been a feasible alternative course; and the policy must have been persistently pursued by a group not just an individual.

From history's satchelful of woodenheadedness, the author selects three for detailed study, following a brief " prototype," the Trojan horse affair, when the Trojans ignored repeated warnings and neglected to beware sufficiently Greeks bearing gifts.

(Those who use "Cassandra" today as a perjorative forget that Cassandra was, after all, right.)

The titles of the main sections of the book encapsulate their sad stories: "The Renaissance Popes provoke the Protestant Secession ," " The British lose America," and ''America betrays herself in Vietnam."

This is popular narrative history at its best. It is also a cautionary tale for reflecting on current events. Persistence in error is not a thing of the past.

Sea history is not a factor in this book, but it is worth noting in this journal that the epilogue is titled ''A Lantern on the Stem."

The phrase is from Coleridge: "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us."

CHARLES G. BOLTE

Mr. Bolte is editor of The American Oxonian, and was the first national chairman of the American Ji?terans Committee.

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

GIVE ME MEN TO MATCH MY SCHOONERS! Down to the Sea: The Fishing Schooners of Gloucester, by Joseph E . Garland (David R. Godine, Boston , 1983 , 224 pp.

160 photos , drawings , $27.50).

This handsomely produced book does full justice to the smashing collection of photographs ofthe Gloucester schooners at work offshore that that great Gloucesterman Joe Garland brings us-with unique authority and inimitable grace.

We searched for a reviewer adequate to the work, and found Sterling Hayden, himselfbrought up in the Gloucester.fisheries, and respected there. Here is some of what he says in his introduction to this classic: Gloucester gave the world a type of sailing vessel the like of which will never be seen again. She sent down to the eternal sea those schooners that took her name, that in a way were almost the mirror image of that great brawling young giant of a nation known as the USA. No chauvinism here.

The ships speak for themselves . Take a quick squint at the photographs embedded in this book and you'll begin to comprehend , I trust, what it is I'm driving toward .

From roughly 1870 to 1930 this town, along with her handmaiden Essex , brought to life a wondrous swarm of two-masted , two-fisted , sweet-sheered vessels calculated to do battle with that malevolent wilderness of waters known as the North Atlantic Ocean. Their everyday task was to catch fish, but their niche in maritime history is due in no small part to their incomparable ability to battle to windward in the teeth ofliving gales. To say nothing of their capacity to heave to and ride out some of. the most daunting weather and infuriate conditions to be found rampaging around on the surface of the Seven Seas .

They were also beautiful. Now we're getting down to it. Working craft the world around have usually had sea-keeping qualities . But beauty? Soaring, mindboggling beauty? Now that is something

else. Even Gloucester herself, never given to flights of fancy, had a phrase for her pelagic progeny: able handsome ladies.

Able was for going to windward, for driving, slashing, slamming uphill full in the face of those infamous winter northwesters, iced up sometimes halfway to the hounds, with their men hard-pressed to endure twenty minute watches, with pure hell breaking loose aloft and the devil himself dancing ajig downwind, his arms widespread in a welcoming arc for those too weary or weak to survive.

Handsome to Gloucester meant the set of the spars, the flawless proportions, the balance of rig and gear, the planes and curves ofhandsewn cotton canvas. Small wonder that the mere mention of Gloucesterman was enough to command sharp respect and even wonder wherever seafaring men congregated, causing many to indulge in an interlude, however brief, of unabashed reflection.

* * * * * Maybe there are " riches " in this convoluted world the arbiters of the Fortune Five Hundred way of life don 't know damn-all about. One thing for sure: the fishermen enshrined in these pages knew what it was to bust their guts and haul their hearts out ... then maybe hang to the vessel's wheel and ease her as she roared toward home and mother with her rail dragging the water, the salt spray rattling like machine-gun fire off whatever canvas might be drawing her back up under the lee of the land. And then one more bitter passage winding down, leaving the Dayvil dangling on his own particular ropes, the stiffs in the fo 'c' sle could lather up, belt back a blast of Black Rum ... and look themselves right square in the eye.

Joe Garland I salute you. You've told it like it was!

