SAIL TRAINING: OPERATION SAIL 1986
Each with Her Story to Tell by Peter Stanford
It is the long-awaited moment. Even among the hard-case television crews gathered on top of the building we are assigned to on Governors Island , you can feel the stir of anticipation and a growing awe-such as the American Indians felt when they saw Francis Drake's tall ships outside San Francisco four centuries ago, and stood "as men ravished in their minds. " Slowly the US Coast Guard bark Eagle comes up the harbor, flanked by the schooners Bowdoin and Spirit of Massachusetts, leading the parade of tall ships in honor of the Statue of Liberty 's one hundredth anniversary year. She is under easy canvas. I cannot help remembering my pride when I first went to sea in her, sailing out of this very harbor. We embarked from South Street, New York's old Street of Ships, which had not seen a square rigger for many years. The Eagle's sailing was in question then , threatened by the knife of "cost effectiveness," which too often measures process (how much it costs to do a thing) rather than product (what is accomplished). Today , there's no question any more: her sailing is assured as the Coast Guard's most visible embodiment of purpose, spreading a message it would take (literally) millions of dollars to buy commercially. And she has been recognized as a uniquely effective training asset; today deckhands and boatswains are being put through courses aboard, as well as the commissioned officers who go to sea in her to learn leadership as well as seamanship. Beyond Eagle loom the shapes of the other ships, coming north in the gentle, gathering breeze . There comes the handsome Danmark , which was on this side of the ocean when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940 , and thereupon joined in training American sailors to man the ships that turned the tides of war in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Off on her far side are the stumpy masts of the American
SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1986-87
schooner Ernestina/Morrissey, which we strove for years to bring back from the Cape Verde Islands. Then an impossible dream , she is now a living reality , an embodiment of immigrant pride (she was the last ship to bring immigrants to the US under sail), and of the education only a working sailing ship can convey . The parade continues with the Christian Radich, which sails from Norway with adventurers of all ages signed on as working passengers. Then stately Libertad, tallest of the tall ships, sailed hard by her apprentice naval crews from her home port of Buenos Aires to ports throughout the Pacific and Atlantic worlds. And then the port-painted small bark Belem. Built in France for the South American trade, she survived as a rather splendid yacht, then as a training ship for the Fondazione Cini in Venice. My wife Norma and I first saw her there in 1970, sadly run down . Even her devoted watchman doubted she'd ever sail again. But in the next decade the growing revival of interest in historic sail in France gave her cause a fair wind, and with the encouragement of the World Ship Trust she was restored to become part of the active sailing scene on the Channel coast-and here, incredibly , I am seeing her again, no longer a ruin but a working ship.
"Just for Ceremony?" " There are so many of them , it' s wonderful ," says the television announcer I am sitting with , to the innocent millions of people who are watching us through the camera's beady eye. "And to think , they're just for ceremony!" I am glad that the people aboard the ships, taking the President's salute and hearing their own country's anthems played by the American Wind Symphony aboard their giant barge, are not hearing that evaluation of their role. For each ship is of course a working ship, crossing oceans the hard way, and helping to instill in her people those most difficult
and valuable lessons of seafaring: leadership, comradeship, cooperation and a heads-up cheerfulness expressed for all time by that great American sailorman Irving Johnson when he said of his own experience at sea in square rig: "That taught me to lean forward into life! " What more valuable work is there on the face of the earth than teaching such things? What product could we think to deliver more important than young people who have mastered these deep and vital lessons? The last of the great ships comes up. She is followed by a colorful rout of small craft of all sorts and varieties, from galliot to catamaran, so that she seems not so much to be ending one parade as beginning another. She is the gallant bark Elissa from Galveston-and before that, from Piraeus, Greece , where members of our Society found her and set to work to bring her back to life as a sailing ship more than twenty years ago . Another impossible dream! And one come particularly true for me, for on her foreyard as she sails by is Norma, fanned by a pleasant downdraft from the fore lower topsail , while I sit dazed on the baking rooftop ashore, stunned like an ox hit with a sledgehammer that the thought could be held by anyone that these ships sail ''just for ceremony. '' Slowly I recover my equilibrium and resume talking to the imperturbable camera about the ships, what they were built for, how they survived, what they are doing today ... each with herown story to tell. It seeps through my mind that I have heard this " ceremony" thing before , in meetings with high officials in Washington and in the upper stories of tall buildings in New York. We, the tellers of tales , dreamers of dreams , keepers of records, the seekers out of the truth of the seafaring experience-we have a very big job to do in getting the ships ' true story across .
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