REVIEWS MYSTIC SEAPORT MUSEUM is pleased to offer
Growing Up in a Shipyard: Reminiscences of a Shipbuilding Life in Essex, Massachusetts by Dana Story
An intimate and appealing look at life and work during the last days of wooden shipbuilding in the famous shipyards of Essex, Massachusetts. 139 pages, 36 illustrations, paperback $15.00 (postage and handling and appropriate sales tax extra)
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books call (203) 572-5347, or write Publications, Mystic Seaport Museum, 50 Greenmanville Ave., Box 6000, Mystic, CT 06355-0990.
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Growing up in a Shipyard ; Reminiscences of a Shipbuilding Life in Essex, Massachusetts, by Dana A. Story (Mystic Seaport Museum Publications, Mystic CT, 1991 , 139pp, 36 illus ; $15) Dana A. Story, son of the legendary Arthur D . Story, master shipbuilder of the majestic Gloucester fishing schooners of yesteryear, has written a fascinating book, a memoir of hi s days growing up in the shipyards of Essex , Massachusetts, a history of a Yankee way of life, a style of living now long since gone. Here, as he grew, he heard shipyard stories and tales, and the lore of the shipbuilding world. He watched caulkers at work, mast makers, shipfitters , carpenters , draftsmen , the whole gang of men who put a vessel together. Wooden shipbuilding in Essex had its beginning in the 1650s. Between 1860 and 1980, 1,388 vessels were launched, 424 of these by Arthur D. Story, the greatest numberof vessels built by a single builder in the hi story ofEssex shipbuilding. This gang of men, working a six-day week (no coffee breaks), could tum out a schooner in about 90 days. The fast racing schooner Columbia, 140 ft on deck, was completed in 102 days by thirty men working through one of the worst winters on record. However, one vessel was not built in a hurry: the Adams, a three-masted lumber schooner. She had her keel laid in the days just after the end of WWI, but she came too late-no one wanted a three masted schooner at that time. Arthur Story continued to work on her from time to time, and by the spring of 1923 she was virtually completed, her long spike bowsprit jutting out over the nearby highway and the passing traffic. When she was eventually launched before an enormous crowd on April 13, 1929, she was the last wooden three masted commercial vessel to be launched in the USA. On March 5, 1932, Arthur Story died. Not only did the glory days of the racing fi shermen come to an end, but the Great Depression had arrived, and there was no call for new vessels. For the first time in hi story there was no activity in any Essex shipyard. Later, from time to time, more fine vessels were built and launched, but the builders lost money on them. When, on June 29, 1949, the Eugenia J., "a beautiful little schooner," was launched, nearly 300 years of Essex wooden shipbuilding tradition came to a close. Dana vividly describes his fall into bankruptcy, but he had the guts and
stamina to start afresh. Today, with his son Bradford, he has a thriving boatyard business , hauling, storing and building small wooden boats on the site where the large fishermen were once built. It is a good thing that Dana has written this book, as he is the only one still living who can tell these stories of life in an Essex shipyard from personal experience; every other man who worked in the old Arthur D . Story or James Shipyards has now passed on. The book is well illustrated, with 36 pictures of schooners, launchings, gangs, people and s uch . GILES M. S. Too, AICH Marion, Massachusetts The U-Boat Wars, 1916-1945, by John Terraine(G.P. Putnam , New York,841 pp, 1989, illus, annot, index;$42.95hb) This comprehensive volume by a British author of nine previous military histories recounts the evolution of German U-boat warfare through four decades of this century. It is divided into three parts-World War I (150 pages) , between the great wars 1918-1939 (57 pages) and World War II (628 pages). The book reviews the political and military debate in Germany in 1914-15 regarding compliance with international naval agreements to afford some wartime protection to merchant ships and their crews. However, in 1916, Germany undertook what came to be known as "unrestricted submarine warfare"-i.e. attacks without warning on all ships believed to be engaged in military support. The war at sea immediately became deadly. In 1917 the British liner Lusitania was sunk with major loss of life, resulting in anti-German feelings in America and other neutral nations. By war's end, U-boats had sunk the incredible number of 3,329 Allied ships with the loss of 14,879 lives. In the 1920s, a number of international conferences sought to establish the relative sizes of the world's navies and to deny Germany the right to possess any submarines. Meanwhile, a young German naval officer who had commanded a U- boat in WWI elected to remain in the service and work toward the creation of a new undersea fleet. He became Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz in Command of U- boats during WWII and succeeded Hitler briefly as Fuehrer in 1945. In WWII, despite having only a limited number of U-Boats, Germany resorted to unrestricted warfare from the outset. On September 3, 1939, the first SEA HISTORY 62, SUMMER 1992