STERLING HAYDEN

Copyright 1983

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11. colorful portrait of a_ v~pishing way of hfe. -Publishers Week()!

Chase shark off Sri Lanka in a handsewn OTUWa. Ferry timber down the Chilean coast in a lancha Chiloia . Sail through harbors crowded with modern vessels in a Chinese junk whose design has been unchanged for nearly 5,000 years. These are some of the experiences you'll share in The Las1 Sailors.

Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes circled the globe in search of the men who still set out under sail to make their living. In Asia, in Africa, in South America, they spent several weeks in each of their selected ports, getting to know the sailors and the local seas, helping to crew the boats, and vividly recording a way of life whose days are clearly numbered, but whose fascination remains boundless.

Oversize format, more than 100 Rhotogr~1=1hs, including 16 p._gges in full color,_$19.95 At bookstores now, or use the coupon to order by mail.

THE LAST SAIIDRS I HI I N/11 I l/IYS 01 WOl\KING SAIL NEIL HOLLANDER AND HARALD MERTES WITH A FOREWORD BY ORSON WELLES

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Greyhounds of the Sea; The Story of the American Clipper Ship; Third Edition with 500 Sailing Records, by Carl C. Cutler (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1984, 688pp, biblio, index , illus, $32.95) .

Carl Cutler's masterpiece on the American clippers, their captains , crews and never-to-be-forgotten achievements under sail was first published in 1930, over half a century ago. But Cutler's engaging prose reads as fresh today as it did when as a child I spent hours over this book , caught up in the excitement of a time when the newspapers in New York reviewed each new clipper ship to come down the ways like a new play or a novel . Cutler makes us share that excitement and with unique authority he plumbs the reasons for it in this classic work on the heroic age of American sail.

Cutler was fifty when he started this work. Born into the age of sail himself, he had been to sea as a youth in the bark Alice, and after a successful career as lawyer he settled into his wife's hometown of Mystic, determined to do justice the inspiring heritage of the American sailing ship, and particularly the American clipper ships, recognized in their heyday, the 1840s and 50s, as the most beautiful and sea-conquering ships ever built.

He buried himself in journals and old newspapers, and consulted some 5,000 ship's logs in his admirable determination to get back to the factual record left by these ships and their people. Cutler himself was a man of heroic mold . He was one of the founders of Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and the person who led that institution to save the whaleship Cha.rles W Morgan-evidence of his belief in the importance of the real thing. And that hunger for the real thing is rewarding to the reader of his work.

In these pages he traces the whole sweep of American seafaring under sail, searching out the roots of the American achievement, beginning with the colonists who sailed forth from their " rocky, poverty-compelling" coasts to forge the beginnings of what became a worldwide seaborne commerce.

And you'll hear these seafaring pioneers speak in the true idiom of their day. You'll come to know the canny builders who conceived and built ships able to outpace fast British cruisers , and the resolute skippers and men who sailed and , when necessary, fought these ships.

And you'll learn of these things not in bland , textbook prose but iit'the authentic voice of a person who, as we would say today, had "been there':.._who had been to sea in sail under the American flag himself, and had known the survivors the clipper era, the builders and masters of ships who

still stamped the quarterdeck in Cutler's youth. H e knew these men , the veterans of a David Crockett or Young America, the clippers that came from the East Boston yard of Donald McKay or the New York East River yard of William H. Webb. With care and with authority, Cutler examines the voyages, the hulls that made the voyages, and the people who wrote the most brilliant chapter in the five thousand year story of the sailing ship.

In Greyhounds, the clipper ship finds the historian equal to her heritage-a heritage that will live while people still care for the great deeds that shaped American history and the American character, or for anyone who, like Solomon three thousand years ago, wonders at the way of a ship in the sea .

P ETER STANFORD

A Life in Boats-The Years Before The War, by Waldo Howland , foreword by Revell Carr (Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic CT, 1984, 307pp, index , 105 photos & drawings, $32 .50) .

Waldo Howland is the only one who could have written such a supremely readable, completely authentic, and sympathetic account about the American yachting scene in the 1920s and 30s. He knew virtually all the giants of the era, the boat owners, the designers, the builders, as well as many of those who helped to make the period the last great flowering of what we today think of as traditional American yachting before it was blasted out of existence by World War II, inflation, and fiberglass.

