In the 1970s, an innovative sail training program aboard the schooner Pioneer changed the li ves of inner city children.
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L----~~~~""""'~-=:s.L~~~..-~..._,~___ The brigantine Black Pearl with skipper Barclay Warburton
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aboard. Warburton fo rmed the ASTA aboard this ship.
Rigger, published in 1932 by Mi lton Bradley Co., has inspired generations of sailors. 1 Johnson and his wife Electa ("Exy) made seven circumnavigations, carryi ng carefull y selected paying crew members. The fi rst voyages were made with their wooden schooner Ya nkee, but most were aboard their steel tops 'I schooner Yankee II. (Johnson referred to her as the "brigantine" Yankee.) The voyages had a profound effect on crew members, many of whom subsequentl y became active in various sail training projects around the world. The Johnsons also wrote on the ir voyages for National Geographic and various yachting magazi nes thro ugh the years. Upon their retirement the Johnsons sold Yankee II , and comm issioned a new and small er Yankee, a 50' steel ketch designed to their requirements by Sparkman & Stephens, in which they crui sed (and wrote) extensively in the canals of E urope and inland waterways of E urope and Africa, from Norway to the Sudan for 17 years. The Yankee II later attempted another circumnavigation underthe aegis of W indjammer Cruises of Miami , Florida, but she was wrecked on a reef in Raratonga in the South Pacific , becoming another of a series of fi ne vessels lost by that firm . During their life at sea Irving and Exy Johnson trained ' A rev ised edit ion , Peking Battles Cape Horn , was published by NMHS in 1978: it ' s available for $17.95 postpaid.
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many hundreds of sailors, and through their published works opened the eyes of millions to the wonders of world cruising. A far different sort of bird was the British seaman and author Alan Villiers. A veteran of six voyages around Cape Horn as AB aboard German grain ships, and voyages in Tasman Sea barks and assorted other vessels, Villiers found himself looking for a ship in 1934, at a time when worldwide depression had made seaworthy sailing vessels a drug on the market. On the Copenhagen waterfront he watched the small ship-rigged Georg Stage get under way and was surprised to hear a bystander mention that the sail training vessel was to be broken up. A new Georg Stage was to replace her! Villiers lost no time in purchasing the iron-hulled vessel , converting her to British registry as Joseph Conrad, and assembling a crew of mariners, schoolboys, sailors and landsmen for a voyage around the world . He had served for years under the Finnish Captain Ruben de Cloux, from whom he had learned much of what he was to pass on to his rather miscellaneous crew. The ship had been built in 1881 by a Danish shipowner, Frederik Stage, in memory of his son Georg Stage, who had died at an early age of tuberculosis. Denmark had no sail training program at that time and no apprentice system. Young men seeking to become sailors could sign on merchant ships as deck boys, but that was a tough life, with the emphasis on hard work rather than learning. Frederik Stage left an endowment fund for maintenance and operation of the ship, but not quite enough to cover everything, thus ensuring that other shipowners would share some of the costs. The ship carried 80 cadets and a professional crew of l 0. In 1905 she was rammed and sunk by a steamer outside Copenhagen with the loss of26 cadets, but she was raised, repaired, and back in service the following year. From 1882 until 1934, more than 4,000 boys were trained aboard the ship. Villiers added two more years of service to her record during her circumnavigation. She was driven ashore in January 1935, during a gale in New York Harbor and suffered considerable damage but he managed to have her salvaged and repaired, and continued the voyage. In October 1936 she arrived back in New York and Villiers sold her. His Cruise of the Conrad, published in 1937 by Charles Scribner's Sons, is a classic of nautical literature, and the ship is now a permanent part of the Mystic Seaport Muse um in Connecticut. She serves as a training platform and barracks forthe Museum's summer youth program. That's 110 years in the business! Villiers continued his career as maritime author and as shipmaster. He sailed in Arabian dhows, and in World War II he sailed small landing craft from the US to Europe and on to the Pacific. In 1957 he sailed the Mayflower replica across the Atlantic to her present home in Plymouth, Massachusets. He commanded a replica of Santa Maria on a voyage from Spain to the West Indies in 1963 and was feared lost in a tropical storm , but he brought the little ship in. It was apparently his first sea voyage in a typical ship of the late Middle Ages: his quarters high in the towering sterncastle were, he said, damned uncomfortable in a blow. Alan Villiers died at age 78 in 1982, after a lifetime of sharing his knowledge and love of ships and the sea with anyone willing to learn . The great New England and Canadian Grand Banks fi shing schooners, each with her fleet of dories , persisted on the Banks SEA HISTORY 57, SPRING 1991