A Restoration of Spirit Indeed! The Restoration of the Sailing Ship Wavertree at South Street Seaport Has Called Forth an Extraordinary Effort-One that May Help Restore the Founding Purposes of the South Street Museum by Peter Stanford
In the long career ofthe full-rigged ship Wavertree, there have been several points since her launch in December 1885 where an odd turning led to her survival and the continuance of her story into its next chapter. In 1892 she was damaged by fire in Australia which well might have destroyed her and which left marks in her iron frame still visible today. She nearly went ashore in the great gale at Algoa Bay, South Africa in 1902. The gale, sweeping up from the Cape Horn wind system across the South Atlantic, came crashing into the anchorage on a September night, driving eighteen ships ashore with the loss of 63 lives; the Wavertree came through with cabin doors smashed and cabins flooded out, but she rode it out, presumably on the great anchors she has aboard today. There were other desperate occasions, doubtless, that we know nothing of. We catch glimpses in newspaper and Lloyd's casualty reports; in December ofthe previous year, 1901, for example, she encountered off Cape Horn 'h very heavy gale from NW, with a very high sea, filling decks to the rail, ship labouring heavily, lost several sails." And nine years later, in 1910, she was dis masted off the Horn andforced to run back to the Falkland Islands for shelter, being towed into harbor by the tug Samson on Christmas Eve. She then survived as a wool and coal storage barge in the Straits of Magellan, behind Cape Horn where she nearly met her end. Sold in 1947 with the proviso that she be scrapped, she was picked up by a steamer coming through the Straits and towed to Buenos Aires. Her new owner, Alfredo Numeriani, a wily but courtly gentleman of considerable wealth (he owned block of downtown real estate) realized that a stipulation in a Chilean contract was not very enforceable in Argentine law courts. So he refitted her as a sand barge, and she lived on. Word of her presence, with other old sailing ships, reached Karl Kortum, that hunter-out of the surviving ships of the sailing era, in his eyrie in the world-involved maritime museum in San Francisco; he went to Buenos Aires in 1966 and found the Wavertree and all her sisters gone. Then, following a rumor, he caught a bus to a remote industrial backwater, and there he found her, in the Riachuelo, the sole survivor of her breed in that quarter of the ocean world. Kortum made it his business to find a home for the ship, and by his direction I went with Norma Stanford to inspect her there and begin the long haul of her recovery in 1968. Well, there are stories and stories of the ship's survival, and some, as noted, may never be known. In SEA HISTORY 19, 20 and 26 we've recounted how this very important ship save came about, and how the vessel came to South Street Seaport Museum in New York. Changing museum management and other problems supervened, however, and blocked the effort to restore the ship to her sailing splendor. After some bold beginnings, including stepping a new mainmast to replace the one lost off Cape Horn in 1910, work languished-and came to a halt. Then, in 1980, just ten years after the Wavertree's triumphant return to New York, the National Society was called on. Another turning-point in the ship's career was at hand.
In the bowels ofthe ship, volunteers (from left to right) Bill Donahue, Ted Miles and Neal Flaherty tail onto a line to hoist junk out of the holdan exercise the New York Times called 'a restoration ofspirit" in the issue of October 16, 1981. Photo, Jim Wilson , N.Y Times.
Jakob lsbrandtsen (in theforeground).founding chairman of the South Street Seaport Museum, came back to lead the work to save the ship he had bought f or the Museum a dozen years earlier. Beyond him, at right, is Bill Shepard, at 16 the youngest of the steady volunteers. Photo, Jim Wilson , N. Y Times.
SEA HISlDRY, WINTER 1984-85
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