Waldo Howland grew up in boats on Buzzards Bay in the 1920s. He raced and sailed with some of the legendary figures of the era and on some of the legendary yachts. He raced to Bermuda many times-twice on Bill Hand's Flying Cloud III, on the Transatlantic and Fastnet races in Landfall and Highland Light, and he made a somewhat hairy winter passage to Bermuda on Nina.

He raced in everything from Herreshoff and Alden 12 \lzs to the great graceful and able schooners during the decades between the wars . But his greatest love was cruising about his beloved Buzzards Bay where he had first wet his toes in Padanaram Harbor and where he and his father (with whom he had had a wonderful relationship) spent many happy times together.

This is not a book about racing or even cruising, however, but rather a book about boats and people. The great and successful boats about which Howland writes so well were successful in large part because of the mutual respect and trust that existed among owners, designers, and builders , all three of whom are vividly brought to life by one who knew them all personally. The author SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

writes with feeling about the great designers of the era, among whom were Starling Burgess, Bill Harris, and Ray Hunt. And the boat builders with whom he worked speak to the quality of construction that he always sought: Pierce and Kilburn, Graves, Lawley, Casey, and Bud Mcintosh among many others. Then there are the boats themselves. The list is a veritable peerage of pre-World War II yachts, many of which , it is good to report, are still sailing 50 years after their birth . Just the names, to this reviewer at least, evoke an emotional response: Nina , Highland Light, Mistress , Brilliant, theMalabars, Fearless, Victoria , the Fisher's Islanders, Teregram , Barlovento, Jolie Brise, Dorade, Escape, and finally Java-the first of the fabulously successful Concordia yawls (your reviewer owned one for 12 happy years) .

To me, one of the most appealing and completely genuine vignettes in the book is the profile of Martin Jackson-fisherman, sailor, boat builder, boat man, harbormaster, friend and confidant, a person held in the highest esteem and affection by all of us who remember him in Padanararn (South Dartmouth}, Massachusetts. And the book offers an abundance of lively anecdotes drawn from the life. There was, for example, the return from Bermuda in 1930 aboard Larry Grinnell's Flying Cloud III which was watched in consternation from on shore as she tried to beat to windward carrying a huge balloon jib instead of a far more efficient working jib. Seems there were many bottles ofliquor carefully furled in the workingjib and lashed to the bowsprit. The strange bulges seemed not to concern the customs man!

All in all this book is a delight; the next thing we need is a companion volume for the years 1941-84 for which this reviewer is eagerly waiting.

THOMAS HALE

Mr. Hale, Vice Chairman ofthe Society, is the owner of the Martha's Vineyard Shipyard. He too learned to sail in Padanaram and Buzz.ard's Bay.

The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail, by Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1984, 142pp, illus, $19.95).

This remarkable and handsome book brings the reader right into the world of the few remaining men who make their living under working sale. (A companion videocassette narrated in resonant tones by Orson Welles is also available.) The authors, who are writers, filmmakers and yachtsmen, do not approach the last sailors as academic subjects but as people who, whether they like it or not, are preserving a way of life that is almost gone from the world .

SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

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U-BOAT COMMANDER A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic

By Peter Cremer

DESTROYER! German Destroyers in World War Two

By M.j. Whitley

The a utho r, o ne of three senio r subma rin e comma n de rs to su rv ive the war, gives fl esh to the h o rr ifying s ur viva l rate o f th e wo lf packs and th e ir crews. At a tim e w h e n a Ge rm a n s ubma ri ne r's life ex p ecta ncy was estimate d to be fift y days, C re me r d e fi ed th e odd s a nd brou ght his U-boa t bac k to p o rt tim e a nd aga in . His thrilling sto ry w ill kee p yo u o n th e ed ge of yo ur sea t.

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A th o rou gh presentatio n of the histo ry o f Ge r man d estro ye r o pe ratio ns during the wa r, th e boo k d esc rib es in d e tail d estroye r support o f th e in vasio n o f De nma rk a nd N o rw ay, the fam o u s "Cha nnel d as h," bitte r battl e s a gainst Russia n con voys, a nd mu ch m o re. It also d ocum ents th e d esign and co ns tru cti o n o f these important wa rships.

