The Ship As Museum by Peter Stanford "After several years in small coasters," said Norman Pearce, "I thought it was time to do something more." That "something more " was nothing less than to go deepwater in a square-rigged ship trading foreign. Well, he was twenty-one and presumably knew his own mind, so he went to a friend of his father's, a ship broker in Cardiff. This person told him: ''We are brokers for a new ship loading coal in Penarth for San Francisco and she will sail this week. She is a new ship called Balclutha, and we can get you a berth as AB on her. '' Well, young Norman packed up his kit and signed on as one of a polyglot crew including an Australian, a Brazilian, some Scandinavians, several West Indians, and the rest British. They all bunked down together in the ship 's cramped forecastle, forward where the anchor chains came through the hawsepipes. The ship then proceeded down the Bristol Channel and stuck her nose out into the Irish Sea. Norman Pearce was to remember the occasion over half a century later . ''The first incident I remember well,'' he said, " was my bed, bedclothes and some of my kit being washed out on deck through the door. " Writing to a friend he 'd never met , who was interested in his story, he went on to explain: As it was a new ship there were no plugs for the hawsepipes and with the
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The far-gazing figurehead of the Balclutha was first doused in salt water in the Irish Sea in the distant spring of 1887. This is the original, replaced recently by a replica carved by the Cornish sculptor and craftsman Greg Powles land. Today, she faces inland on the hilly streets of San Francisco , still dreaming, perhaps, of far horizons. Photo by John Kortum.
first dive she made in the Irish Sea, she shipped most of it (or so it seemed to me) through the pipes, and as my bunk was well forward, it was quickly washed out with the flood. We tried stuffing with empty bags and some of our clothes, but we made a poor job of it for they were washed in again. We just had to make the best of it until the carpenter made plugs to fit and then we had to wait for the cable chain to be unshackled from the anchor and drawn inboard through the pipes, which was always done at the beginning of a long sea voyage.
Karl Kortum, dean of American ship savers, stands before the ships at the Hyde Street Pier, from the left, the Tyne paddle tug Eppleton Hall (he was mate in her on her trip from the north of England to San Francisco) the scow schooner Alma, the schooner C. A. Thayer and the giant paddlewheel ferry Eureka. The steam schooner Wapama is absent, undergoing refit. Photo by John Kortum.
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The 256ft full-rigger visited San Francisco again in her seventeen roundings of Cape Horn, and she lies in that worldinvolved seaport today. And for the past 34 years, Pearce's letter has greeted visitors to the Balclutha's forecastle, compelling the reader to look up at the gaping hawsepipe and imagine the blast of salt water that flushed bed and bedding out of the forward bunks. A Friend in Need The friend to whom Norman Pearce was writing in I 954 was Karl Kortum, who had founded the San Francisco Maritime Museum with a few like-minded souls three years before , and who in that year 1954 had succeeded in buying the Balclutha, to restore her as a museum ship. Kortum had sailed in the last Cape Horn voyage of a Yankee square-rigger in 1941, round the Horn from Washington State to Australia. This was in the Kaiulani of 1899, the ship that the National Maritime Historical Society was founded to save. Kortum was a friend in need to old sailors and old ships in this time of museum-building and ship-saving, as indeed he remains today . He put his credo into memorable words, once, writing to a bunch of us working in SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1987-88