Will There Be a Main Skysail-Yarder by Peter Stanford Operation Sail has helped set tall ships moving on the face of the sea again. And the coming of a tall ship is something to see. It starts as a cloud on the horizon . By degrees it grows to clouds of canvas, royals atop topgallants, topgallants above topsails, topsails over courses, as the ship comes up over the horizon-and back into living hi story as something more than a mere remnant, or an apparition from the past. "We' re not just going back to the past," said Jakob Isbrandtsen twenty years ago when the full-rigged shiplibertad first came into South Street, while he was chairman of the fledgling Seaport Museum. "We're getting back to fundamentals." The officers in the ship 's mahogany panelled wardroom nod. They understand . Wet oilskins drip onto the scrubbed deck in the passageway outside. They have a tall ship under their command, and some 120 young lives in their keeping. Coming up to New York, they had met a violent squall. First a freshening gust or two from the north , against the prevailing southerly air, then lancing cold rain with the wind rising in mounting gusts through it, driving it into people 's faces in a manner to make their cheeks smart. But no time to think of that! Wind rising after the rain began meant that all hell was about to break loose. Rain before wind, halyards and topsails mind. Canvas in high wind does not make a sound like shaking out a blanket, it cracks and booms, like close and distant thunder. You can't hear things clearly over its uproar, which is why sea language is so conservative-you need familiar words. To the helmsman: "Bear off hard, there! " "Bear off hard, aye, aye sir! " Most important not to be caught aback as the wind jumps about from a new quarter. If it catches the sails on the wrong side it will press them against the masts and rigging and likely begin carrying things away, meantime making it almost impossible to reduce the spread of the canvas. As the vessel turns away, she straightens up from the steeply leaning angle of heel she had taken in the initial onslaught of the wind, and begins running with the wind"picking up her skirts and flying, " sailormen say. Aloft, everything is a clashing cacaphony of bulging canvas and jumping yards, as royals are clewed up and stowed, followed by top gallants and courses, reducing the vessel to the traditional and eminently serviceable heavy-weather rig of double topsails. On deck, knots of people struggle with rainstiffened lines, pulling the clattering sails up to their yards, while others are already racing aloft on the ratlines to subdue and stow the wild canvas one hundred eighty feet above the sea-the height of an eighteen-story building. So, a well found and well sailed ship bursting through a summer sq uall to make her passage, the Argentine square rigger Libertad came into South Street, first of the world's tall ships to come there after the US Coast Guard 's own Eagle, harbinger of the flock of sixteen big square riggers that were to follow seven years later, in Operation Sail 1976, honoring the nation's 200th birthday.
Ships to Carry the Message What set these great sailing ships, survivors of a vanished way oflife and half-forgotten era, crossing wide oceans to come to New York? The trail runs back to Europe, where a movement to get young people of different nations to sea in sail began to gather head in the decade following World War II. Something was needed to challenge youth, it was felt, and to realize the commonalities of the human experience in a divided world. Some sail training ships survived from the prewar era, 36
when navies and shipping companies still felt ex perience under sail mattered. In 1956 a fleet of these ships gathered to run an international race from Torbay, on England's southwest coast, to Lisbon, Portugal. Bernard Morgan, a London lawyer with a dream, pressed the idea. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had organized the commandos that raided enemyoccupied coasts during the war, seized on it with with enthusiasm; the ocean-racing skipper John Illingworth and others were enlisted in the cause. The Torbay-Lisbon race was agreat success, and led directly to the forming of the Sail Training Association, headquartered in London, to generate more such activities. The international races found an important sponsor in John Rudd, distiller of Cutty Sark Scots Whiskey, and they are internationally known today as Cutty Sark Tall Ships Racesmost suitably , for the Cutty Sark, for which the whiskey was named, is the last of the world's clipper ships. Enshrined in drydock alongside the National Martime Mu se um in Greenwich, England, that fast-travelling ship of 1869 helps make hi story by inspiring active perpetuation of the skill s and seamanly attitudes that made her name world famous. And some of her income from visitors each year is allotted to support young people going to sea. In America, the sailing of these ships on the other si de of the Atlantic was keenly followed by Nils Hansell, a graphic artist working at IBM. Nils felt the tall ships should come to America! This was quite out of their normal pattern-but the very challenge of the idea worked its magic. Commodore John S. Baylis of the Coast Guard, veteran of ocean sailing in square rig, seized upon the idea with a sure and responsible grasp; it could be done! Baylis and Hansell lined up Frank 0. Braynard (see pages 46-47), then executive director of the American Merchant Marine Institute, to run the operation. They then secured a meeting with President John F. Kennedy! Hansell 's employer Thomas J. Watson, Chairman ofIBM, got wind of the scheme and called Emil Mosbacher, Jr. to warn him he was sending over a couple of unexpected visi tors-"but I is ten to their story before you throw them out." Mosbacher listened and ended up leading the visit to our sailor-president a few days later. He went on to take the helm as Chairman of Operation Sail. Operation Sail 1964 was presented as an adjunct to the World 's Fair in New York that year. There was little warning of the visit of the ships amid the hooplah of the Fair, but the arrival of the tall ships, fully eleven of them-more than had ever been assembled before-passed like a fresh wind across America, turning heads and making people stop each other in the street to talk about. .. "tall ships." And when it was decided to hold another Op Sail for the national bicentennial in 1976, people ended up talking of practically nothing but the visit of the tall ships.
Where Do They Come From? Some were new-built. When the Polish bark Pomorza (built 1909) was retired, the Dar Mlodziezy was built to take her place, and the new barkentine Pogoria joined Poland's fleet as well. The Soviet Union has four new square riggers coming along. Old, and in some cases quite historic ships have been hunted up to put into this needed, intensely productive service. Following the immensely successful Operation Sail 1976, the sponsors, a dedicated non-profit committee Jed by Mosbacher decided to hold another assembly of tall ships for SEA HISTORY 52, WINTER 1989-90
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