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AMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775 - Present By jack Sweetmen Th is book p rovides a concise yea r-by-yea r s umm a ry of sign ifica nt nava l eve nts, fro m the Revo luti o n to th e presen t d ay. Fo r easy re fe re n ce it contai ns an index o f d a tes, U.S. ship na mes, fo re ign s hip na mes, a nd a ge ne ra l o ne o f people

This chilling s tory of the Allies' na rro w escape fro m d efeat at the ha nd s o f Naz i s ubmarines doc um e nts th e most critica l m o nths in th e Battl e of th e Atlan ti c; th e winte r and s pring o f 1942 -43.

The a uth o r, a n active pa rti cipa nt in fo ur key ba ttles, d esc rib es th e va lia nt d ay- to-d ay e ffo rts of th e co nvoys a nd te lls the equall y fa scinatin g sto ry o f th e U-b oa ts.

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THE BATTLE OF THE KOMANDORSKI ISLANDS By john Lorelli

THE GHOST THAT DIED AT SUNDA STRAIT

By W. G. Wi11 slow He re is a maste rful re-c rea tio n o f th e USS

Housto11 's battl es aga inst the Ja pa nese. Winslow,

He re is the s pine- tin g lin g s to ry of a battl e betwee n a s m a ll Ame ri can tas k fo rce a nd a Ja panese fl ee t nea rl y tw ice its size. lt was a u n iqu e eve nt in th e wa r in th e Pacific: a traditio na l gunfight w ith ne ith e r air powe r nor su b m arin e s upp o rt. Th e ba ttle re m ain s a re ma rk able exa mpl e o f skill and courage on th e part o f th e A me ri can s wh o wo n th e d ay.

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o ne o f th e s hip 's few surv ivo rs a ft e r h e r las t sta nd, p rov id es a d e ta iled acco unt of th e battl es of th e Ja va Sea, S u nd a Stra it, and the earlie r Battle of th e Flo res Sea . He brings to light n ew evid e nce that s uppo rts th e co nte ntio n that th e Houston a nd othe r A !li ed wa rships inflicted a heav ie r to ll than th e Japan ese have e ve r bee n willing to admit.

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BOOKS Mertes and Hollander spent two years and 25,000 miles in their small sailboat visiting remote ports. They sailed , worked and lived with the last sailors some of whom were mystified that anyone would be interested in their hard , unrelenting work. The authors chose eight groups of mariners for the book: Windward Island sailors aboard the trading schooner Albert George who are reduced to carrying the least desirable cargo (and maybe a little contraband on the side) ; the Brazilian jangadieros who sail frail rafts off the beach to played-out fishing grounds sometimes 15 miles offshore; the Chilean lancha sailors who carry most ly firewood in their small sloops coping with Roaring Forties weather and rain 300 days a year. The authors also sailed with Egyptian Nile Sailors, oruwa sailors from Sri Lanka, shampans from Ceylon , junks from Macau and elegant pinisi schooners from Indonesia.

Mertes and Hollander do not romanticize or judge these men , some of whom would jump at the chance to do less demanding and more lucrative work . Mostly the authors let the last sailors tell their own stories-stories of the history of their work, the tricks of their trade, the difficulties of the present and their hopes for the future.

SPENCER SMITH

Mr. Smith , director of the dolphin Book Club, is a sailor himself and serves as Chairman ofthe National Society's Publications Committee.

Chants de marins: Anthologie des chansons de mer; Vol. I : Chants de marins traditionels des cotes de France.

Vol. II: Danses et complaintes des cotes de France. Vol. III: Chants de bord des baleiniers et long-courriers Francais.

(S.C.O.P. du Chasse-Maree, Abri du Marin , 29100 Douarnenez , France) .

From the coasts of France, especially of Brittany and Normandy, we have this remarkable set of three record albums that contain a wealth of traditional French sailor songs, many of them never before published . Here is also a wide range of other French maritime music equally new to aficionados. The three albums comprise in all six 12-inch, double-sided LP discs.

