EDITOR'S LOG It is the ship's people that give an historic ship her life and meaning, says Andy German in his remarkable appreciation of the life of the Charles W. Morgan, centerpiece of America's greatest maritime museum, Mystic Seaport Museum. He points out that it was not ever thus. In previous generations, while the instinct to save such ships from a vanished era ran strong among the faithful, they adduced reasons for ship saving which all too often seem to us now shallow and somehow less than adequate to the majesty, exultations and enduring challenge of mankind's endeavors at sea. "Look how tough our forebears had it," was a message common in museums from the 1920s through the 1950s, the first generation of the Morgan's career as a museum ship and of ship preservation in the US. "Look at the way they had to live, be grateful for what you haveand so behave yourself!" might be a free translation of the message we were so evidently supposed to notice and carry away with us. History may well excite such thoughts from time to time, perhaps very appropriately; but to say that this is history's message both limits and trivializes it and mocks the realities of the men and women who lived the experience of traditional seafaring, giving it its shape and meanings. Yes, meanings: it is an editorial viewpoint of Sea History that history has meaning, as the experience of life has meaning. And from this viewpoint the task of historians is to recover the experience of generations preceding their own; not just to mine it for messages, but to lead us to share in the experience of people before our time and enter into their lives and into some understanding of them. Definitely, it is not to dig up our forebears and put their bones in stiff finger-wagging poses to admonish us how to live our lives. No, the mission is infinitely more direct, lively and important than that; we ask of our forebears that they yield up no special formulas for living, but simply to testify to the truths of their lives, thus vastly expanding the base of information and values available to us in our own lives. Howling Stone Throwers? If you think you can live well without that, I invite you to think again. Remember that genetically we are undeveloped cave dwellers; everything that makes us more than howlers and stone-throwers is the product of that widened data base and that access to programmatic experi4
LETTERS ence which history opens to us. In fact, you're learning from history anyway; the question is whether you're going to go for real data and real values or subsist somehow on the junk food served up all around us today in lieu of history. Think of our schools and our universities serving up their pre-packaged generalized "social studies" and other ideologically oriented "studies" which, if you absorb them, make you the victim, rather than the master, of the age you live in. We lose too much when we accept such concoctions in place of the healthy contradictions and endlessly nourishing dimensionality of the historic experience. Not that any of us deliver that experience perfectly! Far from it. But it is good to see Andy German, a marvellously perceptive student of the seafaring experience, coming forward in this birthday article about the Charles W. Morgan to tel I us we should get to know, beyond the monumental ship, her people. Andheisnotalone! InRogerQuarm's appreciation of the very monumental exhibition of classical marine art being brought to the United States from England 's National Maritime Museum, he concludes by pointing out something very basic about all the most memorable paintings in this exhibition-something that I, for one, had never noticed. It is a fact of the kind that the Catholic essayist and mystery story writer G. K. Chesterton delighted in: the fact that is so big it overfills a narrow perspective and so passes unnoticed. That fact is that these paintings all have in common one informing element-they show, as Quarm puts it, "men at their work." PS
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This issue of Sea History is dedicated to the memory of Frank G. G. Carr, Director of England's National Maritime Museum, 1947-66, and later International Chairman of the American Ship Trust and founding Chairman of the World Ship Trust. Frank shipped to sea in the rough trades ofthe Thames sailing barges as soon as he could escape his law studies at Cambridge. His interest in ships was shaped and enlivened by his knowledge of seafaring people and their ways, and by his true uncondescending feeling for them. An appreciation of his life appears on page 8 .
This Wild Guess Seems About Right D. B. Clement ("Letters," Sum mer 1991) states that the destroyers with four funnels, 50 of which were traded to the Royal Navy in 1940, during World War II, were, in Britain, always referred to as "four-stackers" rather than "four-pipers," as your editor terms them. Mr. Clements went on to say that he believed this was also the case.in the US Navy. Of my thirty years in the Navy-the USN avy, that is-the destroyers in question were around for perhaps the first ten. As I recall, they were referred to in conversation and in informal writing as both four-pipers and four-stackers on, as a wild guess, about a 60-40 basis. Since this class of destroyer was flushdecked but replaced a four-stack class with a raised forecastle and was in tum followed by forecastle classes, they were also referred to as flush-deckers. This term was the one usually used in more formal applications, such as in a listing of destroyer classes. The class continued to hang onto this label even after the appearance of the flush-deck Fletchers and Sumners, which were referred to, not by the fact that they, too, had flush decks, but by their prototype names. ROBERT
K.
AWTREY
Commander, USN (ret.) Fernandina Beach, Florida This discussion originated a year ago when your editor chastised the English writer Alec Hurst for calling these World War I vintage destroyers "four stackers'' rather than "four pipers," the term your editor knew them by. The English scholar David Clements intervened with examples of Americans calling them ' four stackers," and others weighed in with other examples on both sides of the question. Commander Awtrey is the first to point out, interestingly, that they were also called "flush-deckers," even after the newflushdeck Fletcher and her sisters arrived on the scene in World War II, and his quantification of the "pipers" versus "stackers" usage seems about right to us--in the perspective of all the valued letters received on this subject.-ED. Ships in Stone Mr. Calvez-Normand asked for old gravestones with ship decorations. His interest would be richly rewarded by a visit to the North-Frisian islands of Amrum and Fohr. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most of the male population of these islands left their SEA HISTORY 60, WINTER 1991-92