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Operation Sail 1992?
Sail plan of Mil verton, sister of Wavertree. the I OOth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Most appropriately, the French bark Belem was in this parade, restored with the specific goal of coming across the ocean to celebrate the statue given to Ameri ca by France, and to celebrate the tides of immigrants summoned by her promise. In 1973, when Norma Stanfo rd and I had last seen Belem, she was laid up in Venice, hav ing been retired from a limited sail training mi ssion fo r the Giorgio Cini fo undation. We asked her aged shipkeeper, would she sai l again? " No," he said, "no more the sea. Too o ld , too worn out. Like me." I hope he saw, at least th rough th e telev ision 's eye, hi s ship come thro ugh the Upper Bay after her trans-Atlantic passage ! One of the loveliest partic ipants in 1986 was the bark Elissa of 1877. Afte r decades of effort by ship hi storians to find her a home, the Galveston Historical Foundation took her on-a shorn and mastless motorship--and restored her to her sailing glory. Thi s was a story of a lo ng vigi l and success beyond the dreams of the watchers and he lpers, a triumph made possible by the growing interest in sail training in an experience-poor age, an interest spurred by Operation Sail. The Eagle herself, host ship for Operation Sail in 1964, 1976, and 1986, was saved by the new interest in sail training, and by the message the tall ships carried to shores ide people. The cost-effecti ve pl otters in the 1960s had about dec ided to scrap the Eagle. Cost effectiveness is all very well , but its besetting sin is the inability to track fo rces that soar off its graphs. The Eagle had come into New York's South Street in 1968, the year before the Libertad came in as the first visitor fro m overseas. Howard Slotnick, a South Street volunteer later to become Operations Director of Operaton Sail , had urged her to come to the rough, unrestored East Ri ver waterfro nt. He knew what he was doing and the Coast G uard knew what it was doing bringing the ship in where square riggers had been before, a part of the city made familiar to all sailing people from the paintings of Gordon Grant and Charles Robert Patterson. They went where the memories were and where new dreams were taking shape. The Commandant of the Coast G uard to ld us thi s one port visit had given the ship new lease on life- a lease later renewed in the full -bl own ship visitation of Operati on Sail 1976. That lease has carried he r fa r in the subsequent yearsacross the Pacific to Australia in 1988 and across the Atlantic and up the Baltic to Leningrad in 1989. She is an effective ambassador because the ship, he r people, and the work they do are real.
Each with Her Story.... The ri sing tide floated little boats as well as great ships. The Little Jennie, a Chesapeake bugeye of 1883, was literall y fl oated off a mudflat and re built in Centerport, Long Island, fo r Op Sail 1986, a project in which NMHS was also pro ud to pl ay a small part. In a similar venture, the oyster sloop SEA HISTORY 52, WINTER 1989-90
Christeen, also built in 1883, aims to compete her restoration in Connectic ut to take part in Operation Sail 1992. And these are j ust examples. But in thi s time one great ship, freighted with many hopes and dreams, lay half-restored in South Street- the Wavertree. A full rigger of the last century , she was still a hulk in Buenos Aires when ARA Libertad came to the deserted South Street pier in 1969. The Argentine ship actually brought up the stump of the mi zzen topmast, broken off in a Cape Horn gale in 1910, so people working to bring the ship to New York would have something of the ship herself to look at. "Thi s makes her real to me," said Charlie Dunn, who helped greatly in reconstructing the Wavertree's hi story while al so running a volunteer sai l training program for kids from Chinatown aboard a museum member' s schooner. This was all he was to see of the Wavertree- he died untimely before the ship came to South Street at the end of a long tow from Argentina the followin g year. The Wavertree, like Elissa or Belem, is a sturdy carthorse. Launched in 1885, she came a full generation after the finelined clippers that fo ught and lost the battle with the oceangoing steamer. Sailing ships of that day were carriers of lowvalue cargoes. Wavertree was built to carry jute from India for British mill s to make into burl ap bags. In a fe w years, steamers crowded her out of even his lowly trade. She turned to tramping ro und the world 's oceans, picking up cargo where she could . She carried wheat from San Francisco to Antwerp, nitrate from Chile to Brooklyn, New York, kerosene from Bayonne, New Jersey to light the lamps of Bombay. But she was launched with the learning of the clippers in her hefty hull and sturd y rig, and by happy chance she was designed to carry that crowning glory of the clipper ships, a skysail on the main! A sail above the royals- a thing rare to the point of extinction in working sailing ships in this century. There is reason to believe Hercules Linton, des igner of the clipper CuttySarkwas alsodesignerof the Wavertree, launched from Oswald Mordaunt 's yard in Southhampton. Where el se did the big ship get her sweeping sheer, her sweet cutwater, her anachroni stic three-masted rig and deep-bodied single topgallants and above that. .. her main skysai l? * * * * *
Wouldn ' t it be something to see the Wavertree restored as a participant, perhaps New York 's host ship, for Operation Sail 1992? Under Jakob Isbrandtsen 's continuing direction a gallant band of volunteers has done everything short of what now must be done in a shipyard. l sbrandtsen is sti ll "getting back to fundamentals," twenty years on into the job. In 1969, after he bought herfor the South Street Seaport Museum, the Museum said: What does the Wavertree have to say to us now, at the end of her long, useful, intensely honorable career? Only what the breezes whispered to her, what the gales yelled at her, what the seas taught herfrom the day she f irst broke out her topsails and leaned to the burden of wind in stiffening canvas . .. that things are not easy on this planet of ours, that security is fo ught for, not given, and that we had all better learn to haul together, brother.for the ship's sake if not fo r our own. That is how she was sailed .* Do we need thi s message in a city like New York today? The Wave rtree is there. She can deliver the message. J.. * The Wavertree: An Ocean Wanderer (South Street Seaport Museum, New York , 1969)
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