They are the result of extensive original collecting among old sailors and coastal residents by a group of dedicated men and women who call thenselves Le Cabestan (The Capstan) . They have had the support of the S.C.O.P. du Chasse-Maree , a cooperative organization of young people working to promote appreciation of all aspects of French maritime culture. How rich and extensive that culture is in traditional music these recordings make clear.

44

This is big news , for the extent and variety of this French body of sea music has never before been really known . Back in 1856, E . de Coussemacker published many fine sea ballads in Flemish in his book , Chants populaires des Flamands de France, but his example was not followed in other French regions. In the present century, French books of sea songs have been few and relatively slim . The most important , Commandant Armand Hayet's Chansons de bord (1927) presented a limited number of good deep-water songs .

As was almost obligatory in those days, Hayet "softened" (or bowdlerized) his shanties, though later he did print the unexpurgated versions, under a pseudonym. (Chansons de la voile "sans voile," by "Jean-Marie de Bihor," 1935.) Since Commandant Hayet stoutly considered the only " real" sailor songs to be those traditional aboard deep-water squareriggers, he was little interested in songs from the fishing and coastwise trades or in the ballads and dance tunes of people in the coastal villages.

The Chants de Marins albums greatly exceed these previous.efforts not only in the number of songs and tunes presentedsome 89 in all-but in the variety of the material. good versions of nearly all the chanties in Hayet collection are included.

Here, for example, is that classic halyard shanty "Jean-Francois de Nantes," which is closely related in tune and refrains to the Anglo-American shanty "Boney."

Forthright in its sexuality, it gives a vivid account of a matelot's fling in port and consequent sufferings in the hospital . The records also include many other rousing chanties traditionally sung by French tars at the halyards, braces, capstan, windlass and pumps. There are several lively handover-hand chanties. Here, too, are special songs used for hauling a vessel alongside its dock, a task often handled by the local villagers .

From such ports of Brittany and Normandy as Saint-Malo, Fecamp, Granville, Paimpol an_d others, hundreds of sailing vessels formerly crossed the Atlantic to fish for cod and halibut on the banks of Newfoundland . Songs traditional with the men of the fishing fleet are well represented in these recordings. Especially moving is the song "Ceu.x qui ont namme les banes," which vividly describes the endless heavy work in the dories and in the salt-packed holds of the fishing schooners.

Particularly appealing also are the rowing songs on several of the discs. These are a type of song seldom if ever found among genuine sailor songs in English. Such a song as "Tire va done sur Les avirons," with its pleasant,,even rhythm, greatly eased the

work of rowing heavy boats or small sailing coasters in a calm .

Naval songs on the recordings go back in some cases to the wars of the 18th and early 19th centuries; in others to mid-19th century warships with their endless, monotonous labor and stern discipline. One record is devoted partly to whaleman's songs, though some of those given were shared by the blubber hunters with other matelots .

Both the mariners and their women-folk handed down romantic ballads and love songs from generation to generation. Many of these are preserved on the discs . Numerous pieces of traditional instrumental music are also included: hornpipes, polkas, round-dance tunes and others. Instruments used include the fiddle, diatonic accordion, veuze (bagpipe) , banjo and horn .

Each album includes, in addition to the records, printed texts of the songs, detailed notes on each one, and informing articles on such subjects how chanties were used , the rigging and various types of sailing vessels, the musical instruments used by sailors and coastal folk, and more. The albums are handsomely packaged and profusely illustrated with historical photographs and drawings.

Occasionally the editors have failed to mention the exact source of a song, although usually this information is given .

One notices some minor variations between the sung and printed texts of certain songs.

But then, these orally circulated songs were bound to be somewhat protean and everchanging.

A few of the songs are reproduced on the discs in the actual voices of the informants from whom they were collected. Most of the singers in whose voices the old songs are heard in the recordings, however, are members of Le Cabestan. Men and women from many different walks oflife, they have been brought together in the mutually shared aim of preserving the traditional maritime music of France before it is lost forever. They have produced one of the finest collections of traditional sailors' songs and other music of the sea that has ever appeared in any language.

WILLIAM MAIN DOERFLINGER

Mr. Doerflinger is author of the classic Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman.

Coaster: The Adventure of the John R

Leavitt, (Atlantic Film Group, 102 Harbor Road , Kittery Pt . ME 03905, 50 minutes, sound and color, 16-and 35mm) .

Having followed the sorry tale of the construction of a 97-foot cargo schooner and her subsequent loss in a moderate blow at sea, I wondered how a movie would be made about this incident-how the painful facts would be handled .

SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984

The vessel was brand new, fresh out of the yard , built sturdily by traditional methods-a beautiful job, and beautifully recorded here. Hailed as a revival of a proud tradition in sail , she loaded with cargo at Quincy, Massachusetts and departed in December 1979, bound for Haiti. About 150 miles east of Long Island the vessel encountered 50 mph winds and began to take in water. The mechanical pump failed, but there were two large capacity manual pumps fully operational. The vessel was not in danger, yet the captain sent a " Mayday" signal. When offered pumps by the rescue helicopter, he refused and insisted instead that the crew be taken off. So the brand-new John F Leavitt was abandoned and lost.

All of this is filmed with great care and detail. Here the film succeeds in making you feel the scene, as if, regrettably, you were there.

But, any sailor in the audience is going to be enraged by the misuse of a vessel as shown in this film. First day out they run aground . That has happened to a lot ofus .

But these people, trying to get off, manage to tear off the tip of their jibboom. A day out of Boston they are becalmed and the skipper frets because he is helpless in a shipping lane. (The schooner has lights , radar, a radio.) When they encounter the blow off Long Island , the cargo boom breaks loose forward. The skipper will not let anyone go forward to secure it because he could be injured!

At the end of the film, we see the vessel bobbing lightly in sunlit seas, the foreboom hanging out wildly to starboard while the unstowed sail flaps and the crew sprawls about the deck , not steering, not stowing, not pumping, awaiting rescue.

Rescue from what?

The film does not answer that question .

It never names the real enemy of this venture, which was not the sea, but the ship's people.

NORMA STANFORD Britain's Armed Forces Today: 2, Fleet Command, by Paul Beaver (Ian Allan Ltd. , Shepperton, Surrey TW17 8AS, England, 1984, 48pp, illus, pbk , ÂŁ2 .95).

This large format profusely illustrated paperback gives a succinct account of the command structure, NA1D connections and larger craft comprising the front line of the Royal Navy today, still the third largest in the world, after the USA and USSR. It includes a full description of the major types of vessels by classes, from the Hermes (last of the large wartime carriers, noted for her recent role as command ship in the Falklands) and the modern carriers completed in record time in 1982, through the various types of destroyer, finishing SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984

with the latest frigates, with a chapter on " Weapon Systems" and a chapter " In Action" which examines the role of the Fleet in the recent Falklands operation , when the major threat came perhaps not from the sea but from the air. Covering a wide range of material in a few informative chapters, this short book can certainly be commended to any reader interested in the development of the Royal Navy today.

JAMES FORSYTHE Major Forsythe, President of the Norfolk Wherry Trust, is Hon. Secretary of the World Ship Trust.

Ancient Trade and Society, by Lionel Casson (Wayne State University Press, Detroit MI, 1984, 284pp, illus, $19.95).

Casting a lucid light over the conditions of life and workings of commerce in the Mediterranean world of ancient Greece and Rome, these essays from varied sources il1ustrate the breadth and solidity of Professor Casson's unique contribution to our understandings of that world . They also make very good reading! The volume includes a tribute from one of Casson's students, which sketches in his career and his inimitably joyous approach to questions of life and scholarship alike.

PS The Counter-Armada, 1596; The Journall of the "Mary Rose;' ed . Stephen and Elizabeth Usherwood (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD 21402 , 1983, 176pp, illus, $15. 95). Who wouldn't go to sea with John Donne, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh?

These were among the flower of Elizabeth's court who embarked eight years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada to deliver a stinging assault on the Spanish port of Cadiz. Sir George Carew sailed with them in the Queen's ship Mary Rose, named for the great warship in which his uncle of the same name had gone down earlier in the century. His journal gives a sense of the realities of Elizabethan navigation and warfare, and is amplified intelligently by the authors. Some scholars feel , however, that they would have got a more accurate picture of events had they consulted more in Spanish archives .

PS Descriptive Bibliography of Current Marine Titles, ed. Ron Barr (Armchair Sailor Bookstore, Lee's Wharf, Newport RI 02840, 1984, 208pp, illus, pbk $6+$1 hdlg). Over 3,000 currently available titles form some 700-odd publishers are not only listed, but briefly and accurately described in this Herculean and invaluable undertaking. A free updating service keeps the catalog current.

"Just for a few moments your attention I crave/ While I relate a sad death on the wave."

So began one of the ballads written about a macabre incident that took place one hundred years ago.

Two highly respectable British seamen, on being c ast adrift from the foundered yacht Mignonette, killed and ate a young shipmate in order to survive themselves.

Their subsequent trial was a cause celebre at the time .

But this was no mere passing sensation. The case-Regina v.

Dudley and Stephens-is a leading one, well known to all students of Anglo -American law. In CANNIBALISM AND THE COMMON LAW, A. W. Brian Simpson has recreated not only the drama of the trial but the atmosphere of the Victorian era in which it unfolded .

He has spun an absorbing tale of wrecks and heroism and of the clash between the law of the land and the law of the sea .

Cannibalism and the Common Law The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Le gal Proce e dings to Which It Ga ve Rise

A. W. Brian Simpson Illus . $25 .00

The University of Chicago Press Dept. BN, 5801 Ellis Avenue, Chicago IL 60637 Check, money order, or MasterCard/ VISA#, expiration date, and signature must accompany order. IL orders add 7% sales tax, Chicago 8%.

45

A Night that None of Us Will Forget

by Lambert Knight

The young yachtsman Lambert Knight joined Alan Villiers for Parma's stormy passage from Australia to England in 1932. This excerpt from his journal describes the worst blow their captain Reuben de Cloux had experienced in many roundings of Cape Hom. April 5, Tuesday:

Course E Dist. 239 Started out with moderate west, becoming strong in the afternoon, accompanied by heavy snow squalls. A heavy sea was also making up. About sundown, the breeze, which had been blowing about sixty miles in the afternoon, increased, and the glass, which had been very low, continued to fall to about 28.1. At sundown the squalls came more often and with much greater fury. We were running along under lower topsails, main upper topsail and foresail , and making about thirteen knots . The breeze was picking up rapidly. It was to be a night that none of us will forget.

Our watch was standing under the fo'c'sle head waiting for the order to take in the foresail and also trying to get out of the snow and sleet. It was very black to windward, and the seas were getting very high, the tops breaking off flying along in great white streaks. All at once a tremendous sea lifted our stern high in the air and we were sent driving ahead at great speed. She kept on going and drove her bow right under, taking much water over the fo'c'sle head . It came over our heads and right down in front us us, just as if we were under a waterfall. This slowed us up, and when the second sea came along, it broke high over the poop with a tremendous crash, and drove tons of water the whole length of the ship. She began to settle to starboard , and kept on going over, and going over, and then lay there as if she were never coming up again.

We scrambled out as best we could and tried to get to the rigging, many of us believing that she was going over. The wind was, by this time, terrific, and sleet and water were driving across us in a great sheet. It was blowing somewhere around a hundred miles an hour by now. The ship broached to, coming more broadside to the seas. The foresail carried away with an awful crash and thrashing. (Foresail was almost new and cost about four hundred dollars. It was of 00 storm canvas with heavy wire bolt ropes.) We began to right up and move again. We tried to get in what was left of the foresail. In the rigging everything was thrashing around wildly, and sparks were flying in a regular fireworks display, as the heavy wire and chains on the foresail were thrashing around. Everything was fouled up and nothing could be done about it. We were going to try to get in the

46

Lat. 53 S Long. 153 W

The big bark photographed by Lambert Knight in the South Atlantic from one of Parma's boats-in calmer weather. main upper topsail, when that also blew out.

In trying to help the boys on deck, the second mate was swept over the side by a huge sea. He was washed clear of everything, but as the poop swept by, he caught the mizzen braces and was dragged aboard .

One of the boys also had a very close call, hanging onto a wire, with his feet and legs out over the rail . He had all he could do to hold his breath long enough and hang on , until the sea had swept over him .

It seemed dangerous to try running any more, and so, for the first time in his thirty years of experience, the Skipper decided to heave to. The glass in the port binnacle was broken, so there was no light on the compass, another reason for heaving to. (The next morning the Skipper cut a piece of glass to fix up the binnacle, using Mrs. Villiers' engagement ring for a glass cutter.)

We were bracing the yards around to heave to under lower topsails on the port tack. The Skipper hurt his leg badly when he was thrown bodily over the brace winch, which had gotten out of control, and the long iron handle was spinning madly around . It's a wonder he wasn't killed.

We finally got her around and lay almost in the trough of the seas, heading it just a little. We would quiver from stem to stern as the huge seas struck us and crashed down on our deck. Then we would fall off and roll madly in the trough. There was nothing more we could do. It seemed to be up to her now.

We got the Skipper and Second Mate to their bunks, and the whole crew came aft, where the Skipper gave them whiskey, which certainly hit the right spot, for we were soaked through and shivering. We had had four men at the wheel , but now we had the wheel lashed hard to port, with two men standing

by in case it should chafe and break loose.

We continued to stand watches through the night, the free watch trying to get some rest in the sail locker adjoining the cabin companionway. This was awash, and there were only a few dry spots on top of some old sails. The cabin had also had plenty of water, but we kept bailing this out. It was by this time a full gale, and huge seas were breaking across us almost constantly. Our greatest concern was the hatches . If the coverings should be washed off, we were through . It was impossible now to go on deck, but we could crawl out along the storm bridge. The heavy iron fastening across the top of number three (Midship) hatch had already been swept away. All that remained were the tarpaulins before the hatch covers would go and the vessel fill.

We spent a very anxious night. Things did not seem to get any better. It was impossible to stand outside. We had to crawl around hanging onto things. One sea had broken across the poop and washed away our starboard compass . I was at the wheel with three others when the compasses went. We could then see nothing but a faint light from the charthouse. It was some sensation . We didn't know what was going on on deck, and couldn't see the sails or anything. Just driving ahead in total blackness, and trying to steer by the way we felt the wind coming from. Things certainly were hanging in the balance, with the odds sometimes seeming against us.

Everyone who was not on duty was now guddled in the officers' mess room and were taking it very calmly. The deckhouses were taking a terrible washing, and it seemed as if we might lose them . As it was, the mid-ship house was completely washed out, the seas having broken in the door and tom out all partitions, cupboards, etc. The bunks in the apprentice part were tom out and all the gear washed away. I had quite a good look at things, as, in the midst of it, I had to go forward and try to find my flashlight. It was the only one aboard, as the Second Mate had lost his when he went overboard.

The only way into the fo'c'sle was through the skylight. The place was certainly a mess. All loose articles from the starboard side had been thrown onto the floor and were washing around in the water. I imagine they went when she took the first big list to port, when she broached to. Anyway, my flashlight had apparently gone with the rest. The seas were smashing up against the side and making the whole place tremble.

It was important to get the light, as the light on our remaining compass had failed and we could not get it started again . But there was nothing for it. It had gone in the drink with the rest. <t SEA HIS10RY, FALL 1984

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Engineering Tomorrow's Sea History

One of two ship simulators at MITAGS, inside of which is an array of instruments normally found aboard ships. These simulators offer unlimited operating areas to train deck officers in the principles of ship handling.

This Is MM&P Country This strange-looking device is one of two ship simulators at the Maritime Institute of Technology and Graduate Studies which is used to train MM&P deck officers in the principles of ship handling in a variety of environmental settings. Students on the bridge of the simulator react to varying situations programmed by the instructor. On command, the legs of the machine cause the bridge to pitch and roll plus or minus 20 degrees and heave as much as 18 inches.

Ship officers return regularly to MITAGS to sharpen their skills and learn new ones-all on dry land-while they navigate their way through any number of simulated waters with complete safety.

MITAGS is the result of a close and profitable collaboration between MM&P and the American flag shipping companies in their joint Maritime Advancement, Training, Education and Safety (MATES) Program .

r. .

ROBERT J. LOWEN International President

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